Will Hurd throws in the towel

[Cajun 11,750]

On 8/1/2019 at 11:26 PM, F250 said:

It isn't Austin white but compared to the rest of the city, yes it is.

Correct.

[tantric superman 4,668]

8 hours ago, Helobious said:

 

Also, today I learned that Will Hurd is part black. I always assumed he was mixed white & hispanic since he was from SA.

[Nivek 16,992]

#54 looks like he is in his 30's.
 

Give em hell 54!

[F250 28,826]

3 hours ago, Nivek said:

Give em hell 54!

[Todd Gack 432]

Hurd throws in the towel on the concept of answering the question that was asked.  Also, his glasses are stupid.

 

[tantric superman 4,668]

Shit, the bar is so fucking low for Republicans, especially those in Texas.

 

[Pescado_Rojo 19,431]

I know he's supposed to be one of the sane ones, but that's a pretty punchable face. 

[Francisco 2.0 32,431]

Bump.

Will thinks he might have a chance at the 2024 Presidential nomination. I call that wishful thinking.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/will-hurd-2024-book/629398/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20220329&utm_term=The Atlantic Daily

 

Quote

HELOTES, Texas—Last spring, having just retired from Congress, Will Hurd was feeling adrift. He had agreed to write a book, telling his remarkable life story and diagnosing a malfunctioning political system, all while teasing out a run for the presidency in 2024, but Hurd struggled with an underlying anxiety. For the first time in his adult life, the guy who’d climbed so quickly—from college class president to star CIA operative to lone Black Republican in the House—didn’t know his next move. Finally, Hurd sat down with his nearly 90-year-old father and shared his concerns.

 

 

Quote

“William, I can’t give any advice on what you should do, because I don’t understand any of these things,” Bob Hurd told his youngest son. “But I know what you shouldn’t do. Don’t be desperate. Because when you’re desperate, you make bad decisions.”

 

Quote

The former congressman tells me this story on the back patio of El Chaparral restaurant, one of his favorite haunts, in suburban San Antonio. We’re drinking Ranch Water—tequila and lime juice over ice, with a splash of mineral seltzer—and comparing notes on his book, American Reboot, which splices together riveting tales that help illuminate his views of a Republican Party that’s rotting from the top down. But the book doesn’t contain the story about this father-son talk. Rather, the anecdote surfaces organically when I ask Hurd about his brutal indictment of the GOP and how that has changed his relationships with the likes of Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, party leaders whom he once considered close personal friends.

 

Spoiler

Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the party’s enabling of Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the party’s ugliest impulses. (The third chapter of Hurd’s book, written as an open letter to the Republican Party, is titled “Don’t Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe.”)

The desperation—lawmakers catering to the loudest voices in the party base—is not healthy, Hurd says. It’s the by-product of safely partisan districts that provide more incentive to light fires than put them out. It’s the consequence of the public’s collapsing faith in the core institutions of civic society, which invites national politicians to weaponize disputes that should be addressed at the local level. It’s the expression of a country in decline—a country convinced that its existential concerns are not Chinese sabotage and Russian disinformation, but face masks in public and vaccines for a virus.

“We’re in a competition. If we don’t win it, we’re going to be a former superpower,” Hurd says. “We need to treat it as a competition—us versus the world. But we can’t, because our politics are so messed up. We’re too busy fighting with ourselves.”

Hurd’s book is notable for many reasons—his personal and professional journeys are legitimately compelling—but most of all for its rebuke of America’s proportionality problem. Drawing on his diverse experiences, from chasing down intelligence overseas to parsing classified documents in Congress to working with groundbreaking tech companies today, Hurd argues that we are woefully unprepared for what is coming our way. Quantum computing has the potential to break every form of encryption that guards our money and our secrets. Artificial intelligence could cut the service-based workforce in half—every two years. Biomedical advances will force questions about the ethics of rewiring our brains and halting the degradation of human cells. In the meantime, China will continue its siege of the American economy—swiping our intellectual property, snatching up our real estate, sabotaging our investments—while Russia will intensify its decades-old campaign to delegitimize our systems of government and turn Americans against one another.

His subtext is plain enough. To confront these challenges, Hurd’s colleagues in the Republican Party might need to rethink their fixation on transgender athletes and critical race theory.

“Everyone treats everything these days like it’s some damn emergency. And it’s got to stop,” Hurd says. “We’re going to be dealing with issues that are so complicated, and so life-altering, that they make the stuff we’re dealing with right now look like tickle fights.”

Hurd proposes a wholesale reorientation of our politics—away from the dopamine-inducing cultural conflicts of the day, and toward the generational trials that will shape American life in the 21st century. To pull it off, he says, we’ll need both a groundswell of reasonable people reclaiming the political discourse from absolutists and ideologues, and innovative, unifying leadership at the highest levels of government.

Hurd knows that these two conditions are codependent: A leader can’t emerge without a movement, and a movement manifests only with the inspiration of a leader. He also knows that some people view him as uniquely qualified to meet this moment: a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation.

What Hurd doesn’t know is whether America is ready to buy what he’s selling. The nation has been lulled into long-term complacency by elected officials and special interests and media personalities that have short-term motivations. The most engaged voters in his party—the people likeliest to cast ballots in a presidential primary—are, to varying degrees, addicted to the fear and grievances being peddled by people clinging to relevance. Hurd realizes that breaking this addiction won’t be easy. In fact, it might prove impossible.

He does, however, see another path forward—one that depends less on persuading those hardened partisans and more on mobilizing a different kind of voter. The overwhelming majority of conservative people in this country, Hurd says, are not watching Fox News every night or imbibing conspiracy theories online. They are not politically neurotic. In fact, they may have never voted in a primary to choose a nominee for president—and that’s the point. “They have been busy trying to put food on their table, put a roof over their head, take care of the people they love,” he says. “But now they’re getting fed up. They are tired of everybody. They are ready for something different.”

Like what?

“Something normal,” Hurd says.

 

Every politician has an origin story. But I’ve never listened to one as telling—and infuriating—as Will Hurd’s.

