Two for Texas
Why are former Aggie buddies John Sharp and Rick Perry battling so ferociously for the job of lieutenant governor? Because they think George W. Bush could win the White House, and then they'd be number one.
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Sharp has made the most of this power. When the state faced a fiscal crisis in 1991, his first year in office, the entire budget-writing process was put on hold while he looked for ways to save money. Eventually he came up with $5 billion worth of suggestions, and the Legislature accepted enough of them to avoid having to pass a tax bill. Since then the process has been repeated in every legislative session, and now Sharp can claim that his proposals have saved the state $8.5 billion. Perry’s supporters attack that number, arguing, for example, that much of the savings was the result of accounting tricks, such as delaying payments to school districts for a week, into the next fiscal year. But the alternative was a tax increase or deep spending cuts. The accounting “tricks” bought time for economic and population growth to produce enough tax revenue to erase the cash flow shortage. Sharp also found ways for Texas to qualify for more than a billion dollars in new federal funds, something legislators had been trying to do for years. His office developed the Lone Star card for welfare recipients that reduced fraud and the Texas Tomorrow Fund that allows parents to prepay the cost of their child’s tuition at state universities at current prices.
As recently as eight years ago, when Bob Bullock was comptroller and successfully ran for lieutenant governor, record and experience were all that were necessary to be elected. (Bullock, who opted not to run for reelection this year, is even less of a made-for-TV politician than Sharp.) Lobbyists and business leaders have traditionally relied on the lieutenant governor to keep the Legislature from spinning out of control. They determined who got campaign contributions, and outsiders (especially Republicans) need not apply. But Sharp’s opportunity to move up has occurred at the exact moment when the old order is on the brink of collapse. More and more, the determining factors in 1998 appear to be personality and party—and those strengths belong to Rick Perry.
Republican Versus Democrat
THIS IS THE YEAR TEXAS REPUBLICANS have been waiting for. All the fortunes of politics appear to be aligned in their favor: the unraveling of Bill Clinton, the popularity of George W. Bush, the catastrophic candidacy of Garry Mauro, and a huge advantage over the Democrats in fundraising. A GOP sweep of all statewide offices and both houses of the Legislature is getting more likely every day. The danger for Democrats is that their loyalists will be so dispirited that they won’t even bother to vote.
Republican candidates may be getting to the point where they hold an advantage once held by Democrats: Voters who know nothing about two candidates except which party they belong to tend to pick the Republican. Even when they recognize the Democrat, they may prefer an unknown Republican. Sharp holds a twenty-point advantage over Perry in name identification, but Perry has a small lead in most polls.
Sharp says that voters know and approve of the things he has done; they just don’t know he did them. “I’ve got to connect up the dots,” he says. He plans to spend more than $5 million on television, a gargantuan sum for a down-ballot race, to get the message out. Perry’s media strategy is to match Sharp in expenditures, focus on a couple of issues such as education and crime, look great, and end with a low-key plea: “If you agree with me, I’d like to be your lieutenant governor.” But his larger strategy is to freeze the ball: Stick to a few simple issues, don’t make any mistakes, grab Bush’s coattails, don’t make any mistakes, and let the clock run to November 3. It is a front-runner’s game plan, and GOP strategists are totally confident that it will work. The math is all on Perry’s side. If the turnout is 4.5 million—100,000 more than voted in 1994—and Bush gets 60 percent of the votes, he will pile up a 900,000 vote margin. To defeat Perry, Sharp would have to persuade 450,000 voters to abandon the GOP. If either the turnout or Bush’s margin is higher, Sharp will be have to reverse more than 500,000 votes: possible, but not likely. The best scenario for a Sharp victory is a low turnout among Republicans because of overconfidence: again, possible, but not likely.
Relations between the Bush and the Perry campaign staffs have been less than smooth at times. Perry’s camp complained when Bush hired Mark McKinnon of Austin, a former Democratic consultant, to handle the governor’s media campaign; Bush’s camp was miffed by a draft of a press release from the Perry campaign saying that Perry was happy to have Bush as a running mate. (It’s supposed to be the other way around.) More tension arose when Bush didn’t accept Perry’s recommendation for a judicial appointment. But Bush and Perry need each other too much to get mad. Perry, whose campaign hasn’t husbanded its money as well as Sharp’s has, needs Bush to help raise more money so that he can match Sharp on television. Bush has to have a Republican lieutenant governor so that his potential presidential rivals can’t use against him the argument that if he is elected president, he would have to turn over the governorship of the second-largest state to a Democrat. How important is this race to Bush’s future? Important enough that his father, the former president of the United States, has developed a deep interest in the Texas lieutenant governor’s race and is actively raising money for Rick Perry.
Aggie Versus Aggie
JUST AFTER LABOR DAY, SHARP’S FIRST TV spots began running in major markets. The first-strike strategy came as a surprise to Perry’s handlers, who had expected their opponent’s TV blitz to start in early October. This kind of ploy is a Sharp trademark; he loves to throw his rivals off balance and make them obsessed with what he is going to do next. In the early phase of the campaign, Perry took the bait. He put his energy into fighting for endorsements instead of getting up to speed on state issues. Reporting on Perry’s appearance at the Texas Farm Bureau’s state convention last fall, the newsletter of the conservative Lone Star Foundation described his talk as “top-heavy with sincerity and slogans and light on ideas concerning the office he seeks.” The commissioner of agriculture ended up losing the endorsement of the Farm Bureau.
Those directionless days appear to be over: Within a day of Sharp’s opening media salvo, Perry answered with media spots of his own. “Running for statewide office is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he told me. “I thought the freshman year at A&M was tough. Air Force flight training was tougher. Their job is to wash you out. But nothing I’ve ever done takes more discipline and focus than running a statewide race.”
The need for discipline and focus is not likely to dissipate after Election Day. Neither Sharp nor Perry can count on having the degree of power that Bob Bullock, and before him Bill Hobby, exercised. The powers of the lieutenant governor are not written in stone. No law bestows upon the lite-guv the right to name committee chairs, to appoint the membership of committees, to determine what senators can pass bills on what days. These powers are customary, and customs can change.
One custom that changed in 1997 is that the Senate majority became Republican for the first time in this century. The GOP caucus is unlikely to seize the powers of the lieutenant governor for itself, but it will be able to win concessions nevertheless. The wishes of a large bloc of senators with a common bond are something that no lieutenant governor can ignore. Formally the lieutenant governor’s powers will remain unchanged; in practice, some degree of the lite-guv’s power has already flowed out of his office to be absorbed by individual senators. Sharp or Perry will need to be extremely skillful (or extremely docile) to be effective. Whoever wins is likely to have some rough going in the 1999 legislative session.
And perhaps the winner will find the 2001 session a lot more to his liking: If George W. Bush makes it all the way to the White House, Rick Perry or John Sharp will become the next governor of Texas.
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