THE DIM & DIRTY ROAD:...A Rudderless Campaign To Nowhere...Hispanic Republican Mayra Flores Has No Second Or Third Gear...For Her, It's Still 2022...A Distinctive Smell Of Defeat In The Air...

 

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

HARLINGEN, Texas |...Everybody knows exactly what is wrong with our republic. You can sit down at a bar and quickly hear the moaning and groaning. Same for most breakfast eateries. The words ring thick and vicious, sentences no longer interested in getting along.

I've been wondering about our politics for weeks now, always ready and willing to see a turn for the better but always turned away at the door. The price of admission is too high - your brain.

Here locally, it is the latest run for Congress being fashioned by a sort of tragic figure we all know as Republican candidate Mayra Flores, shown in photo above. What can you say about a 38-year-old woman so lost in the political landscape that to call her a dreamer is to believe that every dream is now a nightmare.

Miss Flores is going nowhere in her current campaign for the 34th Congressional District seat presently held by Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, a rather entrenched politician uninterested in losing to a woman born in Burgos, Mexico and educated at a city college in McAllen.

He's an attorney and she's a respiratory technician. His education is wide-ranging; Mayra's is lacking in government, economics, world history, finances and the sciences.

It is the easiest call we've had this year. Gonzalez will defeat her once more in the November General Election, in what are characterizing as another beating by more than 11,000 votes. That would be the same margin of victory Gonzalez celebrated two years ago.

The disappointment will be bitter, as most of us - and Miss Flores - remember she served a brief 6-month stint in Congress between the summer and end of 2022, after winning a Special Election following the retirement of then-Congressman Filemon Vela.

She likely remembers it as the shining highlight of her life. It was the equivalent of an actress coming off a job at a soda fountain counter to win an Academy Award. The thrill was nothing short of spectacular exhilaration, rivaling perhaps a much-awaited marriage proposal.

But then she lost that November day.

The interim has been a slog of sorts for Mayra Flores. She is a sought-after interview on Right-Wing media channels and has posed for photos alongside some Republican heavyweights, like Texas AG Ken Paxton.

Back home, the campaign has not been as exciting from one day to the next. She staged a daily visit to Rio Grande Valley eateries most of last month, visiting the restaurants in what she said was support of small businesses. The payoff of meeting crowds of potential voters was not there, however. Still, she has photos with the business owners for her Facebook page.

That ended and we next saw her inviting Right-Wing Congressman Cory Mills of Florida to join her for a rally at the economic Junction Cafe in Pharr, where the turnout was more than disappointing. She beat on against the current, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald might say about here. Looking for the green light and hoping for a spark of sorts.

We have not seen it.

Instead, it is a wallowing we discern in her effort. Perhaps she has seen the writing on the voting booth wall, or maybe she, like us, knows most challenger candidates do not make up an 11,000-vote defeat. Indeed, we have not seen anything that would tell us she has been moving within the district's geography, which includes roughly half of the valley but also a chunk of the Texas Coast all the way to Corpus Christi and a little beyond.

Meanwhile, Congressman Gonzalez (shown in photo below) has been busy announcing federal money approved for his district pretty much weekly, from a little over a million dollars for dredging at the Port of Brownsville to almost $5 million for a new control tower at Valley International Airport here in Harlingen.

And Gonzalez has seen to it that he gets the press coverage.

Mayra Flores? It's as if this is her first rodeo.

There is no excitement chasing her campaign and the loud voice she used in 2022 seems to have mellowed. Still, she is a ground-floor fan of Donald J. Trump and that she will always let you know.

Perhaps she'll surprise us in the coming weeks. Maybe she has a rabbit in her hat she's yet to pull. Or, she has simply realized that there is no path to victory. South Texas is a unique political land. Running for office on the dirtied coattails of a flawed and selfish New Yorker likely is a problem away from the partisan rah-rah sessions.

Once, we admired her cheek and boldness.

There was a belief that we needed a loud voice in Congress, someone to get the attention of leaders and allow the Rio Grande Valley to grab its place on the national stage. Mayra Flores seemed to be auditioning for that part with every bit of harsh criticism she aimed at her opponent.

That annoying, fighting, grating Mayra Flores has not been around on this campaign.

This much is true: The daily desperate grind of an underdog political campaign eventually drains even the most-inspired candidates. Mayra Flores may be out of gas, the desire of a once-beckoning political career perhaps gone.

Pity...

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