As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda

by Gail Collins

  “And I didn’t drive any girl off a bridge”

  The Texas legislature is overwhelmingly Republican now, with a strong Tea Party cast. The tradition of allowing members of the minority party to chair committees continues, although Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, says the committees the Democrats get are seldom major spokes in the legislative wheel. (Ellis, who Ratliff appointed to run the Finance Committee back when the Republicans first held the senate majority, is now head of the somewhat less critical Government Organization Committee.) “This session was a real damper on bipartisanship,” he said in 2011. “They passed the budget with a parliamentary maneuver. They passed the voter ID bill with a parliamentary maneuver.” The senate had long abided by a consensus-building (and sometimes progress-halting) rule that required two-thirds of the body to vote in favor of bringing up any bill, including the budget. At the end of the last session, one Republican leader told the Houston Chronicle that the rule had been “destroyed.”

  The great and steady march toward the GOP really took off in 1978 when Bill Clements, a wealthy oilman, became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Clements won after an action-packed campaign that was highlighted by a dinner party at the Amarillo Industrial Exposition, when he threw a rubber chicken at his Democratic opponent, attorney general John Hill. The chicken landed in another diner’s plate, but Clements had made his point: he intended to hang the deeply unpopular President Jimmy Carter around Hill’s neck the way farm folk hung dead poultry around the necks of chicken-killing dogs. It turned out to be an extremely successful—and extremely Texan—method of connecting the state Democrats to the increasingly liberal national party in voters’ minds.

  Clements’s victory, with all its powerful poultry symbolism, was even more impressive because he was not a guy who coasted on personal charm. When an oil rig he owned suffered a blowout, dumping 3.3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, then-Governor Clements suggested that the state just wait for “a big hurricane to take care of the problem.” When the Wall Street Journal unfavorably compared his refusal to admit mistakes to the way the late president Kennedy had taken responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, Clements verbally rounded up the entire Kennedy clan and snarled, “Well, I don’t have any Bay of Pigs. And I didn’t drive any girl off a bridge either.”

  The last Democrat ever to be elected governor in Texas was Ann Richards in 1990, after an astonishingly awful primary in which one opponent, Jim Mattox, turned on her during a televised debate and said, “Ann, you look awfully sober tonight. If you’re not off the wagon after what you’ve been through the last couple of weeks, then you’re cured.” Non-Texans knew Richards mainly from her career-making keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic national convention, when she brought down the house with lines like “Poor George, he can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” They probably presumed that the sassy Richards, a recovering alcoholic who knew plenty about the dark side of her state’s politics, took her opponents’ dirt with a shrug and a jibe. But she was thrown by the awfulness of the campaign, and she could not quite control her fractious campaign staff. “Everyone wanted to let Ann be Ann. But they had different Anns,” she told a friend. Fortunately for the Democrats, once Richards made it through the primary, she was blessed with a Republican opponent who refused to shake her hand after a debate, and described rape as being like bad weather—“If it’s inevitable, you might as well lay back and enjoy it.” Somewhere between that and his casual acknowledgment that despite rather spectacular wealth he had not paid any taxes one year, Richards managed to squeak out a victory.

  (No matter who’s running for what, Texas politics frequently tends toward the knee-in-the-groin variety that the entire country now seems to be adopting. When Perry announced his presidential run, a Ron Paul supporter took out a full-page ad in an Austin alternative weekly asking “Have You Ever Had Sex With Rick Perry?”)

  Anyhow, that was the Democrats’ last hurrah. In 1994, after Richards lost to George W. Bush, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, who referred to Richards and her staff as “hairy-legged lesbians,” was the only Democrat left standing. Bullock retired four years later, and that was that.

  When Democrats tell this story, they include multiple conspiracy theories about Republican dirty tricks, but really, nothing could have stopped the political migration. It was happening all over the South, although of course in Texas it was happening on a much bigger scale. The majority of voters simply thought more like Republicans, and the old loyalties of the Civil War had finally died off. Ambitious conservative Democrats who had their finger to the wind went racing for the door. Former governor Connally, who had been wounded in the motorcade when John Kennedy was assassinated, became a Democrat for Nixon and then a flat-out Republican. When the final transition occurred, Bullock, outraged at this political disloyalty, said Connally “ain’t never done nothin’ but get shot in Dallas.” (Later, Bullock endorsed George W. Bush for governor when Bush was running against the father of Bullock’s two godsons.)

  That was just the beginning of the stampede. Democratic congressman Phil Gramm resigned from his seat in 1983, changed parties, and won as a Republican in the special election to replace himself. “It’s the last copter out of ’Nam, and you’d better get on it,” he warned his colleagues. A Democratic state representative named Rick Perry was among those who were listening.

