by Molly Ivins
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 at, or even attend, a Texas college you had 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 because he wouldn’t sign the pledge, 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.
David Richards started as a lawyer in the Dallas firm Mullinax, Wells, which specialized in labor law and has produced so many freedom-fighting attorneys over the years. But he was not destined to be a happy camper in the rigidly conservative Dallas of the fifties and sixties. So David and Sam Houston Clinton, now on the Court of Criminal Appeals, started their own firm in Austin. They worked chiefly as attorneys for the AFL-CIO. One of the wonderful things about being in a state as backward as Texas, where we normally run twenty to thirty years behind most places (thank God for Mississippi), is that no element of our tiny progressive coalition has ever had time to become fat, complacent, and part of the Establishment—including Texas labor. The labor movement in this state remained for a long time more like the labor movement of the thirties, scrappy fighters for justice rather than defenders of their own turf. The AFL-CIO filed the first school desegregation suits (Corpus Christi, on behalf of a Mexican-American meat-cutter’s daughter). The key one man–one vote case in this state was White v. Register, subsidized by the AFL, that finally integrated the state Legislature. It took years. Richards developed one man–one vote cases as a specialty, trying them all over East Texas—county commissions, school boards, city councils. As Sam Houston Clinton says, if you were to hold a meeting of all the folks who first got elected because of David Richards, it would fill a hall. “He practically invented that kind of litigation,” said Clinton. “The thing about him is he wasn’t just marching in the streets to protest discrimination, he went into the courtroom and got it changed. He absolutely made it all happen. He’d come into the court and produce the evidence in front of you so you couldn’t deny it.”
It’s fashionable to bash lawyers as a bunch of greedy SOBs these days. The number of cases David Richards has taken pro bono would fill a book. In one of his most recent adventures, he tried to help the Save Our Springs coalition in Austin protect the city’s jewel, Barton Springs, from the depredations of developers and the city council. 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 the 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 haciendado.”
As much as David Richards loves the struggle—he’s a born battler—he also has an equally outsized gift for relishing life. He loves softball and camping and canoeing and beer and singing and good books and running rivers and his wife, Sandy, and all his kids. So have a wonderful year in Santa Fe, David, but for God’s sake, come back: You know we need you more here.
May 1992
Charlie Wilson
THE TREE IS down, the bills are due, the weather’s lousy, we’re all on Rye Krisp and cottage cheese, the Texas Legislature is upon us, and Charlie Wilson has gone to save the Bosnians. Katy, bar the door.
Wilson, Texas’ answer to Hunter S. Thompson, the Uncle Duke of Congress, is off on one of his save-the-freedom-fighter missions. When last we checked in on Representative Wilson’s foreign policy, he was working as Lawrence of Afghanistan, with his girlfriend Miss World in tow. For a while there, he took up Angola, as though the poor country didn’t have enough trouble with Jonas Savimbi running around loose.
But now Wilson’s bound for Bosnia and is so serious about the assignment that he has announced “no chicks.” Those who misunderstood him to mean “no checks” were also relieved (Charlie was a high scorer in the Rubbergate scandal).
Personally, I think Wilson should be declared a state treasure, if not an actual national monument, and protected like the snail darter. If it weren’t for Charlie, Henry B., and Jack Brooks, the Texas congressional delegation would be perilously close to boring—a bunch of earnest strivers, Bob Foreheads, and uninterestingly wrongheaded right-wingers. (And that’s another bone I have to pick with the right wing: You people used to produce a lot of entertainingly loopy public servants, but lately you’ve been letting down the side. Dick Armey is only marginally qualified.) It’s my belief that the nation depends on Texas to provide genuine, certified, bona fide characters as players in the political drama. We have a responsibility in this regard. You can’t count on South Dakota or Iowa to send anyone interesting to Washington. The place needs a bunch of hell-raising Texans, and Charlie is one.
He’s the only man in Congress with an M-16, which he has personally fired at actual commies, mounted over his office door. When he was in Afghanistan, he taught the freedom fighters to yell in English what he told them was an old Texas war cry, “Kill the commie @ %&-suckers!”
As a feminist, I am duty-bound to deplore Wilson’s perpetually adolescent attitude toward women, but since he has an excellent voting record on women’s issues, I see no reason to get into a stew about it. In the old days, before he lapsed into relative respectability, Wilson had a standing order to his office manager concerning the hiring of secretaries: “You can teach ’em to type, but you can’t teach ’em to grow tits.” On the other hand, he’s always had a crackerjack staff, noted for outstanding constituent casework.
