Slicing Up The Pie

The sun is just coming up over the East Texas horizon as our aging, beat-up sedan cruises down U.S. 290 East toward the Travis County line. At that point, we will leave the boundaries of the 10th U.S. Congressional District, currently represented by Austinite Lloyd Doggett. Yet on another, less familiar map, we are not really leaving the 10th at all – we are simply heading into territory inside the new 10th, which will come into full existence on Nov. 2, 2004.

This July morning we are traveling from one end of the new District 10 to the other. Before U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land) applied the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to Austin's voters, such a trip simply involved a direct, 30-mile drive down Interstate 35, from the southern border of Williamson County to the northern one of Hays. But post-re-redistricting, we have barely begun our journey. When we reach our turnaround point, we will be about 140 miles from home, in the northwestern suburbs of Houston.

Tomball, to be specific. When we get there, we will have dropped 387 feet in altitude, from the edge of the Central Texas Hill Country to the East Texas coastal plains. But make no mistake – for one of our fellow passengers, Lorenzo Sadun, the trip is uphill the entire way.

This daunting journey is precisely what Tom DeLay calculated when he split the old 10th into three different districts. The new 10th represents what the arch-partisan DeLay fantasized about – a centralized bastion of liberalism destroyed, sprawled into a completely different landscape, and one in which Democrats became, if not extinct, at least as docile and hard to find as the horned toads once ubiquitous in Central Texas. The district was drawn to be such a sure electoral bet for Republicans that – following a brief early flirtation by Austin Mayor Emeritus Gus Garcia – no Democrat even bothered to file for the seat.

So in the new 10th, there is now only one thorn remaining in DeLay's side – Sadun, a 43-year-old married father of three, an unpretentious mathematics professor at UT-Austin, and an earnest liberal Democrat who simply couldn't stand to see his congressional voice vanish without a fight. Professor Sadun is now mounting a diligent, quixotic write-in candidacy for Congress against former U.S. attorney Michael McCaul, winner of the GOP primary. Indeed, conventional wisdom decrees that Sadun barely rises to the level of thorn – on election day, he will be pulled painlessly from Big Tom's ribs by McCaul, whose Web site strikes the reassuring tone of an officeholder-elect (emphasis ours): "Since the election ended, I've been traveling the district, meeting with future constituents and listening to their concerns."

Conventional wisdom has an insistent, intimidating voice. Lorenzo Sadun is ignoring it. And he's not the only one.

Personal Connections

The Republican Goliaths who would represent most of Central Texas – newcomer McCaul, 17-year incumbent Lamar Smith of San Antonio (CD 21), and Williamson Co. favorite son John Carter (CD 31) – would appear to be shoo-ins. (As does Doggett, correspondingly gerrymandered into his new, bizarrely shaped CD 25, which runs from East Austin to Mexico, and where he faces little more than token opposition from novice GOP candidate Rebecca Armendariz Klein.) But the elephants must first go through the formality of a November general election, and three men have chosen to pick up a sling and face them. All three fit the white, male Democrat demographic (known at the Legislature as "WD40s") that DeLay has targeted for isolation or elimination.

Sadun declared too late to be an official nominee, but his write-in candidacy has earned the backing of the state party. In CD 31, Jon Porter, a 34-year-old Cedar Park lawyer, has decided to see if Fort Hood's military families, formerly represented by Chet Edwards, remain willing to support a Democrat. And in CD 21, Rhett Smith – no relation to the incumbent – hopes that the redrawn district burrows so far into Austin that it will tip in a Democrat's favor.