Shami Campaign Falls Apart

When Farouk Shami (pictured) entered the governor's race I didn't think he's be able to win the nomination in the Democratic primary (there's too much bigotry in Texas to elect a Palestinian-born candidate), but I did expect him to make a credible showing. After all, he promised to spend up to $10 million of his own in the campaign and he hired an experienced and knowledgeable campaign staff.

But the last couple of weeks has been disastrous for the campaign -- a true comedy of errors. I wondered what was wrong with the campaign. I am familiar campaign manager Vince Leibowitz and know him to be an intelligent, capable, qualified and experienced campaigner. What happened?

Well, it looks like what was happening was that Shami was not listening to his campaign staff but to his own corporate lackeys (who have no campaign experience at all, and it showed). He was not only taking advice from these incompetents, but allowing them to send out e-mails on his behalf without knowledge of his campaign staff, and that turned out to be disastrous.

Frankly, if Shami wasn't going to follow the advice of his professional campaign staff, I don't know why he spent the money to hire them (although money doesn't seem to mean much to him since he spent millions on a campaign with little chance of success). Yesterday, five members of his campaign staff had all they could take and quit, including campaign manager Vince Leibowitz, press secretary Charlie Ray and communications director Kelly Love Johnson.

Leibowitz said, "Clearly, (Shami) will not accept political strategy from the people who are there to provide it."

I wish Shami had been smart enough to listen to his campaign staff and follow their instructions. He still probably wouldn't have won, but he'd be in a lot better position than he is in now.