Tony Sanchez's New Deal
The multimillionaire oilman and banker from Laredo has never held elective office, is personally pro-life, and has been one of George W. Bush's biggest financial backers—none of which pegs him as the ideal Democratic candidate for governor. So why does the party see him as its savior?
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Sanchez showed that day that he can think on his feet and tell a crowd what it wants to hear. But the maps and calculations in his Laredo war room had better be right or it won't make much difference what he says. Republicans predicted that George W. Bush's popularity would turn out 4.2 million voters in the 1998 governor's race against Garry Mauro. Turnout was mediocre, just 3.7 million, but Bush won by 1.4 million votes—69 percent to 31 percent. Today Republicans in Texas are thought to enjoy an advantage of about eight percentage points right off the bat. With insiders expecting a turnout of more than 5 million people in next year's election, Sanchez must find about 416,000 new voters to overcome that handicap. Will they come out? People who talk about creating new voters generally lose elections.
But Sanchez and his team are convinced he can win. Sanchez's political consultants include the old pro George Shipley. "We're gonna drive right through the heart of the Republican party, campaigning in the suburbs among the moderate Republicans and those disgusted with the far right," Shipley told me. "But there are also a million registered Hispanic voters who have not voted in the past two gubernatorial elections, and there are a lot of eligible Hispanics who haven't registered. In the past twelve years, no Hispanic candidate of either party with sufficient funding has lost a statewide race."
Republicans have their own ideas. "I've spoken with eight different reporters about this," says Mike Baselice, a pollster who works for Perry. "And I get a little aggravated. I'm not spinning—I'm giving you real numbers! One out of six voters in Texas—seventeen percent—has a Hispanic name. The idea that the Democrats can push that to twenty percent just because Sanchez is Hispanic is wishful thinking. And even if they could, that moves him one point in the general election. Perry's getting thirty percent of the Hispanic vote, which is not bad—most Republicans get about twenty-five percent. By 2020 the Republicans had better be offering more Hispanic candidates or the Democrats will start winning seats back. But that change is not going to happen overnight. It takes years. Frankly, I don't think the Republicans have peaked in Texas."
A challenger must prove he is both viable and credible. Sanchez's wealth and intelligence make him viable; some doubts persist about his credibility. Tesoro. The Cuellar affair. In 1992 Sanchez persisted in drilling a natural gas well under Falcon State Park and the adjoining Rio Grande reservoir; he had only recently finished his term as a member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, to which Governor Mark White had appointed him. The campaign rebuttal: Sanchez Oil and Gas has never been cited by the state for a single environmental infraction.
Appointed by Governor Bush to the University of Texas Board of Regents in 1997, Sanchez has had a stormy tenure. Winning the lasting enmity of some in the Austin arts community, he helped persuade the board to scuttle a design for a museum on campus. At the law school, he called for the firing of conservative professor Lino Graglia, who said Hispanics and African Americans do not view failure as a disgrace. Sanchez burned his bridges with the regents when he complained that a list of candidates for the presidency of the UT Health and Science Center in San Antonio did not include a Mexican American. Sanchez won the battle, his candidate eventually got the job, but in the war he wrote a letter accusing the Bush-appointed board of institutional racism. Sanchez still holds his seat among the regents, but he told me, "They've cut me out of it. I'm not consulted anymore." Yet even as an announced candidate for governor, he has declined to resign.
The campaign rebuttal: Sanchez admits he can be abrupt, but he's no hothead or bull in a china shop. He more resembles George W. Bush, another businessman without a government portfolio, than the hapless Clayton Williams in 1990. One Sanchez consultant told me that the experience with the regents soured him on Republicans and moved him back to the Democrats. "The message was pretty clear to him," the consultant said. "'You're not one of us, Tony. You don't belong in this club.'"
Observers also fault him for erecting his wall of "no comment" and failing to take advantage of the blistering publicity Perry received with his vetoes in June. He didn't even protest when the Republicans handed themselves a majority in House redistricting and humiliated moderate Speaker Pete Laney. Perhaps Sanchez is putting together a race that is modeled on Bush's upset of Richards in 1994. Start working the state early but keep the press out of it. Go to issues college and develop just a few as the core. Stick to the message.
But Sanchez has to deliver his base for his strategy to work. He has Cisneros organizing—in a "nonpartisan" capacity—to register and turn out Hispanics. Sanchez could benefit from black turnout if Dallas mayor Ron Kirk winds up as the Democratic nominee for Gramm's vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. But Democrats have a long history of going fishing when they lack enthusiasm for their candidates.