In 2008, the young CIA operative was stationed in Afghanistan. He had been an unlikely recruit to the agency; having majored in computer science at Texas A&M, Hurd once dreamed of making a fortune in the tech world. But serendipitous encounters with CIA veterans on the A&M faculty had transformed his curiosities, and several years into the War on Terror, Hurd had emerged as a vital asset in the Middle East. After a bombing near the CIA compound, Hurd was tasked with briefing a group of lawmakers from the House Intelligence Committee, who happened to be visiting Afghanistan. When he began to explain the nature of the local rivalries between Sunni and Shia factions in the region, one of the congressmen interrupted. He asked Hurd what the difference was between a Sunni and a Shia.

 

Hurd thought it was a joke. He waited for the punch line. But it never came. The congressman’s expression made it apparent that he, as well as others in the room, did not understand the basic distinctions at the heart of this war zone. Here were federal lawmakers—members of the intelligence committee—who could not be bothered to understand the place where they were sending trillions of dollars to fund wars in which young Americans would fight and die.

The episode confirmed Hurd’s worst suspicions about American politicians: that they were lazy, ignorant, and selfish. (Some of the members of Congress he spoke to that day, he writes in his book, grumbled that the briefing was keeping them from shopping for local rugs.) Hurd was so enraged that he decided to quit the CIA, move home, and run for Congress.

The workhorse reputation Hurd earned on Capitol Hill is best viewed through this prism: the endless weekend drives through the loneliest corners of his district, the obsession with basic constituent services, the determination to gain expertise on every issue before him, the reflex to ignore partisan squabbling and pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. It also explains Hurd’s impatience with far-right and far-left partisans who hail from safe districts where no meaningful work is required to win reelection every two years—and who, in between social-media feuds and cable-news speeches, disparage people like him as languid “moderates.”

“The moderates are the ones who behave the same way regardless of whether their party is in power or not. The moderates are critical to crafting and passing legislation that actually gets signed into law. The moderates are the ones who work the hardest,” Hurd writes in his book. “And we are the ones who get shit done. Extremists do the most bitching and get the least accomplished.”

It’s true that Hurd has never been driven by any particular ideology. He hired a number of Democrats for key positions in both his D.C. and local offices—a practice that’s virtually unheard of on Capitol Hill—and, when in search of legislative partners, defaulted to looking across the aisle before recruiting fellow Republicans. Once, while we were driving together across a barren stretch of West Texas, I spent an hour pressing Hurd to explain why he considered himself a Republican. He rambled a bit, recalling that his first-ever vote was for Bob Dole (but only because of Dole’s military service). He talked about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. Then he pivoted to standard fare about too much government impeding human progress. Finally, he shrugged. “Look, my hypothesis is that 80 percent of Americans are around the center—40 percent left of center, 40 percent right of center,” Hurd told me. “And they’re all persuadable. The letter next to my name should matter less than my message.”

Hurd’s book—and to an extent, his prospective presidential candidacy—should not be read as an attempt to erase the differences between the two parties. Rather, it is a rejection of their fringes, and of the false choices that frame much of our political debate. Even when it comes to subjects as fraught as abortion or Second Amendment rights or the definitions of human sexuality, Hurd argues that there are broad areas of agreement obscured by the incessant demagoguing of partisans who stand to benefit from sowing narratives of zero-sum division.

Take the issue of immigration. The nadir of Hurd’s time in Congress came in early 2019, when the federal government shut down for a record-setting 35 days because of a stalemate over which policies to fund—and how much money should be spent—at the southern border. For 35 days, Hurd watched the leaders of both parties scheming, wrangling their rank-and-file members, figuring out how to emerge victorious from the standoff. Never once in those 35 days did anyone, in either party’s leadership, solicit an opinion from Hurd—a national-security expert, the member who represented more of the U.S.-Mexico border than anyone else in Congress, a guy who’s studied the issue inside and out.

Why wouldn’t they want Hurd’s input? Simple. Because they knew he wasn’t going to tell them what they wanted to hear. They knew Hurd would offer a set of solutions—the mass streamlining of legal immigration for both high-skilled workers and low-skilled laborers; the construction of a cutting-edge “virtual wall” utilizing cameras and fiber-optic cables to monitor illegal crossings; the granting of citizenship to millions of “Dreamers”; the surge of funding to local agencies dealing with a mass influx of asylum seekers—that would antagonize the loudest voices in both party bases.

“So, nothing gets done,” Hurd says. “Because politicians would rather use it as a bludgeon against each other, as opposed to solving a problem that most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, agree on the solutions to.”

The beating heart of Hurd’s book is a call to Americans to consider the most contentious issues of our times more holistically. He’s not under any illusion that consensus will magically appear. But he does believe that most voters—what he describes as the 80 percent clustered within range of the middle—are tired of being presented with binary choices when it comes to big, complicated questions.

In one passage, Hurd describes his anguish over the murder of George Floyd. It was made that much worse by the reductive scrutiny of his own actions in the volatile aftermath: As the lone Black Republican in the House of Representatives, Hurd felt as though anything he said or did—such as marching with protesters in Houston, over the objections of his staff—was perceived as picking a side. In his view, there were no sides.

“I wanted to show solidarity with Black America. I wanted to explain it was okay to be simultaneously outraged by a Black man being murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement puts themselves in harm’s way to enable our First Amendment rights, and pissed off that criminals are treading on American values by looting and killing police officers,” Hurd writes.

“These emotions,” he concludes, “aren’t mutually exclusive.”

 

None of this means Hurd wants to be a great reconciler of the two parties. Just because he can envision leading a post-partisan movement, does not mean he expects—or hopes for—some cease-fire between Republicans and Democrats. He believes that competition between two healthy parties is essential to a functioning democracy. He just doesn’t believe we have two healthy parties.

