WATTS, A FORMER Oklahoma football star who never runs from a fight, is blunt about the shortcomings of the GOP. The “party of Lincoln,” he says, has adopted a “robot-like allegiance to conservative views” that blinds it to the historic suffering of African Americans, and causes it to be “often absent on issues of civil rights, equal opportunity and poverty.”
But Watts, reared to be polite as well as tough, doesn’t tell his personal, behind-the-scenes story, which is that he was never taken seriously by the House leadership. At Oklahoma University, Watts was an MVP-winning quarterback. In Congress, he was always more of an ornament than the fourth-ranking leader, elected by GOP House members in 1998. |
