Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Bullock chain-smoked cigarettes as he listened. He blew a stream in the general direction of Andy and said, “The cigarette tax should be earmarked for cancer research and treatment.” Andy asked unhappily if any options were open for him. Bullock leaned toward him and suggested, “Suicide.”

  In the next session of the legislature, Andy had to go back to Bullock, braced for more punishment. After much jovial chat with the lieutenant governor about hunting and fishing, Andy feared they were running out of their scheduled time, and he reminded Bullock that the subject of their discussion was the Parks and Wildlife budget. Bullock shot up from his chair and said, “You’re the most disloyal son of a bitch I’ve ever known. Get out of my office, and don’t ever come back to this side of the Capitol again.”

  I asked Andy whether he ever found out what he had done to get thrown out of Bullock’s office. He shook his head: “I think I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Bullock wanted to create a budget policy committee composed of the governor, the House Speaker, and himself. When the legislature was in session, the committee would recommend funding priorities. But when the legislators were out of town—the majority of the time—then this powerhouse trio would have budgetary authority to do anything. House members declined to pass legislation that would put them aboard that. Bullock did not get laws passed that would have greatly increased his power, but neither did Ann. Mary Beth Rogers told me that except for the environmental agency nicknamed the Train Wreck, all their talk in Blueprint and the State of the State speech about streamlining and reorganization just went away. “Foosh,” she said. “Never heard from again.”

  Jim Mattox had tried to rescue his gubernatorial campaign by advocating a lottery that would help finance the public schools. During her campaign, Ann regarded the lottery idea with distaste, but she spoke up for a lottery at a press conference fourteen days after she was inaugurated. She swore then that the proceeds would be channeled directly into public education. Yet when a lottery bill finally won passage and received her signature, it turned out most of the proceeds would be diverted into the general revenue fund. That was the state of affairs until 1997, when the legislature established the Foundation School Fund.

  With the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling on school finance hanging over their heads, legislators eventually arrived at a solution in which school districts with an abundance of property-tax revenue would share some of it, under a complex formula, with districts that had an abundance of broken-down old buildings, portable classrooms, and trash-filled lots. Residents of the wealthy school districts branded the compromise “Robin Hood,” and the notion of robbing the rich to give to the poor was not as lofty sounding to conservative voters and parents of school children as it had been to young David Richards.

  During her first year in office, the governor had to call four special sessions before she could wind up the state’s business and send the legislators home. In April 1991, Comptroller Sharp’s revenue estimators had claimed that the state was $4.6 billion in debt—and the Texas constitution required a balanced budget. Ann said she would not call a special session on the budget until July, when a comprehensive audit of all agency spending was in hand. Tempers frayed. At a conference committee on the budget, according to Dave McNeely, Bullock dressed down Representative Bruce Gibson in front of legislators and lobbyists in language that was described as verbal abuse. Gibson told Speaker Gib Lewis, “I’m taking this personal. I’ve had it. You just don’t treat people this way. I’m going to bust him.” (One year later, Gibson accepted a job as Bullock’s chief of staff.)

  In the special session, Ann, Bullock, Lewis, and key staffers holed up in the Wynne Lodge on Matagorda Island to write a budget. There are no bridges or ferries to the preserve. Reporters and editors yelped about violation of the state’s open-meetings law. Some of the journalists rented boats and tried to force their way through security. The state’s leaders cobbled together a budget that featured sales and cigarette taxes, projections of escalating property taxes, and a lottery.

  When they got back to Austin, according to Paul Hobby, Bullock called in lobbyists who had killed all tax proposals during the regular session, predicting that he was a sure dead-duck one-term lieutenant governor over his proposal for an income tax. He said, “The state of Texas has gone as far as it can go without additional revenue, and I am going to take a little chunk out of each of your asses and put a tax bill together. If you whine, I’m going to take a big chunk out of your asses. So you just decide what you want.”

  Whatever motivated Bullock, it was hard to lay it off on some secret compact with the Republicans. In the infighting over redistricting that year, he excluded and bullied GOP senators so rigorously and tried to protect Democratic incumbents with such a heavy hand that lawyers with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund persuaded state judges that the plan undercounted minorities in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Because of a past history of discrimination, Texas was one of the southern states that had to win approval for its redistricting maps and plans from the U.S. Justice Department. Ann had issued a statement about how pleased she was that the Justice Department had preap-proved the Senate plan, but now she had to call yet another special session, this time for redistricting. She didn’t lay any public blame on overreach by Bullock in a January 2, 1992, letter to the Dallas Morning News: “Frankly, I do not see the issue as one of partisan disagreement: Rather, the issue is whether the State of Texas will surrender another area of local jurisdiction to the federal courts. The people of Texas are tired of court intervention and so am I.” On a civil rights matter that grew out of racial prejudice and exclusion, the doctrinaire liberal was now taking up the banner of states’ rights.

  But before that special session could convene, a federal court imposed its own redistricting plan on the state. In the account that Paul Hobby related to McNeely and Henderson, the pressure and disagreement over redistricting brought his boss into heated conflict with Dan Morales, the Democratic attorney general. To protect Democratic interests and abide by federal law, Bullock had hired the best voting rights attorney and expert on redistricting that he knew—David Richards.

