George W. Bush Interview With Mark K. Updegrove (Audio) 
Wyatt’s World: Slideshow 
The Devil and Bob Bullock: Video 
The Honeymoon Is Over
For two years the relationship between George W. Bush, Bob Bullock, and Pete Laney was all hugs and kisses. But now that the Governor has presidential potential and a partisan agenda, the state’s top Democrats aren’t swooning anymore.
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For all the speculation about Bush’s future, he still acts like a person who does not take himself too seriously, in contrast to just about any national candidate you can think of (although, come to think of it, the tie that he is wearing—royal blue with widely spaced white stars—does look very presidential). He banters with everybody who crosses his path, interrupts a policy discussion to talk about the American League championship series between the Rangers and the Yankees (“The fourth game was the greatest public event of my life”), and in general seems to be having a grand old time. One hears a lot of grim comments around the Capitol about the likelihood of a legislative meltdown, including a few from Bush’s own advisers—but none from the governor himself. “I’m more sanguine than they are,” he told me, invoking a word not often heard from politicians in the soundbite era. Maybe his baseball background as president of the then-hapless Rangers instilled in him the eternal optimism of the underdog: In spring training, every team thinks it has a chance to win.
Still, Bush is dead serious about property tax relief; he kept the issue alive for a year when no one else around the Capitol, including his own staff, saw much future in it. The reason has everything to do with his political ambition—but not because of the presidency. Bush’s basic approach to politics is that the way to success is to do what you said you were going to do, and as a candidate for governor in 1994, Bush said that the state needed to pay more of the cost of education. It is not hard to figure out where Bush’s philosophy about cam-paign promises comes from. Remember “Read my lips, no new taxes?” Few politicians in America have had such intimate experience with the cost of failing to keep a campaign promise as George W. Bush.
But he is equally adamant that he will not recommend a specific plan to the Legislature. Publicly, he takes the high road—“My job as governor is to anticipate the problems and elevate the discourse,” he said last January—and leaves the low road of dealing with the details to the Legislature. Privately, however, he has been known to say in front of staffers, “Your governor is no fool,” and then he launches into a lecture about how a thousand lobbyists—and at least that many school superintendents and politicians—are just waiting for a chance to shoot down the first proposal that surfaces.
This much is known about the governor’s “outline.” He wants $4 billion to $5 billion of property tax relief, enough to raise the state’s share of education costs from the current 47 percent to the neighborhood of 60 percent. He has embraced Bullock’s suggestion to raise the $5,000 homestead exemption, so that the first, say, $25,000 of a home’s value would be nontaxable. He would make up for the lost funds with $1 billion from the surplus, a one-half-cent sales tax increase (alert! alert! Republican legislators have been telling the governor that they can’t support it), and some sort of business tax (red alert!). As for what sort of business tax and as for how the funds can be redistributed to school districts in a way that is fair and equitable (abandon ship!), well, that’s why the Texas Constitution created the Legislature. And that’s why Bush needs his political honeymoon to last one more session.
“DID YOU EVER GET IN TROUBLE and want somebody to share your troubles with you?” Bob Bullock asks. “Well, the governor is in trouble and he wants Pete and me to share his troubles with him.” He is sitting at a long table in his Capitol office, accompanied by an ever-present cigarette that he stuffs straight down into an ashtray designed to stifie smoke. In contrast to Bush, who conducts a conversation as if it were a symphony, Bullock is a man of great economy of movement. Even his smiles are slight, if eloquent; the difference between pleasure and irony is just a slight lift of a brow. At the moment, the brow is up.
“I’m genuinely fond of him,” Bullock says of Bush. “He’s a fine person. He says that when he makes a campaign promise, he’s given his word. I admire that a lot. But he wants Pete and me, without a bill, to say we’re with him without knowing who is affected and what it would do.”
One reason that Bullock isn’t likely to be moved to share Bush’s troubles is that he has ample troubles of his own. He is the highest-ranking Democratic officeholder in a Republican state and will be the GOP’s number one target in 1998. He presides over a Senate whose majority will soon be Republican. (The GOP emerged from election day with a 15 to 14 lead and is favored to win the two seats that must be decided in special elections.) His power to run the Senate—to appoint chairmen and committee members and to control the daily agenda—stems from tradition, not law; the GOP majority could take it for themselves and will be under pressure from party leaders to do just that. But they won’t. At 67, Bullock knows everything about Texas politics and politicians that there is to know—and he isn’t shy about using that knowledge. He has already fired one broadside at Republican senators for being too partisan. He later backed off, and he will make it up to them (Republicans already have two of the three major committee chairmanships and, Bullock says, they will get their first majority on the budget-writing committee), but the message was sent and received.
Property tax relief, as they might say in the Legislature, is the fiy in the ointment that could upset the applecart. The last thing someone in Bullock’s position needs is to bear the responsibility for a tax bill to address an issue that he doesn’t believe currently exists. (“I haven’t had any senators coming in here saying that we’ve got to do something about property taxes,” he says.) A former state comptroller, Bullock understands the ins and outs of taxes better than anyone in the Capitol; during our interview, he rattled off fiaw after fiaw in the ideas coming out of the governor’s office—this one was unconstitutional, that one was uncollectable, another one was tried in Florida and had to be repealed. Right now, no one is equipped to challenge him on tax policy, which is one big reason Bush wants the Legislature to take the lead. No dice. “Until the governor says, ‘This is what I want,’” says Bullock, “and shows me how these proposals will work, I’ve gone as far as I can go.”
The situation in the House is more emotional than substantive. Laney and his conservative Democrat lieutenants were the target of a Republican drive to win a majority of the 150-member House. The GOP gained only four of the twelve seats they needed, but the scale, coordination, and intensity of the effort were astonishing. GOP challengers routinely spent more than $100,000—a sum that is almost unheard of in House races, especially for opponents of well-funded incumbents. Many of the targeted Democrats had supported Bush’s legislative package; yet, they were attacked for voting against some of the hundreds of amendments that were offered—amendments that the sponsors of the bills, who were working with the governor, also opposed. All but two incumbents won, but those who survived return with bruised feelings. And that includes Laney. Bush’s grab at the surplus didn’t help. It was seen as unilateral and partisan; the bipartisan approach would have been to consult first, act later.
The Democrats now know that they are fighting a war of attrition: They will face the same sort of Republican effort every election year until they lose or retire; either way, their successor will, in all probability, be a Republican. They know, too, that if the property tax relief bill gets onto the fioor, the Republicans will come up with amendments, just as they did in 1995, that have no other purpose than to create campaign issues in 1998—for example, making it all but impossible for local governments to raise property taxes, period. And Bush won’t be able to stop it. The conservative Democrats, for all practical purposes, are extinct.
Can there be a second honeymoon? Bush insists that it is possible. “I believe that this session is going to be much more harmonious than people think,” he says. “All we have to do is find common ground.” Perhaps that is a signal that he will end up settling for Bullock’s suggestion of homeowner property tax relief and a sales tax increase. If, somehow, he gets everything he wants—if he emerges from the session with tax relief and spending cuts and the friendship of Bullock and Laney—and positions himself for a run at the presidency, he deserves it.
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