Lone Star Democracy Builders Association

After a few songs by a Western swing group out on the hot and humid Mother Egan's patio, Fran Vincent came up on stage and got things started by introducing the main speaker, Barbara Ann Radnofsky.

She's made over 200 trips around Texas in the last year getting support and forming a campaign strategy. Her background is as a lawyer, most recently with her own practice. She's the daughter of NASA scientists, and her dad was shot down over Germany in WWII, making a heroic escape back into Allied territory. She's openly spiritual and thinks that religious people should participate in politics, but that separation of church and state is very important.

Her opponent in the general election, sitting senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, tries to position herself as a moderate, but her positions aren't. She was against restoring Medicade funding, she's voted anti-choice, and she supported the recent energy bill that causes a huge transfer of federal gasoline tax money out of Texas. On veterans issues, she originally didn't support increasing funding for the VA hospitals. Worth noting: there are no VA hospitals south of San Antonio in the state. KBH changed her mind after getting pounded on the issue earlier this year.

How will BAR get elected? For the primary, she needs about 300,000 votes. For the general election, she needs to get around 2.5 million. Her strategy is to run her campaign for the general election; she's not going to move to the left or take extreme positions, and her campaign messaging will be based on framing issues to find common ground with moderates and some Republicans.

On reproductive rights, she's pro-choice, but will be pushing a message of trying to greatly reduce the number of abortions by improving economic conditions for women and pushing health care reform.

On civil unions, she thinks that she can win over people on this issue by framing it in economic terms. She made an argument that by making it illegal to recognize civil unions, you keep people out of private health insurance plans offered through employers and cities, which means more people will use emergency rooms and public assistance.

On immigration, her stand was that it's tied to national security, and we need policies that deter illegal immigration, but that allow the economically beneficial immigration that boosts the border economy in south Texas. Our current policy under Bush has failed and deterred legal trade. The vigilante border patrol groups are illegal and are a sign of the failure of current policy.

Her big issues: economy, national security, health care, and immigration. She's going to really be pushing against KBH on the first two, attacking Kay as weak in those areas because of the Bush policies she's supported.

She doesn't get or want DLC support, and when asked if she's "Republican-Lite", she made a joke about being a soccer mom and wearing pink dresses, but said that she's an authentic Democrat but also a moderate, and didn't want labels of "Feminist", "Progressive", or "Populist" attached to her because of their political stigma with many voters.

Iraq: we need to provide a timetable to remove our troops safely. She's anti-draft; it would be more equitable, but it would cause far too many problems.

Electoral reform: we need paper trails. Her husband keeps her up to date on what's happening here.