  “But they were such violent Republicans”

  During its Democratic phase Texas, like other Southern states, acquired its clout by sending savvy politicians to Washington and then keeping them there for decades, while they built up seniority. In Congress, Texans munched away at the top of the food chain, as committee chairs and sometimes Speaker of the House (John Nance Garner, Sam Rayburn, Jim Wright) or Senate majority leader (Lyndon Johnson). But they had trouble with the national stage. Texas Democrats were members of a party that was much more liberal than the state they represented, and people in that sort of situation generally do their best work behind the scenes. The most they could hope for was the vice presidency, a job that Garner, who held the post under Franklin Roosevelt, described as not being worth a quart of warm spit. (Or a pitcher or a bucket. This is a famous quote with obscure origins.) Neither Garner nor Johnson, when he held the post, was given anything much to do. And of course no one expected Johnson to wind up stepping in for a president who was nine years his junior.

  Before we go any further, we need to address the mystery of Lyndon Johnson, the president who passed more liberal, transformational domestic legislation than anyone in American history except FDR: Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, a ton of sweeping environmental laws, and the War on Poverty. How did all that come out of Texas? (The war in Vietnam is easier to explain. “Lyndon Johnson was obsessed with the Alamo. It’s creepy,” said Jan Jarboe Russell, the biographer of Lady Bird.)

  But about all that domestic legislation: Johnson came from the Texas hill country outside of Austin, a place with a strong populist tradition going back to the old People’s Party of the late nineteenth century, a national movement of small farmers, working men, and blacks. The Texas version foundered on the black part, but not before it put a special stamp on the politics of Johnson’s part of Texas, which continued to yearn for a government that would help raise people up. The hill country, and Lyndon Johnson, would be ready and waiting when Franklin Roosevelt came along. “His first slogan was ‘Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt. 100 percent for Roosevelt,’ ” said Johnson’s great biographer, Robert Caro.

  Johnson’s mammoth ambition led him into alliances with the Texas business oligarchy that would pay for all his major campaigns. “He gave them what they wanted, which was contracts,” Caro said. “He gave them these immense contracts and they financed his campaigns and the campaigns of people he wanted them to finance.” As a senator, Johnson swung right to accommodate the conservative-to-reactionary Texas forces outside his own district. “But then when he becomes president he changes co
mpletely,” said Caro.

  The politician who, as a young man, had once taught impoverished Mexican American children and swore “if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it,” actually did it. And as long as Johnson was around, he kept the Texas Democrats together, through the sheer force of his overwhelming personality and the great expectations of gain from Washington that his growing powers promised. “Johnson was a very unusual human being,” said Caro.

  But after LBJ was gone from power in 1969, and the Civil Rights Act he had championed was infuriating a generation of segregationist Texans, the conservative part of the Democratic Party broke off and ran for the other side. When they got there, they turned out to be far righter of wing than many folks had appreciated. When Caro started working on his Johnson books, he went to Texas to talk to some of the people who had known the late president. “I think I went down the first time in 1977,” Caro said. “I was sort of astonished, because the people who had backed Johnson, like John Connally and George Brown, they were by this time Republicans. But they were such violent Republicans.”

  “DeLay took things to a much more poisonous level”

  The Texas right wing had been a slightly uncomfortable, inside-player power in the Democratic Party. But once it switched sides, it fit right in. The new Texas Republicans were ready to help turn the rest of the GOP into something more aggressive, more radically conservative, a party ready to do battle for the empty-place ethos with the fighting spirit of the Alamo. Picture William Travis as head of the House Rules Committee.

  It’s not as if the old Texas Democratic flame has died out. San Antonio still worships the memory of liberal icon Henry Gonzalez. Houston has elected a gay Democrat as mayor. To some, Austin may look like Berkeley with low unemployment and country music. But statewide, Texas politics has become a mixture of Tea Party populism and big-business conservatism that fits in perfectly with the national Republican tide.

  There are several reasons why the state got this political tone so fast. For one thing, although money talks loudly in all American politics, it really yells in Texas. The campaign finance laws basically allow any individual to give any amount to anyone, as long as he or she reports it. And Texas has always had more than its fair share of very wealthy people who want to make their opinions felt. Its early history as a semifeudal economy dominated by the cattle barons, oil barons, and mining barons set the pace. Campaigns in Texas tend to be very expensive because it is so big—more than twenty distinct media markets, far more than any other state. Also, voting participation is generally terrible. (In 2010, Maine had the highest turnout in the nation at 56 percent of the eligible population. Texas was dead last at 33 percent.) The record is likely to get worse in the future, thanks to a new voter identification law that is pretty clearly designed to discourage poor people from going to the polls.

  In a one-party state with low turnout and high campaign costs, power flows disproportionately to anyone with the money to organize and advertise. The people with that kind of cash in Texas tend to be extremely conservative. The combined effect of all this is to give the state a relatively united, high-volume voice in national affairs—the voice of the state’s wealth oligarchy, and the wide open spaces.