Hurd makes no secret in the book of his scorn for the ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Its crusade against oil and natural-gas production, he says, endangers hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs and would make the U.S. dependent on some of the world’s worst actors to supply our energy. Its stigmatization of law enforcement—calls to defund the police, or abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or slash the budget of the U.S. Border Patrol—invites an era of lawlessness and violence and death, particularly along the southern border. These two issues alone, Hurd says, explain why Latino voters are rapidly disaffiliating with the party.

 

“When I was in Congress, I was the only Republican on the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Now there’s the potential that three of the five [Texas] border seats are going to vote Republican. The border district in Arizona is probably going to flip too. Why?” Hurd tells me. “Because you have Democratic mayors and sheriffs and county judges that are sick and tired of national Democrats talking down to them. For those Latino communities, border security is a public-safety issue. Oh, and by the way, most of those folks on the border know somebody who works in the energy sector. So they feel like Democrats aren’t just putting them in danger; Democrats are trying to dismantle their way of life.”

That said, Hurd saves his harshest commentary for his own party.

Republicans have become comfortable “saying or doing anything to win an election,” Hurd writes. The party of family values champions cruel policies and hateful politicians while lecturing the left on morality. The party of fiscal discipline and personal responsibility blows holes in the budget, then blames Democrats for their recklessness. The party of empowerment and opportunity systematically attempts to disenfranchise voters who are poor and nonwhite. The party of freedom and liberty keeps flirting with authoritarianism.

Hurd’s most pressing concern for his party is that it’s become an agent of disinformation. This is not a uniquely Republican phenomenon, he emphasizes—the book contains a blistering critique of Democrat Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for leaking faulty information regarding Trump colluding with Russia—but it’s the Republican Party’s embrace of lies and propaganda that most immediately threatens our system of government. Hurd says that watching the January 6 assault on the Capitol, just three days after his retirement from Congress, felt like he was watching a sequel to 9/11—extremism infiltrating America in a new form.

It was “an example of the kinds of internal threats many of our military leaders have cautioned our political leaders to take as seriously as external threats,” Hurd writes. “To prevent future manifestations of this threat from materializing, the Republican Party must drive out those who continue to push misinformation, disinformation, and subscribe to crackpot theories like QAnon.”

But that’s not happening. Just as Hurd was shipping his book to the printer, the Republican National Committee met in Salt Lake City. Its 168 members—three from each of the 50 states and six territories, elected at the local level by party activists—adopted a resolution censuring the two House Republicans working on the January 6 investigation. The resolution also called the insurrection “legitimate political discourse.”

Hurd was dumbfounded. He believed that Trump deserved to be impeached—not just for inciting the violence at the Capitol but also for his recorded phone call with the Georgia secretary of state, in which the president asked a top election official to falsify ballots. (Hurd says these circumstances differ from Trump’s first impeachment, which he agonized over and ultimately voted against, because there was “a clear violation of the law” in the run-up to January 6.) Letting Trump off the hook, Hurd says, was bad enough. For the Republican National Committee to gather more than a year after the insurrection and pass a resolution justifying the death and destruction at the U.S. Capitol was a “new level of crazy”—and, to him, proof that the party needs an intervention.

The irony, I tell him, is that these are the people—the best-connected local Republican leaders—who will play an outsize role in determining whether an intervention is successful. These are the people who do the most influencing and organizing and favor-trading in their state parties. These are the first hands he’ll have to shake in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina if he decides to run for president.

Hurd stares at me blankly. Finally, he arches an eyebrow. “Why?”

Because, I explain to him, these are the gatekeepers to the presidential process. Even Trump, who ran the most unconventional campaign in modern history, had to kiss some rings and grease some palms.

Hurd is still blank-faced. “That’s how things have always been done in the past,” he says. “But why does it have to be that way?”

I ask Hurd what he would propose instead.

“Look, there’s some people I’m not going to appeal to—the right-wingers. That’s okay. But there’s more of the other people. The normal people. And I’m going to find them,” he says. “It will be hard. The cost per acquisition of those voters is higher than it is for the traditional Republican primary voter—you know, the people who have voted in the last four primaries. That’s why most people don’t bother trying to find them or turn them out.”

Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, to just concentrate on wooing those existing likely voters?

“Maybe,” he says. “But if you want to change the party, you need to change the primary electorate. This isn’t rocket science. If you want to get back to normal, you need to get more normal people to vote in primaries.”

It’s a provocative notion. Hurd isn’t just hinting at a campaign against Trumpism; he’s suggesting an assault on the structural realities of the Republican Party.

Contemplating this sort of insurgency is one thing when the GOP is locked out of power. But come November, Republicans are likely—based on all the available evidence—to rout Democrats in the midterm elections. If that happens, the loudest and most radical elements of the Republican Party will be emboldened, and any incentive to moderate the party’s identity will seem lost.

Hurd acknowledges this. But if past is prologue, he says, Republicans will do little with their newly won power in 2023. Congressional leaders will struggle to corral their rambunctious majorities; the party will succeed in frustrating Joe Biden’s agenda but fail to provide any governing vision for the country; and by 2024 the country will be forced to choose between two dug-in, do-nothing parties.

“At that point,” Hurd says, “Maybe people will feel like it’s time to get off this crazy train.”

It’s possible, Hurd tells me, that such continuing dysfunction will push voters deeper and deeper into their partisan silos. His hope rests on a belief that they’ve been pushed too far—and that sooner or later, they’ll push back.

“Look, if you’re a left-wing nut or a right-wing nut, you’re probably not going to smell what I’m cooking,” he says. “But most people aren’t nuts. They want to solve problems. They want to make this century an American century. They are normal people who want normal leaders.”

Hurd is putting the pieces in place. His friends say he wants to run for president in 2024. He may not have universal name recognition or a behemoth political operation, but he does have a vision. He has a loyal and growing donor base. He has the biography and the charisma and the God-given political chops to put the Republican Party—and the rest of the country—on notice.

