Whetting Their Whistles for the Election : Debate: Some locals at Jimmie’s are getting steamed up over politics instead of cooling down with a beer.

The sign by the street at Jimmie’s Place said “Just Beer” and that’s about all there was, except for the bar and a couple of tables for dominoes.

A fan shuffled the air around the room. Refrigerated air conditioning in an icehouse like Jimmie’s just wouldn’t be right.

And, usually, neither is talk of politics, given the passion it can sometimes evoke after a belt or two. It certainly riled Clarence Rennspies on this particular day.

Jimmie’s Place is one of the older icehouses in town, located in the Heights, one of the oldest neighborhoods of this convention city. Owner Frank Murray’s father, Jimmie, opened it in 1949. These watering holes, which dot the Texas Gulf Coast, are a remnant of another time when ice was shipped here from Maine and other northern states to help settlers weather the sweltering heat of summer.

The ice was stored in small, insulated buildings that eventually became community gathering places for people picking up their ice. The owners started stocking beer and a few grocery items and, over time, icehouses became a cross between a comfortable front porch and general store.

It’s the kind of place where the grit of a long day’s manual labor draws no stares from other customers and where there is little cause for temptation. “My wife wants me to come here because she doesn’t have to worry about me,” said William Cain, sipping on a noontime brew.

But it is also the kind of place where people come who might make a difference in this year’s presidential election--working-class folks who once voted the straight Democratic ticket but have voted Republican for the last dozen years.

Ruling over this domain is the bearded, jocular Murray, who pointed out that, “for the most part, people who come in here have been conservative Democrats and the Democrats lost their conservative line. I think in the last 12 years, people voted Republican.”

But he also said things seemed to be changing, where working hard doesn’t always mean getting ahead. And this, he said, is a bar in which almost everyone works.

“I really get the feeling the Republican Party has fallen back into the old mode of the rich getting richer,” he said. “The big guys aren’t going under, while the little guys are struggling and busting their butts and not getting anywhere.”

Murray is a man who talks in terms familiar to the folks taking in the convention over at the Astrodome: the need to fix the welfare and educational systems, of how more jobs need to be created and how the Bush Administration has done a good job overseas.

Over at another table, Cain was sitting with Rennspies and Jack Kleinworth, all of whom had been coming into Jimmie’s for more than 20 years.

Kleinworth and Cain said that they are for Bush. Both said it is Congress that is causing all the problems and that Bush deserves another chance.

Bush “did a super job over there in Kuwait,” said Cain, who owns a fencing company. “They just went in there and did the job and came home. If (Bush) can’t run the country, then 50 Bill Clintons couldn’t do it.”

Rennspies had gotten up and walked quietly away from the table and took a place on one of the bar stools.

Kleinworth motioned Rennspies’ way and said that he had left because Bill Clinton is his candidate and talk of what a good job Bush has done only ticks him off.

A short time later, someone asked Rennspies what he thought of the Republicans being in town.

Without turning his head he said: “I don’t talk politics in no beer joint.”