|
News Article
|
It’s just a Texas-governor thing
By Robert Draper
New York Times
“Now I think you’re on to a better subject,” declared Gov. Rick Perry aboard a private plane as the topic turned to Texas. The longest-serving governor in the state’s history recounted its uninhabitable past.
“I think it was Sheridan that said, ‘If I owned hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in hell.’ I mean, this was a really hard place. You look at the men that founded it — the Bowies and the Travises, even Sam Houston, in my opinion possibly the greatest leader this country’s ever developed. . . . I don’t think Texas becomes an urbany, really highly cultured place until like the last decade.”
Nasty storm winds slapped the plane along its journey south to Laredo. Perry, a former Air Force pilot with the rugged veneer of a “Bonanza” cast member, sat unperturbed with a plastic bag full of popcorn in his lap and rhapsodized further about the revered Republic of Texas’s president.
“Houston became a Christian late in life because of his wife,” he said. “He was running for the presidency in 1860, and she talked him out of it. She thought he would lose his mortal soul if he ran for the presidency. He was highly respected in the North — an anti-slave Southerner. There are those that think he would’ve won the presidency of the United States and we probably would not have had a civil war. Interesting.”
The governor was grinning broadly. “Then we wouldn’t have had Abe Lincoln,” I pointed out.
Perry contemplated this for barely a second before replying, “Maybe Sam Houston would’ve been better.”
Losing your soul
He sat back, clearly pleased to have said something that might provoke incredulity somewhere. In the past 12 months, Perry has endorsed “Choose Life” license plates as an option for Texans, hinted that his state might do well to secede from the Union and charged that President Barack Obama is “hellbent on taking America toward a socialist country.”
In his ostrich-skin cowboy boots and oozing sufficient levels of testosterone to detonate a Geiger counter, Rick Perry was doing a fine impression of George W. Bush on steroids. But he was also revealing their acute differences. That crack about losing your soul by running for the presidency was one of Perry’s incessant stabs at all-corrupting Washington. More revealing was his suggestion that Texas had acquired its sophistication only in the last decade, while Perry was governor, which began when the lieutenant governor ascended to complete Bush’s unexpired term in December 2000. This is not only an audacious claim but also an implicit swipe at his predecessor.
But Perry’s opponent in the Republican gubernatorial primary on March 2, 2010, as he seeks a record third full term, isn’t Bush, but rather the state’s senior U.S. senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison.
As governor, George W. Bush was a consummate “uniter-not-a-divider,” and there remain many Texans who fondly recall that model and blame Perry — a big-business booster and social conservative whom Paul Burka, the respected Texas Monthly political commentator, recently described as being “more about politics and ideology than governing” — for its disappearance.
The temperamental basis of Hutchison’s campaign is that, unlike her “arrogant” opponent, she will restore comity to governance and thereby make the ever-shrinking Republican Party more attractive to moderates.
Bushworld veterans like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and Margaret Spellings are Hutchison supporters. Most happen to be close to the senator. But another factor, acknowledges one former Bus adviser, is “vindictiveness due to the way he” — Perry — “behaved toward Bush.”
Perry’s chief strategist, Dave Carney, accounts for the dearth of support among Bush alumni differently. “They’re not conservatives,” he said. “They’re country-club Republicans.”
When I asked if he really believed Rove was a “country-club Republican,” Carney replied: “Yeah, absolutely. It would be impossible to deny that there are Reagan Republicans and there are Bush Republicans.”
To the Perryites, then, the future of the G.O.P. — in Texas next March and thereafter — requires buying into Carney’s assertion that yesteryear’s “Reagan Republicans” and today’s “movement conservatives” are one and the same.
Primary of our discontents
The Texas Republican gubernatorial primary is thus shaping up to be a public airing of that national party’s internal discontents. The issues and cultural references in the race are unmistakably Texan. But the contest’s central question — whether one popular general-election Republican (Hutchison) can defeat another somewhat less popular Republican (Perry) who knows how to excite conservative primary voters — goes to the heart of the party’s overall vitality.
Until recently, the Republicans could play down the damage from infighting by assuming that whoever prevailed would most likely face a weak Democratic candidate, Tom Schieffer, in the general election. But three weeks ago, Schieffer bowed out. Houston mayor Bill White, who has a large war chest for a campaign for the Senate, then announced he would consider switching races to run for governor.
It’s bad enough that a sitting governor not beset by scandal is about to be embroiled in a costly (perhaps as much as $50 million) intraparty contest before a potentially tough general election. But in 2010, the spectacle of two well-known Republicans savaging each other is a midterm gift to the Democratic National Committee.