People close to Hurd thought he was crazy to abandon a future corner office at the CIA to run for Congress. (Bob Gates, the former defense secretary and CIA director, lobbied furiously to keep Hurd from leaving the agency; then, pitying his former Texas A&M pupil, Gates did something he’d never done in his life: He wrote a campaign check.) The young candidate said the same thing to every donor and party official he met: “You don’t need to think I can win; you just need to think it’s not crazy.” That’s the same approach the 44-year-old bachelor envisions taking in a campaign for national office.

Hurd is the definition of a boom-or-bust candidate. He could go all the way to the White House; he could also go nowhere fast. Everything we know about politics in the Trump era suggests that the second outcome is far likelier than the first. But Hurd says he’s not worried about that. Because the only thing worse than being defeated is being desperate.

 

 

Edited March 30, 2022 by Francisco 2.0

[Hank Scorpio 17,731]

lol fuck him

[F250 28,826]

19 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Bump.

Will thinks he might have a chance at the 2024 Presidential nomination. I call that wishful thinking.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/will-hurd-2024-book/629398/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20220329&utm_term=The Atlantic Daily

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the party’s enabling of Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the party’s ugliest impulses. (The third chapter of Hurd’s book, written as an open letter to the Republican Party, is titled “Don’t Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe.”)

The desperation—lawmakers catering to the loudest voices in the party base—is not healthy, Hurd says. It’s the by-product of safely partisan districts that provide more incentive to light fires than put them out. It’s the consequence of the public’s collapsing faith in the core institutions of civic society, which invites national politicians to weaponize disputes that should be addressed at the local level. It’s the expression of a country in decline—a country convinced that its existential concerns are not Chinese sabotage and Russian disinformation, but face masks in public and vaccines for a virus.

“We’re in a competition. If we don’t win it, we’re going to be a former superpower,” Hurd says. “We need to treat it as a competition—us versus the world. But we can’t, because our politics are so messed up. We’re too busy fighting with ourselves.”

Hurd’s book is notable for many reasons—his personal and professional journeys are legitimately compelling—but most of all for its rebuke of America’s proportionality problem. Drawing on his diverse experiences, from chasing down intelligence overseas to parsing classified documents in Congress to working with groundbreaking tech companies today, Hurd argues that we are woefully unprepared for what is coming our way. Quantum computing has the potential to break every form of encryption that guards our money and our secrets. Artificial intelligence could cut the service-based workforce in half—every two years. Biomedical advances will force questions about the ethics of rewiring our brains and halting the degradation of human cells. In the meantime, China will continue its siege of the American economy—swiping our intellectual property, snatching up our real estate, sabotaging our investments—while Russia will intensify its decades-old campaign to delegitimize our systems of government and turn Americans against one another.

His subtext is plain enough. To confront these challenges, Hurd’s colleagues in the Republican Party might need to rethink their fixation on transgender athletes and critical race theory.

“Everyone treats everything these days like it’s some damn emergency. And it’s got to stop,” Hurd says. “We’re going to be dealing with issues that are so complicated, and so life-altering, that they make the stuff we’re dealing with right now look like tickle fights.”

Hurd proposes a wholesale reorientation of our politics—away from the dopamine-inducing cultural conflicts of the day, and toward the generational trials that will shape American life in the 21st century. To pull it off, he says, we’ll need both a groundswell of reasonable people reclaiming the political discourse from absolutists and ideologues, and innovative, unifying leadership at the highest levels of government.

Hurd knows that these two conditions are codependent: A leader can’t emerge without a movement, and a movement manifests only with the inspiration of a leader. He also knows that some people view him as uniquely qualified to meet this moment: a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation.

What Hurd doesn’t know is whether America is ready to buy what he’s selling. The nation has been lulled into long-term complacency by elected officials and special interests and media personalities that have short-term motivations. The most engaged voters in his party—the people likeliest to cast ballots in a presidential primary—are, to varying degrees, addicted to the fear and grievances being peddled by people clinging to relevance. Hurd realizes that breaking this addiction won’t be easy. In fact, it might prove impossible.

He does, however, see another path forward—one that depends less on persuading those hardened partisans and more on mobilizing a different kind of voter. The overwhelming majority of conservative people in this country, Hurd says, are not watching Fox News every night or imbibing conspiracy theories online. They are not politically neurotic. In fact, they may have never voted in a primary to choose a nominee for president—and that’s the point. “They have been busy trying to put food on their table, put a roof over their head, take care of the people they love,” he says. “But now they’re getting fed up. They are tired of everybody. They are ready for something different.”

Like what?

“Something normal,” Hurd says.

 

Every politician has an origin story. But I’ve never listened to one as telling—and infuriating—as Will Hurd’s.

In 2008, the young CIA operative was stationed in Afghanistan. He had been an unlikely recruit to the agency; having majored in computer science at Texas A&M, Hurd once dreamed of making a fortune in the tech world. But serendipitous encounters with CIA veterans on the A&M faculty had transformed his curiosities, and several years into the War on Terror, Hurd had emerged as a vital asset in the Middle East. After a bombing near the CIA compound, Hurd was tasked with briefing a group of lawmakers from the House Intelligence Committee, who happened to be visiting Afghanistan. When he began to explain the nature of the local rivalries between Sunni and Shia factions in the region, one of the congressmen interrupted. He asked Hurd what the difference was between a Sunni and a Shia.

 

Hurd thought it was a joke. He waited for the punch line. But it never came. The congressman’s expression made it apparent that he, as well as others in the room, did not understand the basic distinctions at the heart of this war zone. Here were federal lawmakers—members of the intelligence committee—who could not be bothered to understand the place where they were sending trillions of dollars to fund wars in which young Americans would fight and die.

The episode confirmed Hurd’s worst suspicions about American politicians: that they were lazy, ignorant, and selfish. (Some of the members of Congress he spoke to that day, he writes in his book, grumbled that the briefing was keeping them from shopping for local rugs.) Hurd was so enraged that he decided to quit the CIA, move home, and run for Congress.

