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World Crass: Houston desperately wants to be a global player, but its mayor''s race is strictly small-time.

Article Excerpt
THE SWELLS RETURNED TO LA GRIGLIA in mid-August like the proverbial swallows to Capistrano, reclaiming their favorite tables, ordering their favorite off-the-menu items, and tablehopping with their favorite "frenemies." The high-octane, Italianish restaurant on the border of River Oaks has in recent years become the hangout of Houston's political establishment, and you could see, two weeks before Labor Day, that its members were already plotting and scheming, jockeying and strategizing, on the subject that would dominate the fall and winter: the November 4 mayoral election and the roles they would play in it.

There was Republican power-broker-in-exile Jack Rains, the big-time supporter of candidate Orlando Sanchez, lunching at his table in the center of the room with state senator Jon Lindsay and warmly greeting Hector Carreno, the political consultant who helped Sanchez come within seven thousand votes of victory two years ago and who'd just quit the campaign of candidate Sylvester Turner over the political equivalent of artistic differences. (Carreno, with his partner, Frank McCune, would soon return to the Sanchez fold.) Rains was also holding forth the day Andrea White, the wife of candidate (and Clinton-era Undersecretary of Energy) Bill White, arrived to lunch with two prominent African American women, Lora Clemmons and Regina Kyles. At any other time this might not have seemed noteworthy, but every politico in town knew White was trying to break Turner's hold on the monolithic black vote, and polling showed that black women, particularly professional black women at least 35 years old, were most likely to break from the pack.

A few days after that, former mayor Bob Lanier arrived with his wife, Elyse, their...

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