  Hobby said that Morales first complained to him: “Paul, how do you think it feels? I’m supposed to be the lawyer for the state. These guys don’t have the authority to hire separate counsel. We’ve got lawyers to do that. How do you think it feels to be the first statewide elected Mexican American and have this sort of slap in the face?”

  Morales got the meeting with Bullock that he wanted. The lieutenant governor listened for a while, then got to his feet, bumped Morales in the chest (in the kind of antagonism I used to know as a rooster fight), and gave him a real slap in the face, though it was a light backhand. “You skinny-assed son of a bitch,” he snarled, “you’re squealing like a pig stuck under a gate.”

  Hobby jumped between them, wondering how in the world his life had come to this. Once, after getting home from work at one o’clock in the morning, he said this about his boss to his wife: “I might kill him. I might literally use my bare hands and kill him.”

  Not quite a year earlier, Paul Burka had lavished praise on the governor for her political skill, and so had his colleague Patricia Kilday Hart. But in October 1991, they sang a quite different tune in Texas Monthly’s critique of the Democrats’ leadership.

  The best that can be said about the long struggle of the Seventy-second Legislature is that it is over. This was a year when the Legislature was as bad as the public has always suspected. . . . Eight months of work produced only patches on leaky tires: a school-finance law that hurts as many schoolchildren as it helps; new prisons but no change in the practice of crowding them with nonviolent felons; and new taxes on the same old taxpayers.

  The Legislature . . . must be judged on the gut-check issues—and on these, it failed. The main reason why is that none of the legislative leaders was willing to demand that it succeed—not Governor Ann Richards,
not Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, not Speaker Gib Lewis.

  On a host of issues Ann Richards and Bob Bullock fundamentally agreed, and for years they had periodically carried on like good friends. I asked Mary Beth Rogers how things got so haywire between them. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I really don’t. I know bits and pieces of it. Ann learned a lot from Bullock, and in the early days he was willing to teach her. I think it started when we were in the Treasury. It wasn’t constant. They might have a tiff about something, but then it was over, and they’d be big buddies again. But I can’t see into the mind of Bob Bullock. He was unpredictable. Bullock was the smartest man in state government. He knew everything, and he had all that power in the lieutenant governor’s office. Yet Ann was out in the spotlight all the time—she was the star. And it came to a point of him thinking and saying, ‘She doesn’t know as much as I know.’ Which was true.

  “That first session, if Ann wanted something to happen in the Senate, she’d pick up the phone and call Carl Parker or whoever the lead senator was on a particular issue, and it just pissed Bullock off. He thought it was his Senate, and he felt that somehow she was violating the protocol. She was supposed to call him first. Bullock was learning during that first session, too. As smart as he was, presiding over the Senate with thirty-one prima donnas was difficult. He had to get all of them in line, which he did. He enforced his will; they used to come in and complain about it.

  “Pretty soon, they didn’t try to cut a deal with Ann without Bullock’s knowledge and permission. I remember one time, we were trying to finalize something—I think on insurance. Some senators came over, and Ann said, ‘Did Bullock give you the authority to make a deal?’ They hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t give her a clear answer. She just got up and left. Paul Hobby and I got along great. But it reached a point where there was just no communication between Ann and Bullock.”

  In the privacy of his chambers, the lieutenant governor referred to the governor and her staff as “a bunch of hairy-legged lesbians.” Chuck Bailey was legal counsel for the lieutenant governor and later his chief of staff. “Back when they were still speaking,” he told me, “sometimes I could sit there and hear them saying words, but I had no idea what they were talking about. I finally realized it was AA stuff, like they had some secret code. And there was something chemical going on with him. You could see it happen. He’d be all animated about something, and then his face would turn gray, and he would lose all expression.”

  He used to erupt and fire people without warning—tell them to turn in their keys and pagers and empty their desks, get out of his sight. In a morning or two, he would call them at home and ask them why the hell they weren’t at work.

  On one occasion, the governor came to his office alone to talk to him. He started in on some differences in policy, but soon made it personal. He commented on her appearance. Why, look at her legs, he remarked with disdain—she had a runner in her hose. “He knew what buttons to punch,” Bailey said. “By the time he finished, she was in tears, she was so angry.” Aides of Bullock didn’t want the governor going out like that into a crowd of legislators, aides, lobbyists, and tourists. One of the state troopers made a call to her office and then ushered her to a private way out.

  Governor Richards and her escort for the evening, Congressman Charlie Wilson, are greeted by First Lady Barbara Bush and President George H. W. Bush at a formal White House dinner.

  CHAPTER 24

  Favorables

  In late October 1991, Morley Safer chortled, just beside himself, through a 60 Minutes profile of this new sensation, the governor of Texas. The liveliest exchange came when the veteran newscaster had Molly Ivins hooting and reminiscing about Ann with the Governor’s Mansion in the background. The governor burst out the front door waving her arms and laughing as she approached, but there was a hint in her words of the tension between the two women. “Don’t talk to her,” Ann yelled. “She makes it up! I’ll tell you, Molly Ivins and I’ve been through a lot together. When she tells a story I know she was there, but it doesn’t bear any relation to what happened.”