The workhorse reputation Hurd earned on Capitol Hill is best viewed through this prism: the endless weekend drives through the loneliest corners of his district, the obsession with basic constituent services, the determination to gain expertise on every issue before him, the reflex to ignore partisan squabbling and pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. It also explains Hurd’s impatience with far-right and far-left partisans who hail from safe districts where no meaningful work is required to win reelection every two years—and who, in between social-media feuds and cable-news speeches, disparage people like him as languid “moderates.”

“The moderates are the ones who behave the same way regardless of whether their party is in power or not. The moderates are critical to crafting and passing legislation that actually gets signed into law. The moderates are the ones who work the hardest,” Hurd writes in his book. “And we are the ones who get shit done. Extremists do the most bitching and get the least accomplished.”

It’s true that Hurd has never been driven by any particular ideology. He hired a number of Democrats for key positions in both his D.C. and local offices—a practice that’s virtually unheard of on Capitol Hill—and, when in search of legislative partners, defaulted to looking across the aisle before recruiting fellow Republicans. Once, while we were driving together across a barren stretch of West Texas, I spent an hour pressing Hurd to explain why he considered himself a Republican. He rambled a bit, recalling that his first-ever vote was for Bob Dole (but only because of Dole’s military service). He talked about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. Then he pivoted to standard fare about too much government impeding human progress. Finally, he shrugged. “Look, my hypothesis is that 80 percent of Americans are around the center—40 percent left of center, 40 percent right of center,” Hurd told me. “And they’re all persuadable. The letter next to my name should matter less than my message.”

Hurd’s book—and to an extent, his prospective presidential candidacy—should not be read as an attempt to erase the differences between the two parties. Rather, it is a rejection of their fringes, and of the false choices that frame much of our political debate. Even when it comes to subjects as fraught as abortion or Second Amendment rights or the definitions of human sexuality, Hurd argues that there are broad areas of agreement obscured by the incessant demagoguing of partisans who stand to benefit from sowing narratives of zero-sum division.

Take the issue of immigration. The nadir of Hurd’s time in Congress came in early 2019, when the federal government shut down for a record-setting 35 days because of a stalemate over which policies to fund—and how much money should be spent—at the southern border. For 35 days, Hurd watched the leaders of both parties scheming, wrangling their rank-and-file members, figuring out how to emerge victorious from the standoff. Never once in those 35 days did anyone, in either party’s leadership, solicit an opinion from Hurd—a national-security expert, the member who represented more of the U.S.-Mexico border than anyone else in Congress, a guy who’s studied the issue inside and out.

Why wouldn’t they want Hurd’s input? Simple. Because they knew he wasn’t going to tell them what they wanted to hear. They knew Hurd would offer a set of solutions—the mass streamlining of legal immigration for both high-skilled workers and low-skilled laborers; the construction of a cutting-edge “virtual wall” utilizing cameras and fiber-optic cables to monitor illegal crossings; the granting of citizenship to millions of “Dreamers”; the surge of funding to local agencies dealing with a mass influx of asylum seekers—that would antagonize the loudest voices in both party bases.

“So, nothing gets done,” Hurd says. “Because politicians would rather use it as a bludgeon against each other, as opposed to solving a problem that most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, agree on the solutions to.”

The beating heart of Hurd’s book is a call to Americans to consider the most contentious issues of our times more holistically. He’s not under any illusion that consensus will magically appear. But he does believe that most voters—what he describes as the 80 percent clustered within range of the middle—are tired of being presented with binary choices when it comes to big, complicated questions.

In one passage, Hurd describes his anguish over the murder of George Floyd. It was made that much worse by the reductive scrutiny of his own actions in the volatile aftermath: As the lone Black Republican in the House of Representatives, Hurd felt as though anything he said or did—such as marching with protesters in Houston, over the objections of his staff—was perceived as picking a side. In his view, there were no sides.

“I wanted to show solidarity with Black America. I wanted to explain it was okay to be simultaneously outraged by a Black man being murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement puts themselves in harm’s way to enable our First Amendment rights, and pissed off that criminals are treading on American values by looting and killing police officers,” Hurd writes.

“These emotions,” he concludes, “aren’t mutually exclusive.”

 

None of this means Hurd wants to be a great reconciler of the two parties. Just because he can envision leading a post-partisan movement, does not mean he expects—or hopes for—some cease-fire between Republicans and Democrats. He believes that competition between two healthy parties is essential to a functioning democracy. He just doesn’t believe we have two healthy parties.

Hurd makes no secret in the book of his scorn for the ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Its crusade against oil and natural-gas production, he says, endangers hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs and would make the U.S. dependent on some of the world’s worst actors to supply our energy. Its stigmatization of law enforcement—calls to defund the police, or abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or slash the budget of the U.S. Border Patrol—invites an era of lawlessness and violence and death, particularly along the southern border. These two issues alone, Hurd says, explain why Latino voters are rapidly disaffiliating with the party.

 

“When I was in Congress, I was the only Republican on the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Now there’s the potential that three of the five [Texas] border seats are going to vote Republican. The border district in Arizona is probably going to flip too. Why?” Hurd tells me. “Because you have Democratic mayors and sheriffs and county judges that are sick and tired of national Democrats talking down to them. For those Latino communities, border security is a public-safety issue. Oh, and by the way, most of those folks on the border know somebody who works in the energy sector. So they feel like Democrats aren’t just putting them in danger; Democrats are trying to dismantle their way of life.”

That said, Hurd saves his harshest commentary for his own party.

Republicans have become comfortable “saying or doing anything to win an election,” Hurd writes. The party of family values champions cruel policies and hateful politicians while lecturing the left on morality. The party of fiscal discipline and personal responsibility blows holes in the budget, then blames Democrats for their recklessness. The party of empowerment and opportunity systematically attempts to disenfranchise voters who are poor and nonwhite. The party of freedom and liberty keeps flirting with authoritarianism.

