If you tend to ignore the Texas posts, just skip to the video near the bottom of this post and listen.

The Houston Chronicle and The New York Times provided the best starts to their stories about Annise Parker’s victory Saturday night:

Annise Danette Parker was elected mayor of Houston on Saturday, winning her seventh consecutive city election and becoming both the first contender in a generation to defeat the hand-picked candidate of Houston’s business establishment and the first openly gay person to lead a major U.S. city.

When asked why Houston became the first big city in the United States to elect an openly gay mayor, rather than New York or San Francisco, the woman who had broken that barrier, Annise Parker, raised her eyebrows and said her victory came as no surprise to people who live here.

“I think the rest of America had the wrong impression of Houston,” Ms. Parker said after winning on Saturday night. “We are a diverse, amazing, international city.”

Aside from the historic first out mayor of a major American city, making Houston the biggest city in the world with an out mayor, she is the first mayor of Houston to use part of the victory speech to thank bloggers. She started her victory speech with another reason her election is historical:

I am proud to be the first . . .

[pause for dramatic effect]

. . .graduate of Rice University elected mayor of Houston.”

Enjoy more of her victory speech:

But of course the main reason her election has received so much national and international attention is that she is out and Houston is a big, big city. The media only says US but never mentions any city in the world. I’ll retract if someone shows me a bigger city that has had an out mayor. Even the BBC doesn’t mention any cities outside the US. Some proud people of Portland are taking exception to the declarations that Houston is the first major American city to have an out mayor. Let’s say “major” is a relative term and let Portland keep some dignity. But let’s also realize how much larger Houston is and what Parker’s election means:

• Houston, TX (pop. 2,242,193 / 4th) – Annise Parker (2009)
• Portland, OR (pop. 557,706 / 29th) – Sam Adams (2008)
• Providence, RI (pop. 171,557 / 136th) – David Cicilline (2002)
• Cambridge, MA (pop. 105,596 / 244th) – Kenneth Reeves (1993)

Portland is a lovely city, but please. Houston may not be known, loved or respected by many, but we are the 4th largest city in the nation (Portland is merely 29th). Our metropolitan area is the 6th largest, with 5.7 million people. When Katrina hit New Orleans, we took in 150,000 refugees, about one third of Portland’s entire population. Houston may not win many beauty prizes, but we are a MAJOR city, and any city with less than a million people should just acknowledge that and shut it.

This is important, because I don’t think most people throughout the country know how powerful Annise Parker has become, and how excited gay rights activists should be about that. Houston has a very strong mayorship.

There is no deference to a city manager, or much opposition from council members. The city agenda is controlled 100% by the mayor. Annise Parker has an enormous platform to make her mark and show the country that a gay mayor can be successful and popular. And since she is now mayor of a relatively (compared to Portland) conservative and pro-business city, she can show that a gay politician can do a great job without causing anyone to be afraid of her ramming a liberal “agenda” down anyone’s throats.

The LA Times noted that this month has been quite the rollercoaster for equal rights and out politicians:

[V]oters in Houston elected Annise Parker as their mayor. Parker, the 53-year-old city controller, becomes the first openly gay mayor of such a large American city. Houston, with 2.2 million residents, is the nation’s fourth-largest city.

Two days earlier, Democrats who control California’s Assembly unanimously picked John A. Perez of Los Angeles to be their speaker. He will be the first openly gay lawmaker to hold the powerful post once held by Antonio Villaraigosa (now L.A. mayor) and the famously quotable Willie Brown.

This month also saw New York lawmakers reject legislation that would have made their state the sixth to allow gay marriage.

But again, as part of the topsy-turvy pattern, the District of Columbia Council this month took a step toward legalizing gay marriage in the nation’s capital.

In Houston city government, it’s a virtual given that incumbents win reelection. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but I’m going to suggest term limits are having the opposite effect than intended. Presuming the incumbency path to victory holds true, Houston’s next open mayoral election will be in 2015. Let me be the first to suggest Melissa Noriega for the position.

I’m kind of glad I wasn’t watching television like Hairballs was on election night:

• TV stations seem to think there will be street celebrations in Montrose. We’ll see.
• Channel 11′s Bob Stein compares Annise Parker’s win to Lee Brown’s: One candidate was “different” by birth, one by choice. What? Choice?

As Parker campaigned, she’s ready to lead on the first day:

Erik Vidor positioned himself to know how the day would end hours before others did. The Parker staff with whom I spoke at the election night party did not act as confident.

As the Blogateers sat waiting in anticipation of last nights results we could not help but worry when we saw the early vote totals come in, they were just too close for comfort. Visions of defeat were not far off because after all we had all stuck our necks out there in support of Annise Parker.

Personally, I spent election day at head-quarters receiving election poll vote totals from Annise’s army of volunteers. It became clear around 3pm that we were going to win but elections are not an exact science so the campaign continued to push and push and push even harder because in the end you don’t want to say that you didn’t do enough. The end result was a victory not just for Annise but for Houston and the rest of this state.

