Houston Chronicle
By 11 o'clock on a recent Saturday morning, Ron McLain had the “Texans for Liberty” hot dogs boiling in a pot, and John Wheeler was helping haul folding chairs out to the parking lot of the Medina for Texas Governor headquarters in suburban Corpus Christi.
It was the grand opening of the South Texas campaign headquarters, a nondescript brick building next door to the Nueces County Republican Party office. About 40 supporters and potential supporters waited outside for the candidate, among them Mike Purdy, who, with his wife, watched her in the Jan. 14 Republican gubernatorial debate.
“We were very impressed,” said Purdy, a retired prison warden. “We had seen her at a gun show in Robstown. She seems like the real conservative of the group.”
Debra Medina never made it inside. Nor did she deliver a speech. The neophyte candidate, whose demeanor combines the no-nonsense efficiency of an experienced nurse with the zeal of former independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, spent nearly three hours talking politics and policy with the people in the parking lot. Without the traditional campaign handler to hustle her along, she talked about property taxes, home schooling, school vouchers, abortion, decriminalizing drugs — talked until most everyone there had spoken to her about whatever was on their minds.
“She does this every time,” said Wheeler, an unemployed oil-field worker and avid supporter. “She’ll talk to anybody and everybody.”
Only lately has the Republican Party establishment — and her two opponents — begun to listen.
After Medina more than held her own at her first-ever debate, her poll numbers jumped from 4 percent to 12 percent; they climbed to 16 percent in a Rasmussen Reports survey released Tuesday. In the week after the first debate, more than $100,000 in contributions flowed in; more than half as much as she raised last year.
Native of Beeville
Although she remains the longest of long shots to win the nomination, even after a solid performance in last week’s second debate, the 47-year-old small-business owner and registered nurse from Wharton has made herself a factor in the race. She could be a spoiler, pulling enough votes to deny Gov. Rick Perry the re-nomination. Or she could force Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison into an expensive runoff that could send a bruised nominee into a potentially tough battle against the probable Democratic nominee, former Houston Mayor Bill White.
“It’s a phenomenon,” said McLain, a Corpus Christi lawyer who is a Medina volunteer and a member of the Tea Party group South Texans for Liberty. “It’s interesting to watch.”
The Medina “phenomenon” is the outgrowth of two loosely overlapping political movements — the populist Tea Party insurgency and the Libertarian faction that rallied around the 2008 presidential bid of 11-term U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, who got 5 percent of the vote in Texas. Both groups are fueled by anti-Washington sentiment surging in Texas and across the nation.
Medina was born Debra Carolyn Parker, the eldest of four children, on a farm near Beeville. Her family raised pigs, chickens and dairy cows on three acres near the house, and ran beef cattle on 90 acres nearby. At Beeville High School, she played tenor sax in the band, did soil and dairy judging as a member of Future Farmers of America and was president of the FFA parliamentary procedures team.
She met her husband, Noe, in 1980, the year she graduated from high school. They married two years later, shortly after her graduation from what was then Bee County Junior College. Noe Medina now works for his wife’s medical billing company, Prudentia Inc., a three-person venture based in Wharton. The couple has two grown children — Janise Cookston, 25, an interior designer who lives in Houston, and Jacob Medina, a 20-year-old agriculture economics major at Texas A&M University.
Medina thought she wanted to be a doctor, but after a physics course “ate my lunch,” a college counselor suggested nursing. She took a diploma from Southwest Baptist Hospital School of Nursing in San Antonio, and later received a business degree from the Houston campus of LeTourneau University.
She and her husband moved to Wharton in 1989, when Medina became director of a nursing home. She changed jobs a few years later and began making the daily 120-mile round-trip commute to Houston as a medical consultant, while home-schooling her two children.
She opened Prudentia in 2002. The medical billing business is pretty much bare-bones at the moment, as Medina campaigns full-time.
“The ethics law and the election commission law in Texas really make it difficult for average Joes to run for public office,” she said. “Who can afford to take off of work for a year to run for office? So, it’s been really hard, really hard.”
Her political career had its origins in her church. She was raised a Catholic, but when she and her husband moved to Wharton, they joined the Baptist church. In 1992, the church deacons helped defeat an anti-abortion resolution at the GOP county convention, and, in Medina’s words, “It just shook me to the core.”
Didn’t vote for McCain
She began attending political conventions at the county and state levels and got more involved with each election cycle. In 2004, she ran for county chair and won with support from a core group of Libertarian-leaning Paul supporters. She defeated Phil Stephenson, a longtime Wharton CPA who later ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature.
Stephenson, 64, still fumes about being beaten by a woman he considers a disloyal, fringe Republican. He charges that she did not support the party’s presidential ticket in 2008, that John McCain campaign signs were nowhere to be found. “She’s into Ron Paul — that’s it,” Stephenson said.
Medina has said that she voted for Republican George W. Bush for president, but not for McCain. On her Web site, she has a letter of support from the candidate she hoped would be president. “She has stood up to the big government establishment and fought to hold our party accountable to our platform and our conservative Texas values,” Paul wrote.
Stephenson takes issue with Paul’s kind words for Medina. “She shouldn’t even be considered as a candidate,” he said. “She has no credentials, no experience.”
She challenged Tina Ben-kiser for the state party chairmanship in 2008, pushing for a platform that resembled Paul’s. After Medina lost, she later sued the state Republican Party over how the state convention was run. Her lawsuit was dismissed.
Nueces County Republican Chair Mike Bertuzzi is as exasperated as his Wharton County counterpart. “If she doesn’t win, she won’t support either candidate out of the primary,” he said. “That’s kind of a problem there, a real problem.”
Medina campaign manager Penny Langford-Freeman said, “That’s because we have our eye on the ball, which is winning the primary.”
Bertuzzi contends that Medina and her Libertarian cohorts are attempting to take over the state Republican Party apparatus so they can use it in the service of another Ron Paul presidential run in 2012. Medina, he said, wants to be head of the party.
The idea that this party outlier should run for governor took hold after she spoke at a November 2008 rally in Houston in support of abolishing the Federal Reserve System. She began fielding calls and hundreds of e-mails urging her to run.
Signature issues
Others rallied to her signature issue — replacing property taxes with an expanded sales tax — and for her support of “nullification,” the idea that states have a right to ignore federal laws they deem unconstitutional. Those with libertarian leanings agreed with her willingness to at least discuss decriminalizing drugs.
A fierce opponent of federal gun laws, she keeps a Springfield 9mm in a zippered case in her car. She believes landowners along the Texas-Mexico border have the right to arm themselves against illegal immigrants coming across the Rio Grande. She also wants to post the Texas National Guard along the border.
Despite the encouragement from individuals and members of such groups as U.S. Border Watch, the Texas Tea Party, the Liberty Campaign and disaffected Republicans, Medina was reluctant to enter the race — until she had a heart-to-heart with her daughter.
“She said, ‘We’ve seen something happening. You aren’t saying anything today you haven’t been saying for 15 years, and, yet, last year people started asking you to travel from Beaumont to College Station to San Antonio to Corpus Christi and all over Southeast Texas, talking about these ideas. … The door seems to be open. Why don’t you just step through and fight the good fight?’”
Medina declared her candidacy in 2009 and has been running hard ever since.
“I expect we’re going to win,” she said. “Call me crazy if you want, but I think that’s where we’re headed. I spend more time than not, thinking we’re going to win clean away on March 2.”
joe.holley@chron.com
I just want to decipher whether these plans are feasible and workable here in Texas or are they just major political talking points.
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