The Uvalde Candidates Are Here And They're Not Going To Be Quiet
Can a scream of grief and terror be a campaign slogan?
Just as last year’s horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has created — as most mass shootings do — a new crop of gun control activists, it has also driven some folks to run for office, like Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio was among the 19 fourth-graders and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School. Mata-Rubio is running for mayor of Uvalde in November’s special election to replace Mayor Don McLaughlin, who’s resigning to run for the Texas House next year.
So far, Mata-Rubio, who has a tattoo on her shoulder of a drawing Lexi made of her, is one of just two candidates in the special election, which will decide who fills the remainder of McLaughlin’s term; the 2024 general election will be for a full four years.
Mata-Rubio told ABC News she’s running because
My other children are going to grow up in this community and I want it to be the best it can be for them. […] There is so much potential. There are things I love about Uvalde — so much history and a rich culture — and I don’t want this town to stay where it is and just be remembered for this tragedy. I want to move forward but I want to bring along our children and those two teachers
She’s an ad exec and former reporter/editor at the local paper, the Uvalde Leader-News, which interviewed her after she announced her candidacy. The story carefully points out that while Mata-Rubio has become an advocate for stronger state and national gun laws, gun regulations are “not within the purview of the city council,” which seems like a good thing for a local paper to remind readers of.
Mata-Rubio told the Leader News that new leadership in Uvalde was “long overdue.”
“Our town has become stagnant. Our leadership became comfortable, which led to the events that unfolded on May 24, 2022. The aftermath has added to the trauma of a grieving and fractured community. It is my hope to bridge the gap because only when we come together can we evolve to something greater.”
The only other candidate so far is local banker Cody Smith, who served one term as mayor from 2008 to 2012 and previously spent 12 years on the city council. He wants to be mayor again because experience, and, you know, uhh, healing?
“I would come to the position with some experience,” said Smith, “[...] and then I just want to do anything I can to help this community, you know, heal and, you know, and prosper.”
He explained to ABC News that if he were elected to another term, his first act would be to set up a committee of “city, county and school district members” to create a permanent memorial to the victims, and we’re nearly 100 percent certain he said “stakeholders,” how could he not? Is he actually trying to run as the movie character everyone recognizes is OK but not really what the town needs?
Maybe he has a secret store of charisma that will surprise everyone.
The Uvalde massacre is also the driving force behind state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who was a prominent critic of the slow police response and Texas Republicans’ refusal to even consider any changes in gun laws following the shooting. Gutierrez recently announced he’s running for US Senate with the hope of taking on podcaster and sometime Senator Ted Cruz, probably the most despised member of the Senate.
The radical leftists at The Bulwark ran a complimentary article about Gutierrez this week, in which he said unreleased police and surveillance video from inside the school is “the worst thing I’ve seen in my entire life”:
“I’ve watched hundreds of hours of footage of the event. I’ve seen things that I can never get out of my mind. I see the images every night when I go to bed, and I see them in the morning when I wake up. There’s one image in particular that haunts me. My staff warned me when we were reviewing footage that it was coming up. It was a little girl with no face. I can’t get that image out of my head. I see it every day. I see the damage that that weapon did to the little girl.”
Gutierrez says he owns “a whole bunch of guns,” but not an AR-15 because nobody needs one of those, which is why he supports an assault weapons ban. He’s seen their effects. He also says that when he met with Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to call for a debate on gun reforms, he told Patrick how disturbing the footage was, and broke down crying while trying to describe the horror of what he’d seen.
“I don’t break down much, but I broke down in this hour-long conversation with him. I said we need to do something, and we ended up doing nothing. Patrick said to me, ‘Roland, there’s a reason we don’t look at the video.’ Can you imagine that? One of the leaders of the state suggesting to me that he’s not going to look at the video footage because he doesn’t want to see what happened. […] One of the top three leaders in the state says, ‘We don’t look at the video.’ This could have been his grandchild.”
Yep, that sounds like a Republican strategy for avoiding difficult topics.
Like Mata-Rubio, Gutierrez believes that what’s ailing Texas is its entrenched leadership that’s OK with Texas having awful problems as long as Republicans keep running things. He’s called for reform of the state’s utility grid, which he says is “built entirely to help natural gas companies over people,” and for more school spending, not censorship, pointing out that Texas is “45th in performance and 45th in spending nationwide; there is absolutely a corollary to one another.” And needless to say, he’s firmly against abortion restrictions, not just in Texas but nationwide.
But none of that’s going to change with Republicans running things, Gutierrez says:
“I’m sick and tired of their lies. I’m sick and tired of them telling people this is some kind of Texas miracle we’re living in. Eight hundred people don’t freeze to death in a Texas that works well. Kids don’t wait 77 minutes to be rescued. Our state has gone down a horrible rabbit hole with these people who are not good for Texas. These people are not even good for business anymore.”
Gutierrez also has the honor of being one of three Democratic state senators grifty Attorney General Ken Paxton demands be recused from his impeachment trial in the state Senate because they dislike Paxton, and how could anyone dislike such a wonderful guy? Gutierrez told the Bulwark, “I might have said something on MSNBC months ago that hurt Ken Paxton’s feelings.”
To get the chance to run against Cruz, Gutierrez would first have to win next year’s Democratic primary against Congressman Colin Allred, who represents a Dallas area district and is already running a strong campaign against Cruz. We like them both!
Gutierrez thinks he can win against Cruz by giving Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande valley, who have voted increasingly Republican in recent years, a Democrat they can support. He doesn’t think those voters are necessarily going deep red at all:
“I think the people on the border are not voting and that’s been true for a long time. But in me they’re going to have someone who’s going to speak to them in English and Spanish and Spanglish and everything in between. They’re going to have someone who was raised the same as they were — a kid of hard-working parents, not some Ivy League kid, but a kid who worked hard all his life. Someone who speaks to them and relates to them.”
Sounds good to us!
[ABC News / Uvalde Leader-News / Bulwark]
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You have to admire anyone who can suffer a tragedy like that and then use that energy to try to make things better.
I like these pieces about those fighting for good in the so called "red states". It is discouraging to see the attitude I see on here about how certain states should be kicked out or are condemned as irredeemable when the evidence of good and moral people existing in those states is right here in the comment section. Sure, some of these states are voting overwhelmingly Republican and doing awful things and I don't blame people for leaving those places. But we need people to stay and fight. I don't want to cede any states as "lost" to the GOP forever. Little by little, a win at a time, and you can show residents, especially the young ones coming up, something to give hope that things can change for the better. It won't happen overnight, but as John Lewis said...
"Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part"