By 11 o'clock on a recent Saturday morning, Ron McLain had the “Texans for Liberty” hot dogs boiling in a pot, and John Wheeler was helping haul folding chairs out to the parking lot of the Medina for Texas Governor headquarters in suburban Corpus Christi.
It was the grand opening of the South Texas campaign headquarters, a nondescript brick building next door to the Nueces County Republican Party office. About 40 supporters and potential supporters waited outside for the candidate, among them Mike Purdy, who, with his wife, watched her in the Jan. 14 Republican gubernatorial debate.
“We were very impressed,” said Purdy, a retired prison warden. “We had seen her at a gun show in Robstown. She seems like the real conservative of the group.”
Debra Medina never made it inside. Nor did she deliver a speech. The neophyte candidate, whose demeanor combines the no-nonsense efficiency of an experienced nurse with the zeal of former independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, spent nearly three hours talking politics and policy with the people in the parking lot. Without the traditional campaign handler to hustle her along, she talked about property taxes, home schooling, school vouchers, abortion, decriminalizing drugs — talked until most everyone there had spoken to her about whatever was on their minds.
“She does this every time,” said Wheeler, an unemployed oil-field worker and avid supporter. “She’ll talk to anybody and everybody.”
Only lately has the Republican Party establishment — and her two opponents — begun to listen.
After Medina more than held her own at her first-ever debate, her poll numbers jumped from 4 percent to 12 percent; they climbed to 16 percent in a Rasmussen Reports survey released Tuesday. In the week after the first debate, more than $100,000 in contributions flowed in; more than half as much as she raised last year.
Native of Beeville
Although she remains the longest of long shots to win the nomination, even after a solid performance in last week’s second debate, the 47-year-old small-business owner and registered nurse from Wharton has made herself a factor in the race. She could be a spoiler, pulling enough votes to deny Gov. Rick Perry the re-nomination. Or she could force Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison into an expensive runoff that could send a bruised nominee into a potentially tough battle against the probable Democratic nominee, former Houston Mayor Bill White.
“It’s a phenomenon,” said McLain, a Corpus Christi lawyer who is a Medina volunteer and a member of the Tea Party group South Texans for Liberty. “It’s interesting to watch.”
The Medina “phenomenon” is the outgrowth of two loosely overlapping political movements — the populist Tea Party insurgency and the Libertarian faction that rallied around the 2008 presidential bid of 11-term U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, who got 5 percent of the vote in Texas. Both groups are fueled by anti-Washington sentiment surging in Texas and across the nation.
Medina was born Debra Carolyn Parker, the eldest of four children, on a farm near Beeville. Her family raised pigs, chickens and dairy cows on three acres near the house, and ran beef cattle on 90 acres nearby. At Beeville High School, she played tenor sax in the band, did soil and dairy judging as a member of Future Farmers of America and was president of the FFA parliamentary procedures team.
She met her husband, Noe, in 1980, the year she graduated from high school. They married two years later, shortly after her graduation from what was then Bee County Junior College. Noe Medina now works for his wife’s medical billing company, Prudentia Inc., a three-person venture based in Wharton. The couple has two grown children — Janise Cookston, 25, an interior designer who lives in Houston, and Jacob Medina, a 20-year-old agriculture economics major at Texas A&M University.