Each is a Karl Rove protégé. Back in 1990, when Perry was agriculture commissioner, Hutchison state treasurer — the two fresh-faced Republicans were seen as the party’s twin stars. Today they’re each other’s worst enemy.
“I’m in it to save our party,” Kay Bailey Hutchison told me one October morning, “because I was there from the beginning, when it wasn’t cool to be a Republican.”
“Are you saying you made it cool to be a Republican?” I ventured.
The senator’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, laughed, but she did not. “I’m saying he wasn’t there in the beginning,” she stated, referring to Perry’s having switched parties in 1989. “He’s a Republican of convenience. I’m a Republican of conviction.”
Compared with that of her backslapping opponent, Hutchison’s levity deficit is notable. When she was state treasurer in the early ’90s, her employees complained that she was abusive. A former press secretary admits that she can be “somewhat needy and demanding.”
She is, as Sullivan puts it, “a driven lady”: University of Texas cheerleader and law school graduate; TV reporter; bank vice president; state legislator and treasurer; and in 1993 the first Texas woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
To this day, Hutchison remains one of the state’s most popular figures. In February, Public Policy Polling found that 76 percent of Texas Republican primary voters viewed her favorably. “Hutchison has softer edges,” says Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. “Like Bush, she comes off as the kinder-gentler practitioner of bipartisanship.”
Party implications
Playing into the allegation that Perry has rewarded his allies with appointments and lucrative contracts, the candidate tells supporters that it’s time “to take back Texas” from the “Austin insiders and lobbyists.”
Hutchison told me unequivocally that her contest with Perry has national implications for the Republican Party. “If we don’t see the losses in the House and Senate as meaning that we need to retool our party and our message and our governing strategy, then we’re going to keep losing,” she said as we flew from Dallas to Waco on a campaign-chartered plane.
She spent that day attending four events across the state to trumpet her endorsement by the Texas Farm Bureau. Determined not to resemble a buttoned-up Washingtonian, Hutchison dressed herself in a denim blouse, flouncy skirt and monogrammed cowgirl boots.
At every stop, she vowed to defeat the “government takeover of our health care system.” She spoke about low taxes and private property rights but did not bring up topics likely to appeal to swing voters like the environment or alternative energy sources. Perry, whose base credentials are unassailable, discussed both during the day I spent with him.
When her campaign announced that Dick Cheney would be endorsing the senator (hardly a move likely to endear Hutchison to independents), Perry’s spokesman, Mark Miner, wasted no time replying, “The Washington establishment likes to stick together.”
“Of course we’re not Washington!” Hutchison insisted to me. “I’ve spent the same amount of time at home” — in Dallas — “as I do in Washington. And unlike some senators, I go out in the communities. I’m a grass-roots person, and I’ve always been a grass-roots person!”
In 2005, she made it clear that she wished to challenge Perry for the governorship. At Perry’s behest, several prominent Republicans persuaded her that to do so would be bad for the party. According to individuals with knowledge of the conversations, Perry or a surrogate called several GOP leaders, including Karl Rove at the White House, and suggested that 2010 would be “her turn.”
Politicians have been known to change their minds about such matters — to which Hutchison can herself attest, having run for a third senatorial term in 2006 after having promised to serve only two. So Perry’s announcement in April 2008 that he would run yet again did not divert her from the race. That same month, she hosted a dinner for the Texas Federation of Republican Women on Capitol Hill. One woman present, Kathy Jones, says that she asked Hutchison, “Why would you even consider this, when we need you so badly in Washington?”
According to Jones, Kay Bailey Hutchison’s tart reply was, “Texas deserves the best.”
Like George W. Bush before him, Perry has declared that being governor of Texas is the best job there is. Never one to be confused with a workaholic — until recently, says a friend, Perry “traveled a long ways on some good looks” — the task of being a constitutionally weak chief executive who asserts his authority through appointments and speeches seems to suit him.
Even so, Perry’s years as governor of a conservative state have not been accompanied by high approval ratings. His plan to build a network of toll roads met with loud resistance from landowners and was subsequently scuttled. The State Legislature turned back the governor’s 2007 executive order mandating that teenage girls be vaccinated for a virus that can cause cervical cancer. Critics charged that the initiatives were designed to reward lobbyists who were tight with Perry.
As of July, Perry’s statewide approval rating stood at 42 — well after Perry had titillated the base in April by telling a reporter that Texas was “able to leave” the Union and that “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that?”
