Kinky Friedman’s death today at age 79 is well-covered in the Texas Tribune and on Kinky’s Wikipedia page. League of Independent Voters sends its condolences to Kinky’s huge network of family, friends, and fans who love him dearly.
I met Kinky in 2005, in the runup to his independent bid for Texas Governor. I met with Kinky at his ranch in Medina. It was his love and care for dogs that made plain what a sweet guy he was, that Kinky Friedman.
I know that all dogs are beautiful on the inside, but at the risk of offending any fellow dog worshippers, Kinky had maybe 8 or 10 outwardly beauty-challenged dogs living in his cabin! He took us out to meet the 60 dogs in his lovely dog-centric rescue facility. Kinky named his dogs after famous people. He was very clever at pawning them off on others. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with Reba McEntire and to take her home to Bastrop.
I came to meet with Kinky, along with Gerardo Cardenas, then treasurer of Independent Texans PAC. I was an emissary for the Carole Strayhorn gubernatorial campaign. Carole, the Republican State Comptroller, had planned to run for Governor in the Republican primary against Rick Perry. One of her signature issues was the Trans-Texas Corridor, aka the “NAFTA Highway” opposed by a broad array of groups, including the Independent Texans PAC. Kinky had already declared his independent candidacy, but I came to warn him that Carole was considering skipping the primary and running as an independent.
I helped bring the two campaign managers together; Carole’s son, Brad McClellan, and Kinky’s seasoned and whip-smart independent consultant, Dean Barkley from Minnesota. Barkley played a major role in the successful gubernatorial election of Jesse Ventura in 1998 on the Reform Party line. We knew each other having gone through the four years of exhilarating success and then heart-breaking failure of the Reform Party USA. We never regretted a moment and yes, it almost killed the independent movement and me too.
What I Never Said Before We Can Learn From
It was my feeling that Kinky was not treated with adequate care by the Strayhorn campaign. I think they assumed Kinky might get a few percentage points. I wasn’t sure of that at all. Instead, Carole and Kinky damn near equally split the independent vote. Strayhorn, who had $8 million in her campaign coffers, wound up with 18%. Kinky received 12.6%.
Their combined votes would have put one of them in second place at 32%. Rick Perry won with 39% and Chris Bell, the Democratic candidate, received 29.8%. I feel the same today as I did then that had Carole met directly with Kinky and asked him before the filing deadline to move to the Lt. Governor’s race, Carole Strayhorn would have beat Rick Perry as an independent in 2006. Instead, pride stopped her from giving Kinky the respect he deserved and we all lost.
On a separate note, I want to give homage to all the people who backed Kinky in his campaign, including the brilliant Barkley, who I still talk to from time to time. They ran one helluva campaign, especially their petition drive. They got their signatures spending ¼ of what the Strayhorn campaign spent by mobilizing volunteers. I believe it was this creative (and fun) work that explains how well Kinky did. Candidates running independently invariably fail to mobilize their most important asset – their following. (Hint: RFK, Jr. could well be learning this lesson the hard way today.)
Happy Trails and farewell to Kinky Friedman from all who loved him, including hundreds of four-legged friends like our Reba-doo.
Editorial Note: The League of Independent Voters of Texas is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that advocates for a independent voters in Texas. Readers can view more articles by LIV on its website. Readers are also invited by the organization to share their personal Kinky Friedman stories in their comment section.
The League of Independent Voters also regrets the passing of Ms. Edee Baggett of National Ballot Access, one of America’s leading ballot access petition companies, and author Linda Curtis is mourning the passage of a personal friend, Barry Levine, who played an important role in the early days of the independent political movement that put Lenora Fulani on the ballot in all 50 states in 1988.
I interviewed Kinky as part of his 2006 gubernatorial run.
Like a number of others at the time, at some point, I kept waiting for him to be like Ventura (some of whose staff was advising Friedman) to pivot from 98 percent jokester to modicum of seriousness. And, of course, he never did.
Several years of hindsight later, I came to the conclusion that he was afraid he might actually win.