Texas

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, a ten-term Congressman from Texas, has picked up his first New Jersey endorsement: Dr. Murray Sabrin, the 1997 Libertarian candidate for Governor. The 71-year-old physician was elected to Congress in a 1976 special election, lost the 1976 general election, won a 1978 rematch, and gave up his seat to run unsuccessfully (against Phil Gramm) for the GOP U.S. Senate nomination in 1984. He won .5% of the vote as the Libertarian candidate for President in 1988, and returned to Congress in 1996. Sabrin, a Ramapo College Professor, received 114,172 votes (5%) in the '97 gubernatorial race, and finished fourth in the 2000 Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Paul supported Sabrin in each of his races.

The death of former Massachusetts Governor Edward King leaves Ned Lamont, Chuck Schumer and Robert Abrams as the sole living members of a very exclusive club: people who beat a Presidential or Vice Presidential nominee in a statewide primary.

King ousted incumbent Michael Dukakis in the 1978 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Schumer defeated '84 VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro in the 1998 Democratic U.S. Senate primary; Abrams beat her in 1992 but lost the general election to Republican Alphonse D'Amato. Lester Maddox, who defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1966 Democratic primary for Governor of Georgia, died in 2003.

If the club is extended to people who beat Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates in general elections, living members include: Kent Hance, who defeated George W. Bush in a 1978 congressional race in Texas; Lawrence DeNardis, who won a 1980 House race in Connecticut against Lieberman; Arkansas' John Paul Hammerschmidt, who beat Bill Clinton for Congress in 1974; U.S. Senator Norman Coleman, who won a 2002 U.S. Senate race over the last-minute candidacy of Walter Mondale; and James Abdnor, who unseated U.S. Senator George McGovern in South Dakota in 1980.

More for extreme junkies: Frank White, who ousted Clinton in the race for Governor of Arkansas in 1980, died in 2003. Paul Cronin, who defeated John Kerry in a 1972 House race in Massachusetts, died in 1997. George H.W. Bush lost two races for the U.S. Senate in Texas: in 1964 to Ralph Yarborough, who died in 1996, and in 1970 to Lloyd Bentsen, who passed away last May. Edmund (Pat) Brown won a 1962 race for Governor of California over Richard Nixon; he died in 1996. John F. Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1952 Massachusetts U.S. Senate campaign, and Pappy O'Daniel, who beat Lyndon Johnson in a 1941 special election for U.S. Senate in Texas, died in 1969. Stephen Young, who died in 1984, defeated '44 Vice Presidential candidate John Bricker in the 1958 Ohio U.S. Senate race.

"If the Republicans really want to replace Tom DeLay on the ballot in Texas, then Bush should appoint (New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Deborah) Poritz to the federal bench, fast."

The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld a challenge to the reapportionment of congresional districts in Texas, and ruled that State Legislatures can draw new maps at their own discretion, rather than be limited to once a decade. Does that mean that New Jersey Democrats -- if they can put their current budget squabbles behind them -- might consider new House districts for the 2008 elections?

What man ran against the fathers of both President George W. Bush and Governor Thomas H. Kean?

It was Robert Morris, a former Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security, who ran four unsuccessful races for the United States Senate in New Jersey and Texas. Morris opposed Congressman Robert Kean in the 1958 U.S. Senate primary (Kean won the nomination over Morris and Bernard Shanley, who had been Eisenhower White House aide), but lost the general election to Democrat Harrison Williams). After moving to Texas in the early 1960's to become President of the University of Dallas, he lost the GOP Senate primaries in 1964 and 1970 to George H.W. Bush. (Bush lost the '64 race to incumbent Ralph Yarborough; after winning to terms in the House, he ran again in'70 and lost that general to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, who had upset Yarborough in the Democratic primary.)

Morris sough the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in New Jersey in 1984, but lost the primary to Mary Mochary, the Mayor of Montclair and the choice of the party establishment. But Morris did have the organization line in his home county, Ocean.

From Morris' 1997 New York Times obituary:

Robert J. Morris, whose ministrations as counsel for a Cold War Senate subcommittee bent on rooting out Communists marked a long career devoted to conservative causes, died on Sunday at Point Pleasant Hospital in Point Pleasant, N.J. He was 82 and lived in Mantoloking, N.J.

The cause of death was congestive heart failure, said his son Geoffrey, who added that Mr. Morris had been suffering for more than a year from hydrocephalus, a condition that impedes brain function.

Mr. Morris was chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security from 1951 to 1953, and again from 1956 to 1958, a period when the country was tormented by the specter of Communist infiltration at every level of life.

