‘Roar like a lion!’: Pastor’s fervor is waking everybody up in Fort Worth mayor’s race
This happy-kissy Fort Worth mayor’s race is about to come to an end.
Three weeks before the start of early voting, the leading candidates have to start pointing fingers at each other, because only two are going to make the runoff.
Council member Brian Byrd, the man of many mailers, will have to defend his $2,800 gift in 2019 to Donald Trump’s campaign.
County Democratic Party chair Deborah Peoples, winner of 42% of the vote in 2019, will need to explain what makes her better now.
Five-year city staffer Mattie Parker, endorsed by Mayor Betsy Price and former Mayor Mike Moncrief, will be expected to say whether her lobbyist husband’s clients conflict with the city’s interests.
Council member Ann Zadeh, a professional city planner, will want to tell voters why she would have diverted a fraction of the city’s $1 billion “crime control” sales tax windfall to improve public transit.
Then there’s Steve Penate, a real estate broker and pastor relatively new to Fort Worth from Arizona but barging into the campaign like an oncoming TEXRail locomotive, bringing a revivalist fervor and undercutting Byrd’s base of faith-and-values Trump voters.
Penate, the founding pastor, elder and school trustee at an Oakhurst church affiliated with Gateway church in Southlake and Trump campaigner Pastor Robert Morris, does not go along with the other candidates’ mutual admiration society.
Godly values are “under attack” in Fort Worth — “it’s banging on our door right now!” he shouted during a Fort Worth Republican Women’s meeting last week, the first in-person forum without masks.
Penate, 37, railed against masks, occupancy orders and other state and city public health orders during COVID-19 as an “overreach of our freedoms.”
He said he wants to awaken conservative voters and “get loud and roar like a lion!”
Parker, also 37, restored reality for the large Republican crowd at the CIty Club.
“Every Tuesday, you have to have five votes,” she said: “ .... You have to be able to build consensus.”
This is not a red city. It has been a purple city for 30 years, under two Democratic mayors before Price.
Fort Worth voters not only went for President Joe Biden in 2020. They went for Democratic U.S. Senate challenger Beto O’Rourke in 2018 (by 59%) and even for gubernatorial challenger Lupe Valdez that year over Gov. Greg Abbott.
But Parker also had to answer a pointed question about David Parker’s lobbying work with Longbow Partners.
“I’ve never had a conflict,” she said. “But I do find it ironic that we’re talking about my husband instead of my own principles.”
The forum moderator also directed a sharp question at Byrd, asking him to name the “downtown insiders” he accuses of “corruption” in almost all those mailers.
Given the chance to play offense, Byrd opted to punt.
“Corruption exists in every city,” he said, vaguely mentioning a case where a former city department head is facing charges over a city credit card.
“I want my supporters to know I will continue to keep an eye on that,” he said.
Peoples and Zadeh are Democrats, so they were not invited to the Republican club forum. They, Byrd and Parker wore masks the next night for a more traditional forum inside Wedgwood Baptist Church. (Penate did not attend.)
Most campaign forums are nonpartisan neighborhood events, so watch for these friendly foes to come to a Zoom screen near you.
At least 10 forums remain before the May 1 election, including events Monday at the Fort Worth Club and Thursday in Burnett Park. (The runoff is June 5.)
Thursday will be a big day. That’s when the first campaign finance reports are due, showing who’s paying for some of these out-of-nowhere political campaigns.
Then some candidates will be unmasked.
This story was originally published March 27, 2021 at 2:28 PM.
