From the Texas Tribune: Cat Parks paves own path as Texas GOP vice chair under bombastic Allen West

A look at the office of county and state party chairs.

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Four years ago, the chair of the Republican Party in Hamilton County, a rural county about an hour west of Waco, was getting ready to retire. Around that time, Cat Parks’ husband was sitting on the porch of his ranch one evening, drinking whiskey with a neighbor, when the neighbor asked if he knew anyone up for the job.

“If you could get Cat to do it, she’s the one,” he replied, as she tells it.

Before long, Parks was being sworn in as the next chair of the Hamilton County GOP — and within a few years, she was taking over as vice chair of the state party, a swift rise in a world of Texas GOP politics that tends to reward players with much longer resumes inside the party. Now Parks is turning heads again as she paves her own path at the state party under Allen West, the bombastic former Florida congressman who has alienated some fellow Republicans with his sharp-elbowed leadership as chair.

“She came out of nowhere,” said Bunni Pounds, a veteran party activist who worked with Parks when she chaired the Texas GOP’s Candidate Recruitment Task Force last election cycle.

Pounds and others who have worked with Parks praised her as organized, efficient and goal-oriented, a reassuring force in the volatile West era. She can be hard-charging, they say, but takes a less confrontational approach than West and appears more focused on the nuts and bolts of the party, including building a younger and more diverse GOP.

Pounds said Parks “gives people comfort that someone is looking over the party as their primary focus, and she is very focused on the party and not distracted.”

While the state party chair and vice chair are elected independently from one another every even-numbered year at the state convention, they tend to be more political allies than adversaries. The moments of daylight between Parks and West have been small but significant: The day after West made comments flirting with Texas secession, Parks said that “now is not the time to turn our back on our amazing union.” Later in December, she congratulated the Republican winner of a hard-fought state Senate special election after West pointedly declined to give him kudos.

And last month, in a more bold move, she issued a long statement urging Republicans to think more broadly than the party’s eight legislative priorities, which feature several hot-button socially conservative issues and which West was using as a rallying cry as the session was getting underway.

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