Should America secede from Texas?

My fascination with Texas began rather suddenly. It was the spring of 2009 -- the season when the political right was failing to adjust to the idea of a President Obama. And there was Gov. Rick Perry at a Tea Party rally in Austin, publicly toying with the idea that his state might consider seceding.

"Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may," Perry said, quoting the state's great founding father, Sam Houston. When Houston made that remark, he was definitely attempting to break away from the country to which Texas was then attached.

"We didn't like oppression then, we don't like oppression now!" Perry roared to the cheering crowd, some of whom were waving "Secede!" signs. It did sure sound like an Alamo kind of crisis. Their backs were to the wall!

And, important point: This was just a rally about the stimulus package.

It was perhaps the first time the rest of the country had taken notice of the fact that 21st-century Texans did not necessarily consider the idea of breaking away to become a separate nation as, um, nuts.

You had to pay attention. Not necessarily to Perry himself, who, of course, went on to become one of the worst candidates for president in American history. But the rally, with its combination of egomania (We're the best!) and paranoia (Don't mess with Texas!), was a near-perfect reflection of the Tea Party's war cry in national politics.

That's not an accident. The more I looked at Texas, which seemed to be having an anti-Obama rally every time a cow mooed, the more important it seemed.

The reason Perry imagined he could be president was the way Texas had created job growth by hewing to the low-tax/low-regulation ethic that the political right believes should be the model for the entire country. (The model had certain flaws, such as the assumption that every state could scrimp on higher education and just build a large professional class by importing people who went to college in other states.)

Then a friend sent me a headline from a Texas news report: "Man Allegedly Beat Woman with Frozen Armadillo." I was hooked.

Looking back over the last quarter century or so, I was stunned by how much of the national agenda Texas had produced, for good or ill.

Texas banking laws set the stage for the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s. The 2008 economic meltdown was the product of a financial deregulation that was the work of many hands, but most particularly the paws of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. Our energy policy is the way it is in large part because Texas politicians and Texas special interests like it that way.

Schools from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine, have been remade, reorganized and sometimes totally upended under a federal law based on Texas education reform. For several generations, our kids have been reading textbooks written with an eye to Texas sensibilities. Texas presidents have led the country into every land war the United States has been involved in since Vietnam.

The crankiness is actually a source of Texas' political power. The state has a remarkable ability to be two contradictory things at once. It's a fast-growing, increasingly urban place whose citizens have nevertheless managed to maintain the conviction that they're living in the wide open spaces.

And its politicians are skilled at bragging about the wonderful Texas economy and lifestyle while wailing and rending their garments over their helplessness in the hands of the federal Death Star in Washington. You need that sense of victimhood because it creates energy and unity. You can't build a Tea Party on good news.

Another reason the Texas influence on the United States is outsized is that the place is just so damned big. California has more people, but it's hit a bad patch and it's struggling. New York is the media capital and it has Wall Street, but its population is flat. Texas just keeps growing. (Think jackrabbit. A really large jackrabbit.)

The huge Texas population -- up 4.3 million in a decade -- has an enormous impact on the country all by itself. We've got a super-big state with a young citizenry and a very high birth rate. You have to figure that by 2050, the entire United States will have a distinctly Texas cast. The state's ability to rear, educate and prepare all the little Texans to take their place in the national economy is going to be an excellent predictor of how well the whole country will be faring down the line.

We're not used to thinking of Texas as a driving force in American affairs, but there you are. Even when Democrats held the White House in recent decades, Texans seemed to be holding the reins -- reins that were being used mainly to hog-tie the chief executive.

Barack Obama has been hamstrung by the power of the Tea Party Republicans, whose first big coming-out parties were organized by Armey and whose ideology sprang, as much as from any place coherent, from the thinking of Texas congressman Ron Paul.

You'd imagine a place with a motto like "Don't Mess with Texas" would be a small, scrappy state. But Texas is a huge, scrappy state. What could be more unnerving? And really, there's never a dull moment.

Take the frozen armadillo. I couldn't resist looking into it, and at one point in my research I ran into an officer of wildlife enforcement who assured me that it was illegal to sell a live armadillo in Texas.

"Dead armadillos you can sell parts of them," he added. "Make a curio of a little armadillo on his back drinking a bottle of beer."

How could you not want to know more about a state like that, particularly when it appears to have been setting the entire national agenda for decades, while continually howling about how the federal government is pushing it around?