Hurd’s most pressing concern for his party is that it’s become an agent of disinformation. This is not a uniquely Republican phenomenon, he emphasizes—the book contains a blistering critique of Democrat Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for leaking faulty information regarding Trump colluding with Russia—but it’s the Republican Party’s embrace of lies and propaganda that most immediately threatens our system of government. Hurd says that watching the January 6 assault on the Capitol, just three days after his retirement from Congress, felt like he was watching a sequel to 9/11—extremism infiltrating America in a new form.

It was “an example of the kinds of internal threats many of our military leaders have cautioned our political leaders to take as seriously as external threats,” Hurd writes. “To prevent future manifestations of this threat from materializing, the Republican Party must drive out those who continue to push misinformation, disinformation, and subscribe to crackpot theories like QAnon.”

But that’s not happening. Just as Hurd was shipping his book to the printer, the Republican National Committee met in Salt Lake City. Its 168 members—three from each of the 50 states and six territories, elected at the local level by party activists—adopted a resolution censuring the two House Republicans working on the January 6 investigation. The resolution also called the insurrection “legitimate political discourse.”

Hurd was dumbfounded. He believed that Trump deserved to be impeached—not just for inciting the violence at the Capitol but also for his recorded phone call with the Georgia secretary of state, in which the president asked a top election official to falsify ballots. (Hurd says these circumstances differ from Trump’s first impeachment, which he agonized over and ultimately voted against, because there was “a clear violation of the law” in the run-up to January 6.) Letting Trump off the hook, Hurd says, was bad enough. For the Republican National Committee to gather more than a year after the insurrection and pass a resolution justifying the death and destruction at the U.S. Capitol was a “new level of crazy”—and, to him, proof that the party needs an intervention.

The irony, I tell him, is that these are the people—the best-connected local Republican leaders—who will play an outsize role in determining whether an intervention is successful. These are the people who do the most influencing and organizing and favor-trading in their state parties. These are the first hands he’ll have to shake in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina if he decides to run for president.

Hurd stares at me blankly. Finally, he arches an eyebrow. “Why?”

Because, I explain to him, these are the gatekeepers to the presidential process. Even Trump, who ran the most unconventional campaign in modern history, had to kiss some rings and grease some palms.

Hurd is still blank-faced. “That’s how things have always been done in the past,” he says. “But why does it have to be that way?”

I ask Hurd what he would propose instead.

“Look, there’s some people I’m not going to appeal to—the right-wingers. That’s okay. But there’s more of the other people. The normal people. And I’m going to find them,” he says. “It will be hard. The cost per acquisition of those voters is higher than it is for the traditional Republican primary voter—you know, the people who have voted in the last four primaries. That’s why most people don’t bother trying to find them or turn them out.”

Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, to just concentrate on wooing those existing likely voters?

“Maybe,” he says. “But if you want to change the party, you need to change the primary electorate. This isn’t rocket science. If you want to get back to normal, you need to get more normal people to vote in primaries.”

It’s a provocative notion. Hurd isn’t just hinting at a campaign against Trumpism; he’s suggesting an assault on the structural realities of the Republican Party.

Contemplating this sort of insurgency is one thing when the GOP is locked out of power. But come November, Republicans are likely—based on all the available evidence—to rout Democrats in the midterm elections. If that happens, the loudest and most radical elements of the Republican Party will be emboldened, and any incentive to moderate the party’s identity will seem lost.

Hurd acknowledges this. But if past is prologue, he says, Republicans will do little with their newly won power in 2023. Congressional leaders will struggle to corral their rambunctious majorities; the party will succeed in frustrating Joe Biden’s agenda but fail to provide any governing vision for the country; and by 2024 the country will be forced to choose between two dug-in, do-nothing parties.

“At that point,” Hurd says, “Maybe people will feel like it’s time to get off this crazy train.”

It’s possible, Hurd tells me, that such continuing dysfunction will push voters deeper and deeper into their partisan silos. His hope rests on a belief that they’ve been pushed too far—and that sooner or later, they’ll push back.

“Look, if you’re a left-wing nut or a right-wing nut, you’re probably not going to smell what I’m cooking,” he says. “But most people aren’t nuts. They want to solve problems. They want to make this century an American century. They are normal people who want normal leaders.”

Hurd is putting the pieces in place. His friends say he wants to run for president in 2024. He may not have universal name recognition or a behemoth political operation, but he does have a vision. He has a loyal and growing donor base. He has the biography and the charisma and the God-given political chops to put the Republican Party—and the rest of the country—on notice.

People close to Hurd thought he was crazy to abandon a future corner office at the CIA to run for Congress. (Bob Gates, the former defense secretary and CIA director, lobbied furiously to keep Hurd from leaving the agency; then, pitying his former Texas A&M pupil, Gates did something he’d never done in his life: He wrote a campaign check.) The young candidate said the same thing to every donor and party official he met: “You don’t need to think I can win; you just need to think it’s not crazy.” That’s the same approach the 44-year-old bachelor envisions taking in a campaign for national office.

Hurd is the definition of a boom-or-bust candidate. He could go all the way to the White House; he could also go nowhere fast. Everything we know about politics in the Trump era suggests that the second outcome is far likelier than the first. But Hurd says he’s not worried about that. Because the only thing worse than being defeated is being desperate.

 

 

He is deep state and blek. No way he makes it through the primary.

[Guest Lobo]

He should primary Cruz in 2024 for Senate.  Ted's gonna have a tough time running for both POTUS and Senate that year.  Could be vulnerable.  Especially since he's gonna living in a tractor-trailer...down by the river! 

[yoladu 4,105]

i dont have a strong dislike for him, but that dude is not Presidential material.

Edited March 31, 2022 by yoladu

[RPM 26,360]

15 minutes ago, yoladu said:

i dont have a strong dislike for him, but that dude is not Presidential material.

This. Taking a run at Cruz would be a better path.

[RDCanecutter 26,476]

On 8/2/2019 at 10:51 PM, fattyflattie said:

Back when you could smoke in El Chaparral.  And the entire place was 825 ft^2. 

My brother from a different mother. My dad's funeral ceremony was held at Lester's, AKA the Country Club.