Given the level of hideousness the situation in Bosnia has achieved, I suppose we should View With Alarm the prospect of our favorite loose cannon from East Texas careening around over there. But the Bosnians seem to be increasingly feisty these days, and if that’s their mood, Wilson’s their man. He specializes in government-sponsored gunrunning, which is what I think we should have been doing for the Bosnians all along.
Meanwhile, back at the Capitol, the poor old place is starting to look like postwar Berlin. The roof was leaking, the walls were cracking, and they’d found asbestos all over it, so our Capitol is now undergoing a giant redo. Workmen putter around the place continually, finding more things to take down and tear apart. The House will be meeting in its regular chamber, but the Senate has been shunted over to a former branch bank, which isn’t doing anything for the majesty of the Senate.
The underground extension of the Capitol is now open, and if you have to build a building underground, this one is state of the art. A central courtyard and lots of ground-level skylights keep it from being too gloomy: Most of the state toilers even have windows that open onto sort of moatlike runs between the walls. I rather miss the quaint, Dickensian squalor that ensued from having everybody squashed in on top of everybody else at the Capitol: The new subterranean roominess is slightly eerie.
Another form of gloom is already hovering over the seventy-third session. As we all know, the state has been close to broke ever since the oil crash of ’85. Every year, we’ve barely scraped by, cutting this and that, failing to take care of urgent needs, hoping to bail ourselves out with a lottery, raising sin taxes yet again. A combination of obdurate idiocy (“no state income tax, no
state income tax”: talk about shooting yourself in the foot over and over out of sheer stubbornness) and gumptionless leadership means we still have this pathetic, regressive tax structure. We not only don’t have enough money to do anything well, we have grossly unfair taxes.
This time, after crying “wolf” and then staving off the wolf with some sorry, jerry-built patch, we are looking at the wolf. Knocking old folks out of nursing homes, dropping mothers and babies from nutrition programs, closing the schools. Oh, this is just going to be lots of fun.
January 1993
Ann Richards vs. Shrub
GRACIOUS DEARIE ME, who would have thought the sensibilities of Texas Republicans had become so delicate? They are in a tizzy, having the hot fantods, close to swooning because Governor Ann Richards indirectly referred to Shrub Bush as “some jerk.”
I distinctly recall having heard Republicans refer to their opponents as commies, queers, traitors, drug addicts, and murderers during past campaigns. And of course, what Texas Democrats have called one another cannot be repeated in a family newspaper. Those were the days, my friends, when Texas politics earned its national reputation for hardball. And now we’re having the vapors over “jerk”?
I especially appreciate the fine flush of indignation rising from Republican Party chairman Tom Pauken, the man who taught Jim Mattox how to be mean. During two memorable Pauken-Mattox matches in Dallas in the early eighties, even grizzled veterans of Texas politics found the level of vituperation actually awesome. This is sissy stuff.
Of course, it does require us to examine the timely question: Is Shrub Bush a jerk? In fairness to Richards, it must seem as though Bush is a jerk. If you had spent much of your first term building prisons and doing law-’n’-order stuff—especially at the price of not getting a raise for schoolteachers and other things you really wanted to do—of course it would annoy you if some jerk came along and said that a drop in crime rates is unimportant. The jerk who actually said that was George W.’s campaign adviser, Karl Rove, and I confess that jerk is not the word that came to mind when I heard him—although jackass does also start with a j.
Shrub’s new TV ad only implies that the drop in the crime rate is unimportant by announcing in a voice of doom that “the number of violent crimes is up.” (Actually, even the number is up only in some categories. The rates are down across the board.) So I guess that makes Shrub Bush a jerk only by implication—or, as Richards’ campaign so genteelly put it, it was not a personal remark but was made “in a generic fashion.” That’s one of the funniest distinctions in the history of politics.
Actually, this raises a profound semantic question: Can one act like a jerk or sound like a jerk without being a jerk? Can we hate the jerkiness, but not the jerk? I leave this to theologians.
The fact is that Shrub is not a jerk. It would be nice to dismiss him as a hopeless lightweight because he has no credentials. Ted Kennedy’s first opponent used to go around saying, “If this man’s name was Smith, nobody would vote for him.” Kennedy has since gone on to amass the third-longest legisla-tive record in American history—not, one suspects, a precedent that the Republicans are happy about. But young Ted Kennedy, like Shrub Bush, was especially galling to his opponents because all he had was a famous name, and he hadn’t even earned it himself. It’s not as though Bush were Tom Landry or Willie Nelson or even Ronald Reagan, who at least earned his own fame before he went into politics. Had Bush’s name been Shrub Smith, he wouldn’t even have gotten the nomination.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s smart for the Richards campaign to try to dismiss Shrub as though he were some political pygmy, to be brushed off just because he’s never held office before. In the first place, pointing out that you have political experience and your opponent has none is not exactly shrewd politics these days. For veterans like Richards and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, who know how hard it is to get anything done and who carry a lot of scars from the fights they’ve been in, the temptation to dismiss some puppy who’s yapping “Vote for me—I’ve never done anything” is understandable. But folks are so fed up with politicians these days that anyone who can claim outsidership has a built-in advantage. It’s the same impulse that drives the term-limitation movement: The people who are in office have made such a mess, let’s put in a bunch of people who have no experience—they can’t possibly do worse. (Although this flies in the face of a time-tested theorem: Things can always get worse.)
