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.