Old El Chaparral. Best flavored lard anywhere. And there wasn't no sissyfied 1604 clotted up with crap, if you wanted chain restaurants you drove your ass through the country town of Leon Valley and sat there next to 410 drinking coffee in Jim's.

[RDCanecutter 26,476]

1 minute ago, RDCanecutter said:

Lester's, AKA the Country Club.

Dios mio. I looked it up, and apparently somebody has dumped money on it and destroyed it by fancying it up.

[YChang 3,463]

I don't recall his voting record but that article seems overtly favorable for him. 

[Fudge Nuggets 19,227]

He’s a TX Republican. He’s ass. 

[Pato del Muerto 52,616]

3 minutes ago, YChang said:

I don't recall his voting record but that article seems overtly favorable for him. 

Everybody knows that will Hurd is the word

[WhatTheBuck 28,806]

1 minute ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Everybody knows that will Hurd is the word

I heard that bird is the word. 

[YChang 3,463]

[Pato del Muerto 52,616]

2 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

I heard that bird is the word. 

Don’t you know about will Hurd?

[Chico_SA 521]

16 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Dios mio. I looked it up, and apparently somebody has dumped money on it and destroyed it by fancying it up.

Last time I was there they were about to start the transformation.  Still came out reeking like cigarettes.  I guess they added a "beer garden" in back? 

 

[WhatTheBuck 28,806]

5 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Don’t you know about will Hurd?

I do. He went on a road trip with Beto. Plus he’s not white. He has no future in the GOP.

Haven’t you heard that the bird is the word? You of all people should know that, Pato.

 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,528]

Quote

his views of a Republican Party that’s rotting from the top down.

BS. It's rotting from every direction. I would like to hear an honest republican speak to what segment of their party is not rotting?  And whether it started with Trump or the base, does it really matter? They raced quickly to the middle.

[F250 28,826]

25 minutes ago, YChang said:

I don't recall his voting record but that article seems overtly favorable for him. 

Hurd was an outlier during the era of Trump and represented his district fairly well. He was never demonized as much as he was ostracized. The article is definitely a puff piece and overly optimistic about the idea tha someone with Hurd’s views would be accepted by the GOP.

Hurd would be better off running as a Texas shitlib against Cruz in the next Senate race.

[Brisketexan 105,432]

18 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

BS. It's rotting from every direction. I would like to hear an honest republican speak to what segment of their party is not rotting?  And whether it started with Trump or the base, does it really matter? They raced quickly to the middle.

Approaches to fixing the GQP are akin to approaches to a cancer patient with 10,000 tumors in every part of his body.  The patient is beyond saving.

The fact that a supposed "strategic thinker" like Hurd can't see that knocks him down multiple notches.  The GQP is not a political party to be rehabilitated.  It is a fascist insurgency to be defeated.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23,367]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

It is a fascist insurgency to be defeated.

How do you suppose that happens?!?
 

/I’ll see myself out on the ledge. 

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

BS. It's rotting from every direction. I would like to hear an honest republican speak to what segment of their party is not rotting?  And whether it started with Trump or the base, does it really matter? They raced quickly to the middle.

There is no segment of the party that isn’t rotting. 

[Brisketexan 105,432]

13 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

How do you suppose that happens?!?
 

/I’ll see myself out on the ledge. 

When the next coup they try is more violent and bloodier than January 6th.  And that moment will be the deciding moment in our history.  Either that coup will be repulsed -- almost certainly with a violent response -- or it will succeed and we will no longer have a Republic.

As you may have discerned, I don't like our odds.  There will be another Jan 6th, and it will likely succeed.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23,367]

12 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

When the next coup they try is more violent and bloodier than January 6th.  And that moment will be the deciding moment in our history.  Either that coup will be repulsed -- almost certainly with a violent response -- or it will succeed and we will no longer have a Republic.

As you may have discerned, I don't like our odds.  There will be another Jan 6th, and it will likely succeed.

I mean, they’re on their way to stealing elections without violence…did I say on their way? I meant well experienced. Trump losing the popular vote three consecutive times in a row and potentially serving two terms after being impeached twice. Signs the system is toast, sad to say. 

 

[Beau Vine 54,465]

On 3/29/2022 at 7:26 PM, Francisco 2.0 said:

Finally, he shrugged. “Look, my hypothesis is that 80 percent of Americans are around the center—40 percent left of center, 40 percent right of center,” Hurd told me. “And they’re all persuadable. The letter next to my name should matter less than my message.”

I thought this guy went to A&M?

[fattyflattie 4,638]

7 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

My brother from a different mother. My dad's funeral ceremony was held at Lester's, AKA the Country Club.

Old El Chaparral. Best flavored lard anywhere. And there wasn't no sissyfied 1604 clotted up with crap, if you wanted chain restaurants you drove your ass through the country town of Leon Valley and sat there next to 410 drinking coffee in Jim's.

Father, is that you?  
 

Man…the country club.  Very familiar.   When I was a kid, before I knew any different, I thought all bars were like Arkeys and Floores.  We still have our place in pipe creek but it’s been a minute since I’ve been up there.  

[atomheartbevo 89,822]

On 8/3/2019 at 2:12 AM, zzzz said:

The GOP is so desperate to hang onto power they've become pro-Russia, pro-racists, pro-whatever it takes. The good people are leaving their stinking ship.

From August of 2019, and here we are almost 3 years later, and some of them have amped up the pro-Russia stuff.

On to Will Hurd news:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/02/politics/will-hurd-republican-debate-pledge-cnntv/index.html

Quote

Republican presidential candidate Will Hurd said Sunday he was working toward “hitting all the requirements” to qualify for next month’s first GOP primary debate in Milwaukee.

But when it came to the requirement to pledge his support to the eventual GOP nominee – even if that is former President Donald Trump – Hurd said, “I can’t lie to get access to a microphone.” “I’m not going to support Donald Trump. I recognize the impact that has on my ability to get access to the debate stage, but I can’t lie,” the former Texas congressman told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

Quote

Hurd, who launched his presidential bid in late June, had previously told CNN that he “won’t be signing any kind of pledges, and I don’t think parties should be trying to rig who should be on a debate stage.”