Besides which, as anyone who has met Shrub Bush will attest, he’s not a lightweight. He’s a lot brighter than some people who already hold public office, he’s working like a dog at this campaign, and it’s real hard to dislike the guy. Now, I don’t think his ideas about state government amount to much. The very fact that he’s running around saying he’ll do this and that and the other if elected is proof that he doesn’t know how state government works. (Welcome to the weak-governor system, Shrub.) But when did you ever hear of anyone running for public office without making promises impossible to keep?
In sum, let us put this teapot tempest where it belongs in the long view of Texas politics: Referring to your opponent as a jerk—in the generic rather than the personal sense, of course—is gentility personified.
August 1994
Ann Richards vs. Shrub II
OK, OK, I’M so partisan that after seeing the debate between Ann Richards and George W. Bush, instead of saying it was 2–1 in Richards’ favor or 3–2 or whatever all those other commentators said, I find myself asking, “WHAT ARE YOU, OUT OF YOUR TINY MIND THAT YOU WOULD EVEN CONSIDER VOTING FOR SHRUB BUSH?!”
I really don’t get it. Is this some total failure of imagination on my part? Am I missing some sparkling quality of Shrub’s that’s apparent to others? I’ve said from the beginning that Bush is a guy you could take anywhere. He’s not going to tell rape jokes in public or drop his trou in his office or have a paranoid episode on 60 Minutes.
I still don’t see anything particularly wrong with him. He’s nice. He’s not dumb. He works real hard at making people like him. True, he is awfully . . . privileged, but that’s not his fault. It’s a little creepy to hear him say that the schools are his top priority when you know that he went to prep school and his kids go to prep school. It’s fine for him to say he’s going to clean up welfare . . . do you think he’s ever actually known anyone who was stuck on welfare?
Of course, he inherited money and has been given a lot of breaks in business by his daddy’s friends, but no one ever said this was a level playing field. He’s had some business losses; lots of people did in the 1980s, including Claytie Williams, if you’ll recall. Being born lucky is not a character flaw, and folks in business do take risks.
The problem is not Shrub Bush; it’s the comparison with Ann Richards. Richards really is one of a kind. Just unique. She’s a great politician who also happens to be remarkably good at governing. The two things do not always come in the same package. Richards is an “OK, let’s work this thing out” kind of governor rather than a “Do it my way or I’ll break you” kind. All over the country, people comment on Richards’ “star quality,” but what strikes me most about Richards—first, last, and always—is that she’s a hard worker.
I cannot remember Richards when she was not doing something, not out of nervous energy but just plain efficiency. For years, she has had a Christmas Eve party for family and old friends, which always includes singing Christmas carols around the piano. The highlight is the patented Richards version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which everyone imitates lords a-leaping, geese a-laying, and so forth. Toward the end of the evening, as old friends settle down for quiet chats, Richards is always to be found in the kitchen, doing dishes. Even at the mansion. Dish towel tucked into her belt, sleeves rolled up, a steaming sink of soapy water in front of her, handing spotless plates to a team of wipers while they all discuss some way to make Texas work better.
Richards has always been interested in how to make things work better;
she’s one of the most practical people I’ve ever met. I’m confounded when I read that Richards is “too liberal.” I am a liberal. I’ll talk theories of social justice all night while Richards finishes the dishes, peels potatoes for tomorrow’s picnic salad, sews a child’s Halloween costume, and figures out how to make the House and Senate agree on the appropriations conference bill.
State government is fairly simple in some ways: roads, schools, prisons, and what Allan Shivers called “eleemosynary institutions”—help for the blind, deaf, disabled, and mentally ill. Richards started in politics as a county commissioner, doing roads. This is a woman who knows her road graders. And she knows everything else about state government in the same from-the-ground-up way, including how to run bureaucracies. (Don’t get her started on bureaucracies unless you really want to hear a forty-five-minute lecture on just how many ways bureaucrats have of not doing anything about a problem.)
