Debra Medina, negligible, spoiler, something else... is there a point?

Gardner Selby looks at Debra Medina and finds that she is possibly in favor of drug legalization (link)...

She told me that decriminalizing marijuana deserves a look. The mother of two home-schooled children, now grown, also sounded skeptical of the state mandate that children attend school.

Medina said she voted for Republican George W. Bush for president but not for the GOP's 2008 presidential choice, U.S. Sen. John McCain (or Democrat Barack Obama).

She also wants to repeal the conceal/carry law in Texas... interesting...

The Wharton businesswoman favors repealing the Texas concealed handgun law, saying it shouldn't be government's job to license and regulate guns.

I hate to say this because I am a big issue guy but Debra Medina's voice really gets on my nerves...

Medina's campaign recently shot itself in the foot when she falsely claimed last week that definitely Rick and possibly Kay were keeping her out of debates (link). Excerpt follows...

"KERA is buckling to demands by the governor that unless he’s on the stage exclusively with Kay, he’s not going to be there," Medina said Monday night.

But KERA News Director Shelly Kofler said Tuesday that Medina has not been excluded from the debate and that no one representing Perry or Hutchison has made her appearance an issue.

"In their conversations with me, neither the Perry nor Hutchison campaigns have made Medina an issue for whether they would participate," Kofler said. "They may have preferences, but that was never a precondition for accepting the debate."

Jason Embry was rather harsh in his words toward Medina's camp (link). Excerpt follows...

Debra Medina, the other candidate in the Republican primary for governor, complained Monday that Gov. Rick Perry is avoiding debates with her. But Medina’s campaign seems to be engaged in its own debate with reality.

The Medina campaign said in a press release:

“In early November, the Texas Press Association scheduled a gubernatorial debate in Galveston. “We thought it would be great for the city of Galveston to have the publicity surrounding such an event,” stated Ed Sterling of the Association. The city would have benefited economically and since the devastation of Hurricane Ike they have undergone a tremendous amount of hardship. The invitations were sent and Rick Perry and Kay Bailey were confirmed. Debra Medina was confirmed and two days later we were told the event was canceled as the demands of Rick Perry were not being met. The sponsor had invited all the candidates.”

I thought this was pretty interesting, particularly considering how anxious to debate Perry had been earlier in the campaign. So I called Ed Sterling at the Press Association to confirm the details.

Good thing I did. Sterling said he had hoped to organize a January forum where all Democratic and Republican candidates would appear onstage together, similar to an event the group hosted in the 1990 governor’s race. But the only two candidates who committed to attend were Medina and former Democratic candidate Hank Gilbert. Hutchison asked for information but never committed, and neither did Tom Schieffer, another Democratic former candidate.

Sterling said a Perry staffer claimed not to get some of his written communication, so he followed up with a phone call. The Perry campaign didn’t commit in time, and with U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison having not committed, the plan for the forum was scrapped. Perry and Hutchison were never confirmed.

[SNIP]

There is certainly a legitimate argument to be made that Medina belongs in any debates that take place between Perry and Hutchison. It’s not my place to take a position on that. But if Medina wants to be taken seriously in other aspects of her campaign, she needs to be careful about the kind of information her campaign puts out.

Even Rick's old foe Chris Bell thinks Medina's candidacy is sort of pointless (link). Excerpt follows...

“She ends up hurting the guy that she is probably closest to politically,” says Chris Bell, the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who knows a thing or two about the effect that Medina-like candidates can have. He adds, “It’s an incredibly self-serving exercise at the end of the day.”

I think this is why Kay's peeps have been so eager to get Medina included in debates...

Depending on your perspective though, the substantial "Anybody But Perry" vote could peel away from Kay and toward Medina if Medina gets a whole lot of play...

If, in running, Medina is drawing support from would-be voters for the current Republican governor — given that both the UT/Tribune and the Rasmussen polls showed a double-digit lead for Perry —that’s only bad news for Hutchison.

The flipside of the conventional wisdom is more bad news for Texas’ senior senator. “Her mission is clearly an anti-Perry mission,” Blakemore says of Medina. “On that point, she would be taking votes away from Hutchison.”

I have to say that Medina is an interesting candidate, but her so called statewide media buys are not really running statewide... they are barely running at all... some of the peeps in the biz I have talked to say she has spent almost nothing on television ads but big newspaper blogs keep running them because she is telling them she is going up with this ad or that ad "state wide" or "in key markets" which is all baloney.

Debra Medina also seems like a political opportunist... she was all over the Willingham case trying to stir up trouble from a liberal perspective when she thought it could hurt Rick's chances, and her drug legalization and some other views are just not only out of the mainstream but very objectionable to Texas conservatives...

I think she would be fun to have in the debates, but if she doesn't deliver serious ideas rather than a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theories in the first one I hope they reconsider letting her return for other debates...

I know that's harsh, but it's reality... the debate participants must be relevant, otherwise we would have to allow any Tom, Dick, or Harry into the debates...