Ronnie Earle Mulls Run For Statewide Office

The Austin American-Statesman this morning confirmed something we’ve been hearing for a while: former Travis County DA Ronnie Earle is considering a run for statewide office in 2010.

According to the newspaper, Earle is considering a run for Attorney General or Governor:

Retired for all of four months, former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle is considering running for a new job, possibly as the state’s top lawyer.

“There have been people who have talked to me about statewide runs,” for either governor or attorney general, said Earle, who served as Travis County’s top prosecutor for 31 years before retiring in December.

Sadly, however, most of the Statesman’s story was about the legislature’s attempts to remove the Public Integrity Office from the Travis County DA’s office and not Earle’s chances or much of anything about the race.

First and foremost, Earle would have a significant fundraising and name identification advantage in almost any statewide race he’d enter. While his name ID may not be all good among far-right Republicans because he’s the man who indicted Tom DeLay, among Democrats and independents he’s probably got a positive ID or at least a neutral ID.

As someone who has heard Earle deliver a rare political stump speech during the 2008 election cycle at a Democratic Party function, I’ll also go so far as saying that he won’t have trouble in the area of getting folks excited.

Too, Earle is a smart guy. I wouldn’t hazzard a guess on what his IQ is, but let’s just say that Rick Perry is nowhere near his intellectual peer.  I’d be willing to bet he would debate Kay Bailey Hutchison or Rick Perry under the table in a televised debate.

Ronnie Earle is one of only two candidates mentioned in Texas right now for governor on the Democratic side–State Sen. Leticia Van De Putte is the other–who would have a real chance of exciting the netroots at a national level about the gubernatorial contest in Texas. Earle is known far and wide for his work as Travis County DA, and is a true progressive. (And, for what it is worth, he’s the only county-level officeholder in Texas ever to grace the cover of Esquire.)

Earle also has a the kind of compelling personal narrative that many statewide candidates lack these days.

There are a couple more interesting points worth noting. If Hutchison were the nominee for the Republicans and Earle the Gubernatorial nominee for the Democrats, it could potentially be the most exciting gubernatorial race Texas has seen since the days of Miriam Amanda Ferguson. After all, Earle prosecuted Hutchison and probably knows better than any other person in the state where all of her secrets are buried. If Perry was the GOP nominee, it would also be an interesting race. Earle, like Perry, is an Eagle Scout. Perry, as we’ve seen from his book, has a different idea about what a lot of the tenets of Scouting mean than most progressives who attained that rank (myself included). More importantly, though, a Perry versus Earle race would be a race between someone who spent a lifetime upholding state law versus someone who has spent his entire tenure as governor making light of and subverting the law through his junkets to the Bahamas, the mid-decade redistricting scandal, and much, much, more.

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