July 29, 2014 2:10 PM

Bearse: Conventional Wisdom and Henri, Le Chat Noir

From the Right: QR’s conservative columnist Eric Bearse argues the best name the Democrats have on this year’s ballot is Jim Hogan because he’s the un-candidate: “If Hogan pulls this off, his campaign will be studied for decades. And Wendy Davis’ campaign will be studied for ten minutes.”

The definition of conventional wisdom is that which has yet to be proven wrong. For instance, conventional wisdom says a lot of Republicans will vote for Senator Leticia Van De Putte for lieutenant governor because they dislike Dan Patrick. It is said to be conventional wisdom in Austin, which means it was promulgated in a bar and made it to a blog. From there, it took a life of its own; a meme that rings true until proven false. In other words, until November.

Look, I know some insiders will vote for Van De Putte. Some may even call themselves Republicans. Or scoundrels. Or lobbyists. And this protest vote will change the overall total by 0.0001 percent. In other words, she will win Travis County even bigger. The problem is the other 253 counties.

And the sad irony for Democrats is they have long assumed Hispanics will vote in large numbers for Hispanic Democrats. Because that is just what Hispanics do. It’s conventional wisdom. But what if her name is Belgian? Or Dutch? Or Flemish?

My name is English. But I am most closely aligned with the Finns in terms of bloodlines. Well, and Germans and the crazy Dutch too. But if I ever ran for office, I would not win the Finnish colonies with a name like Bearse. Too many vowels for the Finns. The Finns would stay home. I would lose.

The best Democratic name on the ballot is not Davis, Van De Putte or even Sam Houston (that sounds too much like one of those crackpots who actually changed his name to be famous instead of making his name famous.) The best name is Hogan. He is the ultimate un-candidate. He is better than Cola. He is Un-Cola.

The complete column from Eric Bearse is in today's R&D Department.

By Eric Bearse