Nick Jimenez

Joe Salem, a liberal who kept the faith

Joe Salem's heart was as big as it had ever been during his last years even when the rest of his body couldn't keep up. Many people, except for those who feasted with him each Thanksgiving, probably didn't know Salem, who died the other day. That's a shame.
   A glimpse of the old Salem, the veteran campaigner, unabashed liberal and stump orator, flashed for a few minutes last year. Those who were lucky enough to hear him won't forget it. Salem was one of several honorees at one of those banquets we have in Corpus Christi where too many people get to say too many things. And the evening dragged on as one speaker after another indulged in self-congratulation and plaques were handed out for achievements, both significant and barely noticeable.
   The hour grew late and guests began to dribble out, at first quietly and then making no bones about the matter, noisily and without excuses.
   Finally, almost last on the program, a wheelchair-bound Salem was brought forward. I say brought forward because it took several people to get him to the podium, then more effort to stand him up in place. It was agonizing to watch and no doubt exhausting for him, since his disease-wracked body had already had to endure hours of waiting.
   Then he spoke. He was funny. He was touching. He was self-deprecating. He was everything every speaker before had not been. As always, he spoke not about himself, but about the people he had always cared for - the defenseless, the weak, the forgotten. He spoke about the young and the world they faced, a world we had made for them and could make better still. It was a more thoughtful room of people after Joe Salem spoke.
   In a few minutes, really barely a page of speaking, he had filled the room with energy - this aging and sick man - and he had given us a charge to keep.
   There is a half-remembered quote about a guest who dined on successive nights with two dazzling conversationalists; after the first, she said, she thought that her dining partner was the most brilliant man in the world. But after the second, she said, "I felt I was the most brilliant person in the world."
   No doubt it was this sense that our better angels had been called on for having dined with Joe Salem that prompted as warm an ovation as I have ever heard.
   An old-time liberal
   Salem, a former state representative and a defeated congressional candidate, was of a generation of liberals now gone. Poverty and deprivation for Salem, as for others of that era, were not matters of theory. Even if he had not suffered himself, he had seen people go hungry and fight to keep their dignity.
   Salem was of a generation of liberals who saw themselves speaking for people who had no voice of their own. The irony of his political career is that he lost his 1982 congressional bid in large part because that era was ending.
   The 27th Congressional District was drawn after the 1980 census precisely to give minorities a voice. Salem was overtaken by a historical floodtide.
   But what he did after the defeat said more about Salem's liberalism than anything he did while he held elective office. He continued sponsoring Thanksgiving dinners at his beloved Boys and Girls Club. He continued helping youths and working to make a better world for them.
   The best of those old liberals, like the best of the conservatives, were not about obstinate ideology or the cult of personality, but about people. The elected office was a tool for his vision of what things should be like. After he lost that office, he simply used another forum.
  

 
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