A graduate of Fordham Law School, he had served on a New York State Assembly committee in 1940 that investigated New York's schools and colleges for Communist activities. He worked various aspects of the Senate hearings, appearing as a witness now and then and serving as a frequent spokesman and defender of its work.

The Internal Security subcommittee was described in 1951 in The New York Times as one that "far over reaches the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as it far out reaches Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. The mandate from the Senate is for practical purposes, limitless in the whole field of security. The subcommittee may inquire generally into suspected subversion, in or out of the Government."

As a result, the hearings corralled diplomats, scholars, businessmen, refugees and schoolteachers. It opened investigations into a possible Communist takeover of Hawaii, Communist influence along the New York City waterfront, shipments of propaganda detected in New Orleans and creeping Communist control of American military industries.

Perhaps the subcommittee's darkest moment came in April 1957, when E. Herbert Norman, the Canadian Ambassador to Egypt, committed suicide after learning that the subcommittee was reopening a 1951 investigation that centered on his purported membership in a 1938 Communist study group in Provincetown, Mass. Mr. Norman had been cleared of the charges in 1951, and Canadians angrily attributed his death to a "smear campaign" by the subcommittee.

Mr. Morris, who had made the announcement a month earlier that reports showed that Mr. Norman "is a Communist," insisted that there was plenty of material to support the investigation.

In the opinion of another legendary figure from that era, Mr. Morris may have been more McCarthyesque than the Senator himself. In a letter to William F. Buckley Jr. published in "Odyssey of a Friend," a collection published in 1969, Whittaker Chambers, the self-reported Russian spy who implicated Alger Hiss, said:
"The Senator in my opinion did the right more mischief than he ever did the left, and he keeps right on doing it. It does no good to plead that the left was mean to him. I would say that Bob Morris really accomplished much of what the Senator is credited with."

Mr. Morris's interest in politics was part and parcel of his upbringing in Jersey City, where his father was known for organizing opposition to Frank Hague, the entrenched Hudson County boss. That interest sharpened while Mr. Morris served in the Navy during World War II.

Turned down at first because of his inability to recognize the color red ,an anecdote he repeated with delight through the years, he became a commander of counterintelligence and psychological warfare. At one point, his son said, he was in charge of writing the threats, printed in Japanese on what looked like money, that were dropped by the planeload on Japanese cities.

He also interrogated prisoners, and began believing that Communism was a greater threat to world security than most leaders realized--an opinion that would influence the rest of his life.

Politics continued to attract him after he left the subcommittee. In 1958, he made a bid for the Republican Senate nomination from New Jersey, running on a conservative platform that stressed his subcommittee work. Like all but one of his attempts to win public office--he was elected a municipal judge in New York City in 1954, and resigned two years later to rejoin the Senate investigations--it was unsuccessful.

Turning his eye to education, Mr. Morris moved to Texas in 1960 to become president of the University of Dallas. He continued speaking out against Communism and on other issues, which became a source of friction at the university, which he left in 1962.

That summer, he founded the Defenders of American Liberties, a group he described as modeled after the American Civil Liberties Union, "but with emphasis on different positions." The group quickly gained public attention with its defense of former Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, who was accused of inciting unrest at the University of Mississippi at Oxford as James Meredith, its first black student, was attempting to start classes there.

In 1964, he founded the University of Plano, now defunct, in Plano, Tex., which was intended to teach mildly disabled young people through "patterning," controversial at the time. It involved putting students through a series of physical exercises, including crawling and creeping, to stimulate nonphysical development in the brain.

Mr. Morris was prompted to do so by the difficulties of one of his children, William, whom he enrolled in the university. He remained at the university until 1977, and it closed a short time later.

He continued to be a vocal foe of Communism and to speak against disarmament. While in Texas, he made two runs at the Senate, in 1962 and 1970, positioning himself as a conservative Republican. Both times he was defeated in the primary by George Bush.

He was the author of five boooks, all but one dealing with the prospective unraveling of the world order. One, "Disarmament: Weapon of Conquest," became something of a best seller after it appeared in 1963.

He also wrote a column, "Around the World," which was published from 1960 to the early 1980's in newsapers, among them The Manchester(N.H.) Union Leader and The New York Tribune. Among his interests were the politics of Africa, and he became a chairman of the African Zimbabwean Association.

In 1984, he made one last bid for the New Jersey Senate nomination, campaigning on the same platform as President Ronald Reagan but losing nonetheless. Until last year, his son said, he remained active, writing and giving lectures to groups in the New York area.