  The biggest barrier to Texas’s national political influence has been the rest of the country’s suspicion of Texas politicians. Modern history is littered with disastrous Texas presidential candidacies, from John Connally—who proved that money really isn’t everything—to Rick Perry, who demonstrated that good hair won’t get you all that far, either. Other than Lyndon Johnson, who came to office via the Kennedy assassination, the Texans who made it to the White House were people who were born somewhere else. The perfect bridge candidate was George H. W. Bush, a Texas oilman with roots in Connecticut and Kennebunkport, Maine. “H. W. was not a Texan,” said Jim Marston, the director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas office. “We don’t use ‘summer’ as a verb.”

  H. W. had settled with his family in Midland, in that pleasant but extremely modest house where he and Barbara raised their young family, which today still bears testimony to the fact that their oldest son was once both a Boy Scout and a charter member of the Roy Rogers Riders Club. (That was about as close to horses as W. was ever going to get.) A defender of business interests, especially when the business was oil, H. W. was otherwise not actually all that conservative by current standards. As president, he signed a major new civil rights law for the disabled and the Clean Air Act, which his son would ignore as governor and then later undermine when he reached the White House himself. H. W. actually raised taxes. When he got into a war—and it was admittedly a war in which American oil interests had great, um, interests—he brought all of America’s allies on board, and he ended it without trying to topple his main enemy, the farthest thing possible from the Alamo spirit.

  Bush’s middle-of-the-roadness failed to get him a second term. But Congress was changing in ways the empty-place wing of the Texas party was finding much to its liking. Really, things could not have been much better unless Newt Gingrich, the new House Speaker, had been from Amarillo instead of Carrollton, Georgia. Texans found Gingrich’s aim—to create a new Republican majority that was united in right-wing ideology—totally appealing. And the man who would be his majority leader when he came into power was a Texan, Dick Armey, who helped Gingrich write the Contract With America, and who would later be a key organizer of the Tea Party movement. Then there was Tom DeLay, the hard-charging exterminator from the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, who had first decided to run for office when the Environmental Protection Agency banned his favorite product for eliminating fire ants. DeLay inserted himself into the leadership and became whip, the number three House leader. In DeLay’s case, he was a number three with special interests in partisan fighting and obsessive fundraising. “DeLay took things to a different and much more poisonous level,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

  Armey and DeLay, who succeeded him as House majority leader in 2003, were not a team. In fact, Armey once referred to the DeLay camp, with its incessant focus on hot-button social issues, as “those nitwits who took over after we left.” Armey was a libertarian who prided himself on his credentials as an economist, while DeLay was part of the social right who would eventually come to pride himself on cha-cha-cha-ing on Dancing with the Stars. But they had a similar antipathy toward government. DeLay was once asked whether there were any government regulations worth keeping, and responded, “None that I can think of.”

  DeLay oversaw the K Street Project, an effort to reserve all the good lobbying jobs in Washington for Republicans and to punish any special interest group that dared to employ Democrats. Meanwhile, the minority party was elbowed out of any role in the House. Under DeLay, committees began to draft legislation in meetings closed to Democrats, and the product of their work was pushed onto the floor with straight party-line votes. The Democrats had ignored the Republicans in a more polite way when they were in charge, partly because they felt confident of their power and partly because so many Democratic members were conservative. Now the split between the parties was clearer and the domination more brutal.

  And their agenda was totally clear. Lower taxes. Less government. Phil Gramm moved up to the Senate and became a principal architect of financial deregulation. Armey led the Republicans’ successful fight against the Clinton health care plan.

  Meanwhile, back in Texas, George W. Bush had become governor with the help of consultant Karl Rove, who would become almost as influential a player in Texas—and then national—politics as the men whose victories he engineered. (It would be Rove who recruited Rick Perry to run for agricultural commissioner, and put him over the top in a last-minute ad blitz that tied the populist liberal incumbent, Jim Hightower, to the twin sins of flag-burning and shaking hands with Jesse Jackson. (“He was innocent of the former and guilty of the latter,” wrote a trio of political
journalists in their Rove biography, Boy Genius.)

  The first President Bush was an easterner who learned to talk Texan—or at least, to talk like a founder of Zapata Petroleum Corporation. (“I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like,” Ann Richards told the Democratic National Convention in 1988.) His oldest son was, like his father, born in New England. But W. nevertheless grew up as a real Texan, albeit one who was shipped off to school in the East to rub off some of the western edges. As governor, George W. was eager to get along with legislators of both parties and enthusiastic about improving education, particularly for poor and minority children. He was also extremely conservative, especially when it came to the empty-places priority of keeping government small and underfunded. He was a fiend for privatization—the Rove biographers reported in Boy Genius that Bush told one state legislator that he dreamed of privatizing the University of Texas. Previewing another cause he’d champion as president, Governor Bush pressed to give faith-based organizations a bigger role in providing social services. (Texans, after all, could get a child out of a well without government help.) He also pushed through a big tax cut that blew the state surplus and left Texas sitting with a monster deficit, while its architect went to Washington to do exactly the same thing to the country. Once in the White House, Bush II also gave us a huge federal education bill that would remake America’s public schools in the image of the ones in Texas, an energy bill that was drawn up by the energy interests, and two wars.