State officials encouraged two million coastal residents to take to the Texas highways simultaneously, resulting in 100-mile traffic jams, fuel shortages and general consternation. The way Friedman and his campaign managers see it, if he can present himself as a genuine alternative to a disgusted electorate and mobilise at least some of the 75 per cent of Texas voters who didn't bother to show up for the last governor's election, he stands a real chance of winning. Tom DeLay, overlord of the state's congressional delegation, has just been charged with conspiracy and money-laundering. Public opinion is appalled at the governor and the legislature for relegating the Texas school system to 50th place among the 50 states. Any political capital Governor Perry may have accumulated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when his state became a conduit for federal money for the flood of incoming evacuees and he put on a passable show of competent leadership, started to deplete as soon as Katrina's successor, Hurricane Rita, hit the Gulf coast. Kinky has been earning himself both attention and warm praise in the Texas media for his witty articulation of a commonly felt disgust at the state's political leadership.
He's running at a more than respectable 18 per cent in the latest opinion poll ?with more than a year to go before election day. Perhaps most significantly, the Texas establishment is floundering all around him. His team has produced a hilarious campaign cartoon making fun of Texas politicians as they speak broken Spanish on the campaign trail and invoke Jesus at every turn One valuable fundraising asset is a Kinky talking doll. One of the 25 lines it spouts: "Friedman is just another word for nothing left to lose." By now, though, it is clear the campaign is much more than a joke.
His campaign is littered with Jewish jokes, politician jokes, gay marriage jokes ("they have every right to be just as miserable as the rest of us"), even jokes about the current governor, Rick Perry, and his famously perfect hairdo. "I've got a head of hair better than Rick Perry," Friedman boasts, to loud guffaws from his audiences, "it's just not in a place I can show you." For the first few months of his campaign, conventional wisdom had it that Friedman's candidacy was itself a joke, a way of sticking it to Texas's luridly headline-worthy establishment without committing himself to much more than a stream of one-liners to entertain the crowds. Certainly, he can be counted on to show up to events in his trademark jeans, cowboy hat and leather waistcoat, puffing on a fat Cuban cigar as he goes through his well-rehearsed paces. When Kinky Friedman, hitherto known as an eccentric Jewish cowboy singer turned mystery novelist, is asked why he is campaigning as an independent in next year's Texas governor's race, he likes to respond with a question: "How hard can it be?" If that sounds like a wisecrack, Friedman has plenty more where it came from. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.