  Safer cracked up. “Ann, just a minute here, I’m trying to get a little bit of the truth—”

  The governor looked about in mock wonder, as if to the people who voted her into office. “Well, y’all—he wants the truth and he’s asking Molly!”

  Paul Burka started his critique of the program with a jeer. “What a puff piece!” It sure was that. But give Ann credit for knowing how to score some payback on prime-time national television, and it didn’t cost her a dime. The creeping frostiness between Ann and Molly may have been simple jealousy over turf—which one was the grande dame of Texas liberals?

  That same year, in addition to the three or four newspaper columns a week that Molly continued to churn out, she became a national figure in her own right with her surprise bestseller Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (In a breakthrough contract, Random House agreed to publish the collection of columns—a genre famous for selling poorly—as a favor in anticipation of a long book on Texas politics that she proposed but, in the end, never wrote, because her collections and collaborations with Lou Dubose sold so well.) There was plenty of ego and sarcasm at play in the relationship of Ann and Molly. Also, after the divorce, David Richards was a much closer friend of Molly than Ann was. In 1993, she devoted one of her columns to her admiration of him.

  One of my favorite David Richards cases was the tuba player who taught at the community college in Dallas. He had one tuba student for one hour a week and was paid all of $3.50. In those days, we had a lot of wiggy, leftover laws from the McCarthy era—in order to teach, or even attend, a Texas college you had to sign a pledge saying you were not now and never had been a member of the Communist Party, despite the fact that the Communist Party was perfectly legal. Now Richards’ tuba player was not a communist (I think he was a Methodist), but he felt strongly that he shouldn’t have to make any kind of political commitment to teach tuba. (Given our Lege in those days, we’re lucky they didn’t outlaw being a Republican: Come to think of it, not a bad idea.) The college wouldn’t give the tuba teacher his $3.50, so David took the case (I assume for a handsome contingency fee, like half of the $3.50.) And lo, at long last, at the end of the legal process, Richards triumphed and got this silly little menace to freedom of thought removed.

  On the greater arc of his legal career, Molly wound up that column:

  Richards has not only fought for freedom himself; he has inspired a generation or more of young lawyers to go and do likewise. During Jim Mattox’s first term as attorney general, Richards was his top hand, and that office almost crackled with energy and idealism. Everyone who was there seems to remember the speech Richards made at a farewell party they gave for him. He closed with a favorite line from one of the Mexican revolutionary leaders, who had been offered a share of the spoils, a big hacienda, when it was over: “I did not join your revolution to become a hacendado.”

  Anyone reading Molly’s columns on Ann’s performance as governor would not sense the rift between them. Molly was generous in her praise, sparing in her criticism, and she made no bones about their being on the same side in the partisan trenches. But in private, they were no longer the soul sisters of popular perception, if they ever had been.

  About the same time the 60 Minutes profile aired, Mary Beth Rogers received a memo from a young pollster at Jack Martin’s firm, Public Strategies, Inc., named Matthew Dowd. Martin had assigned Dowd the task of analyzing a poll of 1,000 likely general-election voters in 1994, which had been conducted by Harrison Hickman. Dowd wrote:

  Overall the numbers look very good for Governor Richards. Her favorability rating is 63 percent positive to 22 percent negative which is nearly 3 to 1. (One week before election day 1990 Richards’ favorability rating was 39 percent positive and 51 percent negative.) Richards’ job performance and favorability are strong among Democrats and Independents. Moreover, she has a net positive of 11 percent among Republi
cans.

  Concerning expectations, 39 percent said Richards has done much or somewhat better than expected, 48 per cent about as well as expected, and 12 percent somewhat or much worse than expected. Thus more than 3 to 1 say she has exceeded expectations. Also in rating past governors, 11 percent say Richards is one of the best, 25 percent say Richards is above average, and 4 percent one of the worst. Again, these are very strong figures.

  These numbers contrast somewhat with the “re-elect” question where 45 percent of the electorate said they would either definitely or probably vote to reelect Richards as Governor; 40 percent said they would definitely or probably vote for someone else. The 40 percent basically consists of Republican men and women who, even though they have a favorable image of Richards, say they will vote for someone else. There is no gender gap among Republican men and women—Richards does not garner a significant portion of either vote.

  But she still polled eight to ten points higher with Democratic and independent women than with men of the same persuasion, and that margin had been a crucial part of her victory over Clayton Williams. In not quite a year, Ann’s performance as governor had raised her favorable rating by twenty-four points and decreased her unfavorable rating by twenty-nine points. This despite the haggles in the legislature over school finance, the lottery, and the budget; the appearance of ineptness caused by being forced to call multiple special sessions; and the overriding specter of President Bush, who was at the height of his popularity after leading a rout of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the First Gulf War. Bush’s expected blowout of whoever surfaced as the Democratic presidential nominee would spell trouble for Democrats everywhere, especially in Texas.