To Perry, the matter of states’ rights — for generations a tool used by previous Southern governors to institutionalize injustices against African-Americans — has gained new salience with the advent of trillion-dollar deficits and increasing federal intervention into the private sector.
“What would have been your remedy, then?” to the collapse of the financial markets, I asked.
He shrugged. “What was our remedy then is still the remedy,” he said. “Cut the spending, cut the taxes.”
Perry didn’t make clear how a little ad hoc belt-tightening on the part of Congress would have allayed the collapse. He seemed, instead, skeptical that such a collapse had been imminent.
Though a vocal a critic of Obama’s financial recovery package, the Texas governor readily accepted all but a small fraction of the relief money offered to his state. “It’s our money — we sent it up there,” Perry told me.
On his airplane, I asked Rick Perry if he was taking a few tough swings at Kay Bailey Hutchison in hopes of scaring her out of the race. Perry grinned and replied, “Those are your words, by the way.”
“Well, it’s my question,” I said.
Laughing, the governor said, “It is a question that holds some truth.”
Hutchison, for her part, acknowledges that her popularity is somewhat ephemeral. “When it comes to specifics, I haven’t had one thing that resonates with a whole focus group,” she told me, which opens her up to being defined by the Perry campaign.
After an impressive kickoff at the beginning of the year, her candidacy all but disappeared. Hutchison spent several months dithering over when to quit her Senate seat to campaign full time, finally deciding in November not to quit, by which time one poll had her 11 points behind Perry. When I suggested that remaining as senator might lead voters to think that she’s hedging her bets, Hutchison replied: “Well, I hope not. I hope that what they will see is that I’m making the decision about what’s best for Texas, even at a huge disadvantage to my political success.”
But is Hutchison’s candidacy, and the angst it inflicts on the party, “best for Texas”? A similar question could be asked of Rick Perry: What unfinished business necessitated his going back on his promise and running for a third full term? The answer may have something to do with Perry’s ambitions, and that big-state governors tend to find their way onto a national stage. When I suggested that his anyone-who-crosses-the-Potomac-is-tainted rhetoric would result in derision should he ever run for a job in Washington, he assured me, “You won’t see me there.”
But a prominent national Republican who knows Perry asserts that Perry campaigned for Giuliani in hopes of becoming a vice-presidential choice. A politically connected friend of Perry’s says: “My belief is that if he’s elected governor, he will immediately begin the campaign for president. Don’t get me wrong — he doesn’t expect to be president. But he will be an attractive candidate to be on the ticket with somebody because he’s the Texas governor and he’s got a great financial base and is a proven winner.”
A more vexing puzzle is whether either candidate offers a winning road map for the state’s Republican Party. Four years ago, Texas joined Hawaii, New Mexico and California as “majority-minority states,” with 50.2 percent of its 22.5-million residents belonging to minority groups. Today, 30 percent of all Texans speak Spanish at home. Though Perry has appointed a Latina to the Texas Supreme Court and Hutchison expressed to me her concern that “we have not done enough to bring Hispanics in who have the same basic values that Republicans do,” neither candidate spoke directly about Hispanic issues when I followed them. When I observed to one of Bush’s top advisers that the candidates seemed to be ignoring the state’s changing demographics while instead targeting the GOP base, the response was: “Amazing, isn’t it? And the Hispanic vote is gettable. Perry will probably benefit by that strategy in the short term. But I think the long-term consequences are stark.”
Dick Armey is among the handful of Texas Republicans who see little harm in next March’s contest. “When I first came to Texas in 1967,” he told me, “the only race you had was primaries between Democrats. They managed to cope with it emotionally.”
Still, the question that awaits an answer is not whether the Texas GOP will emerge from next March’s fight with a smile on its face, but whether it will be any wiser for the experience.
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.”
|
| READER RESPONSE |
|
|
|
| Dave Mundy - posted: 12/15/2009 1:47:27 PM
It's rather sad when the New York Times would allow its name, long revered by journalists as the home of fairness and accuracy, to be used by a writer with such a clear bias against Texas, Texans and most definitely against Republicans.
It's even sadder when a Texas publication picks up such a bit of drivel and republishes it.
| | Jennifer - posted: 12/14/2009 1:30:29 PM
We have a better choice than the arrogant Rick Perry and the moderate KBH. Her name is Debra Medina. http://medinafortexas.com/events.php
Rick Perry is pressuring KERA public television in Dallas to keep Ms. Medina from participating in their January debate. We deserve to hear from each candidate. Contact KERA and let them know you want to hear what Ms. Medina has to say.
Phone: 214-871-1390
Metro: 972-263-3151
Fax: 214-754-0635 | |
|
|