He also has to fight to bring women to his side the way he did in Austin. He can do that by continuing to answer two questions: why he abandoned Ann Richards and what his policy on choice will be. Sanchez told me that nothing in particular caused him to break with Richards. He said he was just tired of politicians loving South Texans in November and ignoring them in December, and Bush had the sense to visit him and share ideas about education. But staffers from both camps explain the Richards dispute in terms of concrete and trucks. Following the 1990 election, one Laredo group, aligned with Sanchez and one of his banks, the International Bank of Commerce, wanted a toll road that would connect Interstate 35 with an international bridge outside town. Another group, aligned with the archrival Laredo National Bank, thought business in the city would wither if sixteen-wheeler traffic was diverted. Local politicians were hotly divided, and Sanchez, who had contributed to Richards' 1990 campaign, hoped she would deliver for his side with the board of the Texas Department of Transportation. When she didn't, the two butted heads. Soon after that, Sanchez started writing checks to Bush.
His stand on abortion has been problematic as well. Just before this September's announcement swing, in a widely read story, Sanchez sent a tremor of alarm through many women by seeming to hedge on his commitment to choice. He told the Star-Telegram that he favored not only parental notification but also parental consent for teenagers seeking an abortion. "The pro-choice community has been patiently waiting to find out where he stands," says Susan Hays, a Dallas Democrat and lawyer. "When he says he's in support of parental consent, I'm sorry, I'm outta there. That may sound good in the polls, but it does not envision the frequent circumstance of a girl with an abusive father. I cannot think of anyone more powerless in our society than a pregnant teenager."
Yet not all Democratic women are driven by this issue. Zaffirini, who is also personally pro-life, has been his friend since they were children; their parents stood up at each other's weddings. She's had her fallings-out with Sanchez in Laredo—she came down on the other side in the dispute over the toll road. But she argues that if Texans fault Sanchez for some of the mistakes he has made in Laredo, they should also applaud him for what he's done right. For example, in 1992 Sanchez lost his father to leukemia, and in 1998 he lost a sister to ovarian cancer. "His way of dealing with that personal tragedy," said Zaffirini, "was to bring Laredo a superb cancer center. Later, when he heard his children complaining about having nothing to do in Laredo, he brought the city a first-rate distinguished lecture series. I imagine he's proudest of Laredo having a four-year university, because achieving it was such a prolonged and frustrating battle. His dad started lobbying for it in 1967. It finally happened in 1993."
Another Laredo woman who admires him publishes LareDOS, the best alternative newspaper on the border. Meg Guerra is a sixties rowdy who "came home to grow up," she told me with a smile. She has known Sanchez many years, and though he told her when she launched her monthly paper that it would be a losing business proposition, he and his bank have been supportive. Her editor, Carol Brochin, first encountered Sanchez when he was a regent and she was a University of Texas student protesting the remarks of law professor Lino Graglia. "He was formal, a little aloof," Brochin said of Sanchez. "Like he didn't know if he was supposed to be talking to students. But it was exciting just to discover that one of those regents was Hispanic. And in the end he came through for us."
When I mentioned the oft-stated Democratic remark that it is simply time for a Hispanic governor in Texas—in the same way it was time for women when Richards and Kay Bailey Hutchison won their races at the top of the ballot—Brochin grinned, cocked her head, and amended, "No. It's about time for Hispanics."
"How refreshing," Guerra quipped about Sanchez's qualities as a politician, "that he didn't have to go to Guanajuato to learn Spanish." Both women seemed surprised when I described a common Austin perception that Sanchez is a substitute for the name-brand Hispanic, Cisneros. "Tony has palanca," Guerra said. "Henry's time has maybe come and passed." I asked her what "palanca" means. She thought a moment and said, "It means 'effectiveness. Political currency.'"
The publisher continued: "My son, who's twenty-seven, is all fired up about Tony. We're seeing a lot of that. For me, an important measure is that Tony was here with his wife all those years, raising those kids. They're good people. One Thanksgiving not long ago, he and his family made and served dinner to homeless people at the shelter. This was before the talk about the governor's race, so he wasn't doing it for that. Tony's not like the politicians we've seen in Texas in recent years. You look into him, and the guy checks out."
Sanchez doesn't inspire all Hispanics, even in his hometown. A former migrant farmworker and stalwart in Laredo politics stretched his mouth at my mention of Sanchez. "He's a Spaniard," the man said. But the enthusiasm of youths like Brochin and Guerra's son are the intriguing surprise of the Sanchez campaign. Young, well-educated professionals are exactly the group of Hispanics that Republicans think they can coax away from the Democrats. I keep thinking about the youth I had heard about who could command a six-figure salary in the corporate world; instead, he's rattling around the Eagle Pass barrio in an old car, banging on doors and getting out the vote. Tony Sanchez has not demonstrated much charisma, but somehow within him, there is some jazz. And he's got the ear of a constituency that neither party can afford to alienate or ignore.
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