To qualify for the debate, Republican candidates have to meet certain polling and donor thresholds as laid out by the RNC. They must also sign a pledge “agreeing to support the eventual party nominee,” the committee has said.

Quote

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has touted the pledge as a “no-brainer” and a means to avoid division within the GOP. But there has been resistance among certain 2024 GOP hopefuls over committing to support Trump, the current front-runner, who faces mounting legal woes, including two indictments. Chris Christie, another GOP presidential contender, has slammed the pledge as a “useless idea.”

“It’s only in the era of Donald Trump that you need somebody to sign something on a pledge. So I think it’s a bad idea,” the former New Jersey governor told CNN last month. But he affirmed that he would do what was needed “to be up on the stage to try to save my party and save my country from going down the road of being led by three-time loser Donald Trump”

 

[WhatTheBuck 28,806]

What happens if you sign the pledge and then go back on it if/when Trump is nominated? I don’t think you’d be any more or less ostracized than you would be if they didn’t make everyone sign a stupid pledge in order to get on the debate stage. The word of a Republican doesn’t mean shit anyway so why not sign the stupid pledge? Hell, stand there on the debate stage and say you meant you pledged to support the Republican nominee if it was anyone but Trump because Trump’s not a Republican. 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,528]

The GOP pledge is pointless because we all know the front runner wouldn’t live up to a pledge. One, he will refuse to acknowledge the he could hypothetically lose. Second, he will declare fraud if he loses which is 100% undermining and not supporting the nominee.

not to mention that agreeing to support the nominee is a vague phrase. What does support even mean? Working for them on the campaign trail? Not running as a 3rd party candidate? Support could mean a million different things to a million people.

I give any candidate credit for refusing to agree to it. They could easily sign it. Not agreeing shows some intelligence.

[Sawbonz 27,595]

[956 Worldwide 34,794]

Signing the pledge would make you toxic to the rest of the electorate if you miraculously make it out of the primary. It’s only there because of Trump and it’s basically a loyalty oath.  The goal is to make everyone get Trump’s shit smell on themselves. 

Edited July 3, 2023 by 956 Worldwide

[Js1 85,602]

1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Not agreeing shows some intelligence.

That bar is looooooooooow though. 

[Sawbonz 27,595]

1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

What does support even mean? 

[956 Worldwide 34,794]

Also, in a sane party a person like Will Hurd would have been being prepped and rolled out to the public as a potential POTUS after his first electoral win with his background and profile. The potential future of the GOP type stuff. But the real future is MTG. 

[atomheartbevo 89,822]

3 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The GOP pledge is pointless because we all know the front runner wouldn’t live up to a pledge. One, he will refuse to acknowledge the he could hypothetically lose. Second, he will declare fraud if he loses which is 100% undermining and not supporting the nominee.

not to mention that agreeing to support the nominee is a vague phrase. What does support even mean? Working for them on the campaign trail? Not running as a 3rd party candidate? Support could mean a million different things to a million people.

I give any candidate credit for refusing to agree to it. They could easily sign it. Not agreeing shows some intelligence.

And Trump has already said he wouldn't abide by it unless he likes the person, and the only person he likes getting the nomination is himself.

30 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Also, in a sane party a person like Will Hurd would have been being prepped and rolled out to the public as a potential POTUS after his first electoral win with his background and profile. The potential future of the GOP type stuff. But the real future is MTG. 

And MTG has also said she won't support anybody but Trump.  Sure, she's not a candidate (for now), but the fact that she will only support Trump tells you everything.

[TwiceHorn 31,552]

11 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The goal is to make everyone get Trump’s shit smell on themselves. 

As if they haven't been gobbling Trump's shit by the handful and smearing it in their hair.

What it is is that a few of them are showing signs of wanting to hose off.  This prevents that.

[TwiceHorn 31,552]

21 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Quote

save my country from going down the road of being led by three-time loser Donald Trump”

 

Fuck fat boy Christie, but he is talking some shit on teh Donald.  Moar pls.

[StassneyHorn 6,643]

Should be primary-big Cruz instead

[Hank Scorpio 17,731]

Herd is a fucking loser who needs to fuck off to some bullshit conservative DC think tank funded by Raytheon and show up on cable news occasionally arguing why we need to invade Iran. 

[Bullneck 19,214]

FUCK YOU GUYS.  HE WAS GREAT IN "BODY HEAT."

[Hermanator 7,178]

All a republican like Hurd, who already left Congress and publicly shows he doesn't like trump, has to do is go on Fox news and make a ton of noise then after trump gets handed the nomination run as an independent. It'll be enough to give republicans who hate trump an avenue for their votes that'll sink trump in the election. That'll effectively end trump as his criminal trials will hold him down and he probably doesn't make it to 2028. Can say he's doing it to save the republican party and the country from another 4 years of a criminal President or whatever. None of them have the balls to do it because as republicans they're naturally cowards and greedy assholes. 

[Pescado_Rojo 19,431]

16 hours ago, Hermanator said:

All a republican like Hurd, who already left Congress and publicly shows he doesn't like trump, has to do is go on Fox news and make a ton of noise then after trump gets handed the nomination run as an independent. It'll be enough to give republicans who hate trump an avenue for their votes that'll sink trump in the election. That'll effectively end trump as his criminal trials will hold him down and he probably doesn't make it to 2028. Can say he's doing it to save the republican party and the country from another 4 years of a criminal President or whatever. None of them have the balls to do it because as republicans they're naturally cowards and greedy assholes. 

"I don't like Trump, but the democrats might make it slightly more difficult for me to buy an assault rifle, so...."

[WhatTheBuck 28,806]

20 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

All a republican like Hurd, who already left Congress and publicly shows he doesn't like trump, has to do is go on Fox news and make a ton of noise then after trump gets handed the nomination run as an independent.

Oh, is that all?

[Gil Bang 26,048]

Smartest aggy ever?