Lonesome Cowboy
He's rich. He's handsome. He ropes. He rides. And he has four years as land commissioner under his belt. So why do so many Republicans (let alone Democrats) hope David Dewhurst is not the next lieutenant governor of Texas?
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Dewhurst defends his action, arguing that if he had abstained from voting—the only other choice as he saw it—he would have thrown redistricting into the courts. Apparently acting as a broker never occurred to him. He has tried to make amends, speaking with all sixteen Republican senators and most Democrats to try to explain himself. He believes he has healed the wounds. “I think that all these Republican senators know where my heart was,” he says. But Wentworth, for one, still feels aggrieved: “He tried to defend what he did, and I still disagree with him.”
Another problem for Dewhurst is that he has left himself vulnerable to being portrayed as an ultraconservative Republican, as opposed to a mainstream conservative. In March he got caught in a controversy involving the right-wing group FreePAC (short for Free Market Political Action Committee). In a mailing to GOP primary voters, FreePAC claimed that six GOP legislators (including Ratliff and Wentworth) supported policies favored by “radical homosexuals” and Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The mailing included photographs of two men kissing. Led by Ratliff, GOP state officials and many legislators condemned the mailing, as did Dewhurst. But it turned out that Dewhurst had been a major donor to FreePAC in the nineties, in the amount of $84,500. He stopped giving to the group in 1999, the year it began targeting incumbent Republicans it considered insufficiently pure. But that information got lost in the larger news story, the gist of which was: Dewhurst Funds Fanatical Right-Wing Group.
The FreePAC controversy is not likely to be remembered by voters in November. Among insiders, however, it has the effect of making Dewhurst seem even quirkier, more mysterious than he already is. Without any coaching from Dewhurst’s opponents, a reasonable person might well conclude from this episode that he really is a right-wing ideologue who doesn’t fit with the mainstream of his party. You don’t have to talk to him for long before you realize that he is very much a creature of the mainstream. But that is not how John Sharp will describe him.
The general election is still five months away, but the signs are that Dewhurst and Sharp will soon be blasting away at each other’s records as officeholders, saying how poorly the other did in managing his state agency. In a year when the state faces a possible $5 billion hole in the budget, both men are selling their abilities as managers—Sharp as a former state comptroller and Dewhurst as a businessman and state agency budget-cutter.
They have already clashed over Dewhurst’s Land Office budget cuts. In advertisements, Dewhurst claimed that he had cut his agency’s budget by 25 percent. Sharp disputed that, saying that Dewhurst had made cuts of only 4 percent—a position supported by newspaper stories and editorials. Who is right? Dewhurst justifies his claim with two numbers: the $53.5 million annual budget he inherited from his predecessor, Garry Mauro, for fiscal year 1999 and the $40.56 million in expenditures reported officially by the General Land Office for 2000, the first year Dewhurst had full control of his budget—a drop of 24.2 percent, not quite 25 percent but, as they say, close enough for government work. Sharp bases his claim on the $48.5 million the General Land Office spent in 1999, the fiscal year Mauro and Dewhurst split as land commissioners, and the $46.6 million he says Dewhurst’s GLO spent in 2000, citing a Legislative Budget Board analysis. Both sides’ numbers are questionable. By the time Dewhurst took office, Mauro himself had previously recommended, and legislative budget writers had accepted, a $6 million reduction for 2000, which Dewhurst subsequently reduced even more. Dewhurst shouldn’t be able to take credit for the Mauro reduction; his portion of the budget cut amounts to 15 percent—not 25 percent, but still substantial. Sharp’s $46.6 million figure for GLO spending in 2000 was way off: it was only a Land Office estimate (not a budget board analysis), which turned out to be $6 million higher than what Dewhurst, correctly, had said he spent. As with all budgeting disputes, this one may seem pretty arcane, but it is important because Dewhurst, who achieved most of his savings by firing 103 people in his first week on the job, plans to attack Sharp for expanding the comptroller’s budget during eight years in office. In any case, Dewhurst is not alone in believing he ran a tight ship. “I don’t mind saying that David has done a good job running that agency,” says House Appropriations Committee chairman Rob Junell, a Democrat who is supporting Sharp. Still, the skirmish is classic Dewhurst: When Sharp attacked, Dewhurst was unable to explain his numbers to the media and wound up losing round one of the public relations battle.
Later, he somehow managed to lose the endorsement of the state’s biggest business association. In February the Texas Association of Business and Chambers of Commerce, which is supporting Republicans in every other race and of which Dewhurst is a former officer, threw its support to Sharp. The setback resulted from a combination of his failure to anticipate Sharp’s challenge of his numbers—Dewhurst admits that he did little advance work—and being outperformed by Sharp when the two made a joint appearance at a TABCC luncheon.
On Dewhurst’s side is his money, which he will use mainly to buy television and radio advertisements, and a built-in six- to eight-point tilt among Texas voters toward Republicans. Sharp has a distinguished record in Texas politics—he has served as a House member, a senator, and a railroad commissioner and as comptroller for eight years, and he narrowly lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Rick Perry in 1998. He has substantial Republican support; Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan heads Republicans and Independents for Sharp. He also stands to benefit from the presence of gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez and U.S. Senate candidate Ron Kirk on the Democratic ticket this year. If Hispanic and black voters turn out in large numbers, Sharp will get a huge lift. Look for Sharp to paint Dewhurst as an extremist, a far-right-winger who contributes to groups like FreePAC—even though Dewhurst’s pet issues are shared by many Republicans: He wants to raise education standards and give teachers more money, improve access to higher education, and streamline the health-care system.
No matter what the big issues turn out to be, the 2002 campaign for lieutenant governor may well come down to money. Sharp and Dewhurst are like the fox and the hedgehog in the old fable. The fox, you’ll recall, knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing. Sharp is the fox, a wily veteran politician with a lot of allies and friends and a vast store of knowledge about state government. Dewhurst, the hedgehog, knows that he can afford to drop $25 million on this campaign compared to Sharp’s $8 million to $10 million. And that is a big thing indeed.
If David Dewhurst has a natural constituency, it is probably women. This is no doubt partly because he is tall and good-looking. But there is something else too, and it is obvious when you see him in public. Women like him, and he likes them. He is at ease around them, something that isn’t true when he is in the male-dominated world of the Capitol, where he seems stiff, formal, wary, and a little out of place. At the monthly dinner of the Austin Young Women’s Alliance in April, his comfort level is obvious. The event takes place in the banquet room at Truluck’s restaurant. He circulates, leaning down from his six feet five inches to talk to his hosts. One of the women is from the complex where he has an apartment, called the Gables on Town Lake, in Austin. They know each other. They are telling me, jointly, a story about roping.”I drove in one night and saw the strangest thing,” the woman says with a laugh. “There was a man practicing roping out in the parking lot. Then I saw who it was.”
“You’re kidding,” I say to her, looking at him.
“Unfortunately she isn’t,” he says.
“He had this little toy sort of cow, and he was throwing the rope at it.”
“But in the parking lot?” I ask, still not convinced that Dewhurst was actually doing this. The small crowd around us is laughing now.
“Well, you see,” he says, grinning, “I had some roping events coming up, and I needed to practice. I have this roping steer made out of metal. So sometimes I practice. In the parking lot.” More laughter.
“A couple of drunk guys showed up and tried it,” says the woman.
“That was pretty funny,” he says.
I can’t imagine another politician who would be standing in the parking lot of an apartment complex roping a metal cow. Who is the real David Dewhurst? He’s the Republican party’s lonesome cowboy.
With reporting by Susan Currie.
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