Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, January 21, 2024

I recently had coffee with a colleague. He said he was concerned about what’s happening in Austin. I didn’t know him well, but having lived in Texas for a decade, I immediately translated his comment to mean the problem with “the blueberry in the tomato soup” and the progressive ways of our wayward little sister who we love to rag on but may be secretly jealous of her ability to hike and chill.

But my colleague was not talking about city politics. He was talking about our state government. And I couldn’t agree more.

Let me back up. In my experience, Texas can get an unfair rap from the coastal types. When my husband and I left Washington, D.C., for Dallas in 2014, we were given a nice bottle of red wine and forlorn claps on the back, as if we were on our way to big box housing, strip malls, and megachurches, leaving the finer life behind. When I tell my Washington colleagues that our house is more than 50 years old, we are within walking distance from Whole Foods and a lake, we go to a tiny Anglican church downtown, and that at least one of my children is more fluent in Spanish than English according to state testing, they are, in a word, dumbfounded.

This perception isn’t just on the American coasts. Just days after I filed the first draft of this story, I jetted off to London for my husband to launch his newest spy novel. Nearly every day of the week we were there, the Financial Times included some mention of Texas Republicans, always about red meat issues like abortion or immigration. Never about our state’s highly diverse, growth-oriented, pro-family constituency, which provides unmatched opportunity and a model for economies worldwide. . . .