Republican Activist Jaime O. Perez Announces Congressional Bid

Prominent Republican activist Jaime O. Perez announced on Friday that he was a candidate for Congress in next year’s general election. 

Perez has been known as a pretty solid conservative for quite some time now but has worked for Democrats in the past. He’s most recently known for being the Chief of Staff for former County Judge Anthony Cobos and ran as the Republican nominee in 2010 for County Judge against current County Judge Veronica Escobar.

Previously known for being a bit eccentric, Perez has done a good job of rehabbing that image and ran a very clean and issue-based race against Escobar.

After getting to know Perez I can say that I’m pretty sure he knows he’s not always a viable candidate. But he runs in order to shape the debate of the races that he’s in. Unlike most Republicans in town, he can do that without being silly or extremist.

That’s a big deal in the El Paso Republican Party. Frankly the Republican Party in El Paso has been a bit of a punch line, while at the same time Republicans have basically taken over almost everywhere. Perez is a 100% improvement of their last sacrificial lamb, Tim Besco.

Besco basically gave people the impression that any idiot could be the Republican nominee for Congress in El Paso. Frankly, its their own fault because no one in the GOP stepped up and said, “Hey wait a minute, maybe he’s not the strongest candidate we could be running.”

If history in the El Paso GOP has shown us anything, its that the first person to throw their hat in the ring for the nomination of the GOP ends up being the nominee. It’s the playground rule of “I called it first”.

Which might explain why JOP announced so early. The other person that has been making it known that she is interested in running for Congress is Barbara Carrasco. I’m being generous by characterizing her as an extremist.

Trust me, that’s me being generous. Passionate would be a completely inadequate way of describing her.

She’s the lady who paid for a couple of billboards on I-10 in the last election that were basically Republican Party message boards. Interestingly she didn’t pay for Besco billboards in that election, she just paid for billboards that had generic Republican messages.

At least with Jaime O. Perez as the candidate, they have a candidate that will advocate for their position based on party platform in an intellectual debate focused on philosophical arguments, as opposed to extremist views that would otherwise be advocated for by Carrasco.

The question is will the GOP get behind JOP? He’s really Latino (sorry, still not buying Dee Marrrrrrrgo’s sudden conversion), speaks both languages fluently, and is capable of engaging in a rational issues-based debate.

But there are still a lot of people who think he’s some kind of closet Democrat. Some of the GOP call me the Duke of Democrats, so take it from the Duke of Democrats, Perez is not a Democrat. He’s solidly a Republican, though he certainly is a Ron Paul Republican.

So we shall see very soon if, to borrow a line from a Naughty By Nature song, the GOP is down with JOP.