At Least We're Not Kansas

Launched but a few days ago, What's the Matter with Texas? has already accumulated a deafening buzz in the state blogosphere. What is the matter with Texas? The state Democratic Party, of course. Meant as part postmortem on the party's flagging statewide fortunes, and part bitch session, the blog has already accumulated some big readers. Like Chris Bell.

Responding to a post titled ”The Problem with Chris Bell” blaming Bell's lack of vision and dearth of small donors for his loss, Bell kicked some knowledge of his own – mainly that WTMWT blogger Smarty Pants' small donor numbers were wrong, and the vague inspirational drivel cited was from the early days of the campaign. (Bell's letter, published last night, has since been taken down at his request.)

No, considering what he had to work with (nada), Bell ran one hell of a campaign. As the blog makes abundantly clear elsewhere, “we fielded a weak, inexperienced, and under-funded slate of state-wide candidates, and the party's largest donors backed a Republican running a misguided independent campaign for governor. We did very little to build the base, and those same mistakes threaten to happen again in 2008.”