Media continue to weigh in on Annise's win
The incredibly shrinking Houston?
Annise Parker's mayoral win continues to garner national attention, but this sentence in a story in Time magazine left us a little puzzled.
"In terms of geography, Houston may be a city in the Old South, but its personality is a mix of Western frontier and Third World boomtown: dynamic, diverse, a place to make a fortune and lose one. Only 40% of greater Houston area residents live inside the Loop, the freeway that defines Houston's city limits......,"
We didn't realize the the city had shrunk so much. As locals know, the Houston city limits stretch north to Kingwood, southeast to Clear Lake and west almost to Katy, which makes it one of the largest cities in terms of geographic size. If memory serves correct, only Jacksonville, Fla., is bigger in land size.
That small point notwithstanding, the article offers a good analysis of how Parker cobbled together a winning coalition. Another interesting article on the Politico Web site posits that Parker's victory shows how the power nexus in politics has shifted to the Sunbelt.
Politico writes that Parker's win "signals an unmistakable evolutionary step in national politics, one that provides further evidence of a trend that helped make Barack Obama president: growth-oriented communities like the Texas metropolis, rather than aging big cities or nostalgia-inducing small towns, are setting the course of the country's political direction.
"Houston is one of a set of fast-growing cities and expanding suburbs whose changing face and increasingly post-racial politics played a pivotal role in sending Obama to the White House. Their politics are defined by some of the same trends—notably, growing Hispanic and Asian populations and the rise of the service sector—that are shaping the nation as a whole."
Aren't politics fascinating?
