“Economic redevelopment, first and foremost,” he says. “We want to focus on bringing more upscale retail and better development to Farmers Branch. We want to make Four Corners a centerpiece of new development, and tear down some of those old apartments.” What would he want in the place of the apartments? “A parking lot would be an improvement.”
Hard to argue. Who can look at West Village now and weep about all the low-rent stuff that was there 20 years ago? Well, I mean, besides the people who lived there 20 years ago? Most, though, will nod in agreement the change has been a good thing. The obstacle to that gentrification, of course, was the low-rent property and the inhabitants thereof. In Farmers Branch, they saw that a significant number of those paying low rents were illegal immigrants. So why not use the law to get the ball rolling? That was the real motive in relation to color—the color of money.
“We were the first to do this in Texas, and they thought calling us racist would shut us down,” O’Hare says. “Most people would back down, surrender, and apologize. We didn’t, and that made them more determined—and us, too. There’s not much you can do when people are calling you a bad person. No one wouldn’t be hurt by that. You just push on through, and we did, and the people of Farmers Branch didn’t buy into what was said.”
Not that O’Hare and his supporters don’t recognize that they would draw the support of a more simple kind of voter. On election day, O’Hare compatriot Tim Scott, a youngish corporate recruiter for Pizza Hut and freshman city councilman, talks to a guy who pulled up to the library in a beat-up old truck with camouflage accouterments. He wears tattoos and a torn and dirty tank top undershirt. He doesn’t have his wallet but says if there are cops inside, they can vouch for his ID since he was arrested last weekend. When he pulls out, Scott says, “I think he’s in our camp. I think we have a lock on the truck-driving camo guys—and not because of the economic development platform.”
Two hours and a shirt change later, O’Hare greets a crowd of supporters at a meeting hall in a Holiday Inn Select. If multicultural diversity doesn’t manifest in the crowd, it does at the food tables, where the gathered munch on chips and queso, Swedish meatballs, and what can only be sausage stuffed in flour tortilla blankets. O’Hare and his girlfriend, Christen, enter to popping streamers and Elvis’ “Burning Love,” a musical accompaniment whose significance I’m still trying to understand. He hugs friends, thanks everyone (it’s a 68 percent win), and poses for pictures. Notably, no television crews ask O’Hare about the “i” word. Even Spanish-language Univision gives the man a pass and doesn’t bring up the subject in its interview. O’Hare’s victory speech is optimistic and forward-looking, nothing like the one given in neighboring Carrollton by its new mayor, Ron Branson, whose turn at the dais, I’d later learn, had the tone of something translated from the original German.
When O’Hare came onto the scene in 2006, his talking points memo said that keeping illegal immigrants out of Farmers Branch was all about enforcing the law and doing what the federal government couldn’t or wouldn’t. Was he then, like many restrictionists now, wrapping racism and xenophobia in a flag of law and order? Or was he merely a Machiavellian champion of redevelopment, using a populist wedge issue to advance his agenda?
Because now he says it’s all about the money—development and redevelopment. The talking points have changed. Between then and now, D Magazine published a lengthy story showing that the move to oust illegal immigrants was motivated by much more than law and order. Maybe that story forced O’Hare to tell the truth—or gave him permission to. Maybe it offered him a new cover.
You can’t look into anyone’s heart. But I’ve looked into Tim O’Hare’s eyes and I don’t see a racist—closeted or otherwise. I see something much more complicated. I see a politician. Gauging public sentiment, trying to figure out what he himself actually believes, sure of only one thing: the way things are headed, Farmers Branch doesn’t look like the town where he grew up. The present doesn’t feel like the past, and the future is uncertain. He’s scared, and so are his neighbors. Therein lies an opportunity.
I drove to Farmers Branch on election Saturday expecting to find a man smaller than I had first met, before I underwent my own evolution on the subject of illegal immigration. I figured I’d see him wallowing in the banality of racial politics. But I found instead a man who, by my reckoning, has transcended the issue that made him famous. Like my own initial restrictionist ideas that germinated from something ugly inside myself, this vanity, too—that my new, anointed position on the issue made me better than him—caused me shame. So I didn’t find a smaller man in Farmers Branch, just one in the mirror.
See what I mean about booby traps?
Trey Garrison is a contributing editor to D Magazine. Write to [email protected].
