James Talarico is hitting back at Texas Republicans who have tried to raise the Democratic Senate candidate’s masculinity as a central issue in his high-stakes election campaign against state Attorney General Ken Paxton, slamming politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz for “throwing cheesy nicknames” around instead of focusing on issues Texans care about.
In a recent campaign ad, Paxton branded his rival as “Radical Talarico: too low-T for Texas,” referring to the Democrat’s supposed testosterone level. And during an interview with Fox News, Cruz told Sean Hannity, “I gotta say, if you were making a list of 1,000 adjectives to describe this guy, ‘masculine’ would not be one of them.”
“There’s been a lot of talk in this race about what it means to be a real man,” Talarico told MS NOW’s Jen Psaki on Thursday. “A man takes responsibility. A man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors. A man does what’s right, even when no one is watching.”
The Democrat shared that his idea of masculinity was shaped by his father. “Every Saturday morning, Mark Talarico would mow our lawn, whether it was rain or shine, whether he wanted to or not,” he said. “And then, without anyone asking him to, he would go next door and mow our neighbor’s lawn, because our neighbor was elderly, she was a widow. And my dad never talked about it, he just did it, because that’s what a man does.”
“Real men serve others, weak men serve themselves,” Talarico said, contrasting his father’s behavior to that of Paxton and Cruz.
“I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don’t think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is,” he added.
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The former public school teacher called the attacks on his masculinity a distraction and said his critics are “throwing embarrassing, cheap nicknames at their political opponents instead of focusing on improving Texans’ lives.”
“I travel all over the state, and I get to talk with Texans from all different backgrounds, from all across the political spectrum, and Texans are struggling right now in a way that we haven’t struggled before,” Talarico continued. “And again, it’s not to afford nice things, it’s to afford the basic things, the necessities: groceries and gas and insurance and childcare, prescription drugs, higher education, housing.”
“To me, that’s everything that’s wrong with our politics, and it’s why people are so fed up with this broken system,” he said. “It’s because it doesn’t serve them, it doesn’t actually improve their lives.”
Talarico said that because of these personal attacks, politics has started to look “a lot more like professional wrestling,” adding, “You’ve got these old guys lathered up in their fake tan, throwing cheesy nicknames at each other, and those nicknames, they don’t lower the cost of groceries, they don’t lower the cost of gas or utilities or insurance. And so I’m going to keep talking about the things that Texans actually care about.”
You can watch Talarico’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”