Texas: Kinky could have been the Ventura of the Lone Star state but for Grandma...

Look for Capture The Flag by Paul Burka in the upcoming issue of Texas Monthly:

Preview from Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report
...Nobody in the business of politics gives Kinky Friedman a chance to win, including me. And yet I wonder what the race would have been like had Strayhorn not stolen some of his thunder by running as an independent as well. Perry’s strategists say that Friedman’s negatives are twice as high as his positives, but that doesn’t matter much, because his voters are twice as motivated as the other candidates’ voters. Friedman represents what so many people want to vote for: none of the above. His slogan—“How hard could it be?”—targets the vast majority of Texans, some 64 percent, who’ve grown so cynical about politics that they didn’t even bother to vote in the last gubernatorial election.
The model for his race, of course, is wrestler Jesse Ventura’s upset victory as the standard-bearer for Minnesota’s Independence party, then known as the Reform party, in that state’s three-way governor’s race of 1998. Friedman even retained Dean Barkley, Ventura’s campaign chairman, as his campaign director. Both say they have a feeling that something big is brewing in Texas, but as many observers have noted, the rules in Minnesota are far different from those here.....