The Mandate of the New Mainstream

A Speech by Chris Bell. The Texas Reform candidate.

Then I met Tom DeLay.

And it’s not just Tom DeLay. It’s the corrupt culture of Washington that you never really see until you’re on the inside. I never really saw the walls that divided us until the voters of Houston gave me the keys to the kingdom. I had no idea how partisan it was, how locked out people really are.

You want to know how broken the system is? When I was thinking of filing the ethics complaint against Tom DeLay, leaders of my own party tried to get me to back down. They wanted to preserve the so-called “ethics truce.”[10] Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Only in Washington, D.C. would an “ethics truce” make sense.

I did what any Texan would have done. I did what I thought was right. To paraphrase someone who knows a lot about Washington ethics, I had to choose between Tom DeLay and y’all, and I chose y’all.[11] But after that whole experience, I’m beginning to understand why Davy Crockett said what he did when he lost his congressional seat. He said, “you all can go to Hell, and I’m going to Texas.”[12]

That’s where I find myself right now, and there’s no place that I’d rather be.

I am a free man. But it is a taller order to meet the measure of a reform candidate.