Democrat Ricardo Sanchez to enter race for US Senate in Texas

Source: Dallas Morning News

The latest in a long line of Democrats hoping to break the Republican hold on elective office in Texas will make it official this morning. Former Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez will announce he's running for the US Senate. As we reported on Monday , some Democrats look to Sanchez as this election's Democratic hope - Republicans say sacrificial lamb - when he announces today he's running for the seat Kay Bailey Hutchison is leaving. Sanchez comes to the race with high hopes among supporters that he can attract Hispanic voters. But he also comes with some baggage: he oversaw coalition forces in Iraq before retiring in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

Word in Democratic circles is that Sanchez will make his announcement on Facebook, then file the paperwork in San Antonio . Sanchez is 59 and was raised in San Antonio. He becomes the only Democrat so far in the race to succeed Hutchison. Several Republicans are in -- or expected to get in -- the race. Any Democrat comes into the race at a severe disadvantage. The GOP holds every statewide elected office and both Senate seats. The last Democrat elected to the Senate in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen , who resigned the seat in 1993 to become treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. (Bob Krueger was appointed and briefly held the seat before being defeated by Hutchison).

Democrats point to the growing Hispanic population in Texas. Hispanics tend to vote Democratic. They account for two-thirds of the population growth in Texas over the last decade. And President Obama's immigration speech yesterday in El Paso was clearly aimed at bolstering his political bona fides with Hispanics. But the Democrats' history of putting a Hispanic candidate at the top of the ticket -- billionaire banker Tony Sanchez for governor in 2002 and Senate hopeful Victor Morales in 1996 -- has not worked. While Hispanics constitute nearly 35 percent of the population, they accounted for only 20 percent of the vote last November.

Read more: http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/05/democrat-ricardo-sanchez-to-en.html

:popcorn:

Let me guess: This paper leans right.

Sanchez spoke out against the war. I believe he is a good man. His real disadvantage may be not being WASP.

If his district is more than 50% minority, he may be okay. Otherwise, I really don't know.

I looked for residential real estate in San Antonio once. The agent was very insistent about which neighborhoods I should avoid and why--and "why" was always the presence of people of Mexican descent in the area.

No matter how I argued, he would not show me a house I had found online and asked to see. Instead, he kept driving me past bus stops where groups of people of Mexican descent were going home from work and telling me they were headed to the neighborhood where the house was located.

I should have filed a complaint, but he was a veteran, recently retired from the Army, with a family, and I was only in town for a short time.

'Sanchez was commander of coalition forces during a period when abuse of prisoners occurred at Abu Ghraib and at other locations. In a memo signed by General Sanchez and later acquired by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act request, techniques were authorized to interrogate prisoners, included "environmental manipulation" such as making a room hot or cold or using an "unpleasant smell", isolating a prisoner, disrupting normal sleep patterns and "convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him."<2>

On May 5, 2006 Sanchez denied ever authorizing interrogators to "go to the outer limits". Sanchez said he had told interrogators: "...we should be conducting our interrogations to the limits of our authority." Sanchez called the ACLU: "...a bunch of sensationalist liars, I mean lawyers, that will distort any and all information that they get to draw attention to their positions."<3>'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Sanchez

after he retired -- of course -- he began to become more clear:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/15/iraq.usa

Even without naming names, Gen Sanchez's analysis of the mishandling of the occupation of Iraq, delivered on Friday, was piercing. "From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan to the administration's latest surge strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronise its political, economic and military power," he said.

Asked at what point he thought the mission in Iraq had started to go wrong, he replied: "About the 15th of June 2003." That was the day he took command of US forces in the country. Gen Sanchez went on to say that after four years of fighting in Iraq, there was still no clarity within the civilian leadership, which he accused of "lust of power" and of failing to mobilise all corners of government for the struggle in Iraq. "The administration, Congress and the entire inter-agency, especially the state department, must shoulder responsibility for the catastrophic failure, and the American people must hold them accountable."


but he was part of that catastrophe.