Charlie Geren and I tried to hate one another but, dang it all, we couldn’t make it work.
That was probably 20 years ago, when we engaged in a shouting match over the quality of a good cowboy hat, a 10X versus a 20X.
Range wars and brush fires start that way. Something ridiculous lights a match of quick tempers and next thing you know it’s either war or a conflagration.
The fight about hats was a brief battle. We screamed at one another over the phone, called each other nasty names and one of us hung up on the other. The one who did not hang up first might, just might, have phoned the other person back and hung up just to get even.
Two women brokered a dinner among the four us to settle the dispute and put it to rest. We worked together at the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo and needed harmony. Neither Charlie nor I looked particularly happy when we arrived for the peace talks at a now-closed restaurant on White Settlement.
Taking the liberty of messing with the lyrics of a country song, we had each other from the first hello. We started insulting one another in jest over the first beer and laughing about the ridiculousness of our fight but never giving in. We ate, drank, laughed and vowed to continue hating one another forever. We’ve been close friends ever since.
When our friend Marty Richter died recently, in the midst of Geren’s heated primary campaign, it was Charlie who phoned to tell me the sad news. The night of the funeral, while he waited outside a school board meeting to accept an award for leadership, he called to ask how I was doing.
Neither of us traded our usual insults or laughed. We might have shed a tear of two.
Beneath Geren’s devil-may-care exterior, there is a man who is all heart.
Having just pummeled his opponent, Bo French, in the primary, he is now certain to be re-elected to his 10th term representing House District 99 in the Texas Legislature.
Two days after the primary he was basking in the sun on Padre Island, relaxing and fishing with his wife, Mindy Elmer, an accomplished lobbyist. After each election, his routine is to go to Padre and relax for a while.
Geren is a Republican and factions of his party have been trying to beat him since his first election in 2000. The latest antagonist is a deceitful group of folks, mostly out of Midland, called Empower Texans, which contributed substantial political and financial support to the French campaign. The fight was nasty. The Tea Party also hates Geren.
These folks dislike Geren because of the stubbornness and independence I saw in our dumb fight about hats. He now tackles issues much more important than a 20X hat down in Austin; he is a skilled negotiator and, yes, compromiser. He works diligently to serve the people of his district and all of Texas. He works for his constituents, not hewing to the party line or, these days, falling prey to the right-wing zealots who have overrun the GOP.
He is his own man and our man – the people’s man.
Folks in Midland and other parts of the state underestimate the importance of loyalty in Tarrant County. The voters here are loyal to Geren and rightly so. We don’t want a puppet in Austin. We want a Texan, straight-talking and honest. With Geren, what you see is what you get. He’s a maverick, and we admire that in these parts.
This time around he beat French by 14 percentage points, down two points from the 2016 primary.
Over the phone, he quipped that if his margin of victory continues to decline by 2 percent, French might overtake him in 2034.
He also has a great sense of humor.
But here’s what is not funny. The French campaign played dirty and, among other things, disguised campaign literature as official state documents condemning Geren. French even filed a last-minute lawsuit to divert attention from the heart of a race that pitted an experienced and dedicated public servant, Geren, against someone who has never held public office.
Even worse is the waste of money – hateful money – spent trying to beat Geren. Estimates of the amount folks have spent trying to oust him range as high as $6 million to $8 million. All for one district out of 150 in the Texas House of Representatives.
If the people who raised, contributed and spent that money truly cared about Texas and Texans they might have donated those millions to the state to spend on services that would improve the lives of Texas citizens.
This kind of ugly political fighting and funding has been going on for years. But coming at the start of a new election cycle, the Geren-French race suggests we will see more of this contemptible waste as Republicans go after other Republicans in Texas and all over the country in their effort to cement a version of conservatism that is downright ugly.
Ugly as a 10X hat.
Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net