Turnout was a disappointing 16%. Estimates has 25,000 more voters showing up. Some voters, however, were so eager to vote that they showed up to be first at the wrong polling location:

Among the voters waiting for the polls to open were some dog-tired medical students who never sleep anyway.

Chirag Patel, a 30-year-old student at University of Texas Medical School at Houston, picked up some friends at 6:45 a.m. for the short drive to the polls, continuing the tradition the buddies have had since the last election.

The goal: To be first in line on Election Day.

“This guy is weird, man,” said Rene Colorado, who Patel dragged along with him.

Though the friends were, indeed, among the first to arrive at Fiesta on Saturday morning, none of their names were on the voter rolls. They had gone to the wrong precinct.

They wouldn’t be the first to vote after all.

“Too bad,” said a slightly forlorn Patel.

Parker overcame Locke’s position as the business community’s favored candidate through the support of national organizations like Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and through a base about 60k of Houston’s 2.2M residents identify as LGBT. That would appear to be quite an insignificant number, but with only about 155k voters turning out to vote, that is a strong base of voters.

Dos Centavos is right on the money about 287(g) being part of the mayoral race:

That said, the whole 287(g) issue creeping into the race angered me. I wasn’t afraid to criticize Parker and the rest for taking a more punitive approach, rather than use the bully pulpit to demand comprehensive immigration reform in order to strengthen the Houston economy and families. After I realized that neither would take that sort of risk, it became about choosing who I thought would best serve Houston. As the run-off campaigning progressed, I thought that 287(g) would stay out; unfortunately, the Roy Morales mailer and Gene Locke’s “immigration-as-crime” add-on to his TV ad brought it back up. The thing is, neither message is what right-wingers really want to hear, and usually, they do not trust a “liberal” talking up the issue (just ask Nick Lampson).

Locke using the issue in a 6-figure ad-buy was not a smart move, though. Although his supporters tell me he is clear in saying he wanted to arrest immigrants “in the jails,” why even bring it up?

Still, given Parker’s similar “in the jails” stance and the fact that 287(g) is a costly and ineffective program, this blogger/activist will continue to call upon her fiscally responsible mind to convince her that Houston does not need it.

Locke’s use of 287(g) in his commercials is one of the factors firmly pushing me into the Parker camp. It disappointed Ernesto Aguilar as well:

Yet there was the former activist who once decried police abuse, going to the well with slams of Parker being soft on crime and declaring an intent to have police check immigration status of ‘criminals.’ Rush Limbaugh would find it deliciously ironic. I found it tragic.

Locke’s alignment with hate didn’t work. Bizarrely, some are trying to blame anti-Black racism for Locke’s loss:

Some people will inevitably say Gene Locke, by allegedly allying with bigots, had this loss coming. However, this phenomenon is not just about Gene Locke’s mistakes, but the prevalence of race in a city that seems to be in full spin mode in pretending race does not exist.

I really don’t know what he’s talking about. Look at the racially polarized voting by neighborhoods in Houston. It’s hard to hide a stark fact. But Aguilar’s piece is an interesting read and should be examined further:

This positioning and materials that tagged Locke an elitist (in one Parker mailer I received, Locke is called a “lawyer-lobbyist”) were a painful reminder of 2008’s Clinton/Obama jockeying, with the white female being more together and qualified than the aloof, untrustworthy Black man. It’s doubtful Parker supporters wanted to give such an impression, but one certainly walked away with that implied opinion nonetheless.

It’s obvious which side of each of those contests I was on. I abhorred any attempts to paint Locke as an elitist — although he did not help himself by saying he enjoyed the lifestyle of a high-priced attorney in one of the debates.

Forgotten in this equation was the fact that the populist right has been in full-on attack mode for at least 18 months straight against a Black man, Barack Obama, since the 2008 election season. The critiques of a Black president have waddled from sophisticated, attacking those who exposed the racist anti-Obama crowd, to downright crude birher babble and animal comparisons. Even Gov. Rick Perry got in on the act, blathering about Obama “punishing” Texas. That meant Locke, with his history as a Black former firebrand, was seeking votes when the tea party rank-and-file have been consuming little more than blue Kool Aid about the biggest Black politician in America being a Muslim, extremist, non-citizen bent on taking away freedom and guns on the great leap forward to communism.

Exactly. That couldn’t have made Black voters happy.

But Parker’s victory certainly made the President happy. Listen:

In other history, Al Hoang is set to become Houston’s first Vietnamese member of City Council. I couldn’t agree more with Greg Wythe’s opinion of Hoang:

And lastly, the District races. Watching Al Hoang serve on council for the next two years should be embarrassing for the city. That Hoang is another candidate – now elected official – who doesn’t even live in District F makes for an enormous running joke. Redistricting may answer whether I have to take a personal concern in the 2011 election for Hoang’s seat. I’d love for him to be more Alief’s problem than Sharpstown’s by then.

Congratulations to Mayor-elect Parker!

- Justin Gillenwater

Posted by Justin on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 4:48 pm.