Mr. Right
Can you name the most influential Republican in Texas? It's not Rick Perry or any other elected official. It's James Leninger, a little-known San Antonio physician whose ideology and millions are pushing the GOP to be more conservative than ever.
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Leininger's giving to other candidates, causes, and charities is also substantial. Since 2000, he has given $100,000 to Texans for Lawsuit Reform and another $200,000 to state Republican PACs. His federal-level contributions since 1999 total nearly $250,000. He has given large amounts to national right-to-life groups and Texas pro-life organizations, as well as to nonpolitical entities such as the Baptist Hospital Foundation, the University of Miami School of Medicine, and Vanderbilt University. He has given millions to send San Antonio children from low-income families to private schools. He has also set up several charitable foundations with combined assets in the millions of dollars. On top of all that, he has funneled large sums of money to the Republican Party of Texas, to entities promoting taxpayer-funded school vouchers, and to the state's top Republican officials, Governor Rick Perry in particular.
"He is in his own category because he has had the intent and the sophistication to create this interconnected web of political organizations," says Samantha Smoot, of the Texas Freedom Network. "There is no funder on either side of the political spectrum in Texas who has created an operation like James Leininger's, and that's why he's so dangerous." But Leininger's friends contend that because he puts his money where his heart is, activists like Smoot wrongly paint him as an extremist. "He's committed, he's wealthy, and he's very concerned about people like the children of San Antonio," says Ray Hannigan, KCI's former CEO. "If he were a liberal Democrat, PBS would be doing a documentary on him. But he's a so-called religious conservative, so therefore he's 'evil.'"
IN THE ORBIT OF ANY POLITICAL party, there are those who want to advance particular issues, those who are more interested in advancing the party as a whole, and those, like James Leininger, who want to do both. The two specters of Leininger—the philosophical conservative and the partisan one—have hovered over his participation in the school-voucher movement and in Republican party politics. While ideology and strategy are hardly mutually exclusive, inevitably there comes a time when they conflict, as Texas Republicans well know.
Not so many years ago, the Republican party in Texas might as well have had its headquarters at the Petroleum Club in Midland, for like the Petroleum Club, it was a small group of mostly well-off white men and their wives, many of them transplants from other states, who tended to be interested in foreign policy and golf. Although Texans voted in 1961 to send Republican John Tower to the U.S. Senate, it wasn't until 1978, when Bill Clements was elected to the governor's office, that the Republican party began to gain a real footing in state politics. And because the party took shape during the eighties, its identity was very much forged in the fires of those years. Ronald Reagan's election helped bring blue-collar Democratic voters to the GOP, and right on Reagan's heels came the rise of the Christian conservative movement, which spurred home-schoolers and abortion foes to stand as precinct chairs and attend the party's conventions. Thus, at the same time that Republican appeal was growing broader in Texas, the state party, as an institution, began to see more and more participation from a particular group of activists with a social agenda.
That tension persisted into the mid-nineties, when all of a sudden a massive new object barreled into the Texas Republican cosmos, Planet Bush-Rove, exerting its own strong gravitational pull. Its presence played a large role in bringing about the Republican sweep of statewide offices in 1998, and its departure for Washington, D.C., left a vacuum that the party, even as it aims to retain those offices and win control of the state House, has yet to fill. With the GOP likely to win a House majority, it's safe to assume that large new tax proposals will not emerge from the next Legislature; most other bets are off. What can be predicted, however, is that if Perry is reelected, David Dewhurst wins the lieutenant governor's race, and the Republicans gain enough seats in the House to elect Midland Republican Tom Craddick as Speaker, Leininger—who has contributed lavishly to all three—will have the ear of the most powerful figures in state government.
Then again, it's not obvious what difference that will make. Leininger's contributions have had the largest impact when directed toward a relatively circumscribed arena, such as the State Board of Education, or when connected to a much broader coalition, as has been the case with tort reform. His most prominent cause before the Legislature, by contrast, did not succeed. Leininger was the principal funder of Putting Children First (PCF), a group that lobbied for school vouchers during the 1997 legislative session; the PCF also turned to Texas Justice Foundation president Allan Parker and the Texas Public Policy Foundation for tactical support. Though the PCF attempted to cast itself as a bipartisan, coalition-based entity, it was the direct descendant of a group called the A+PAC for Parental School Choice, which had given $587,000 to Republicans, among them the long-shot opponent of House Speaker Pete Laney, versus $8,500 to Democrats.
School vouchers first caught Leininger's attention in 1991, when he read an article about a private voucher program in Indianapolis founded by insurance mogul Patrick Rooney. He fancied starting one in Texas, and as with other Leininger notions, it soon became reality. He advanced a substantial amount of money, asked other local businesspeople to do the same, and in 1992 launched the CEO Foundation, to help San Antonio children of low-income families afford private-school tuition. Two years later he and other funders further pledged $50 million to start a second voucher program, in San Antonio's Edgewood Independent School District. By focusing on one famously poor school district, the program had the potential to serve as a political demonstration project as well as a charity. In the meantime, Leininger's voucher interest had connected him to a network of wealthy supporters around the country, including Rooney, Wal-Mart heir John Walton, and Robert Cone, a Republican businessman in Pennsylvania, all of whom had contributed to a PAC in California that in turn contributed to the A+PAC.
To many a Republican consultant plotting strategy in the mid-nineties, vouchers were surely an appealing issue, the campaign Hula Hoop that would replace stale causes like term limits. In theory, vouchers would appeal to Christian conservatives who home-schooled their kids or sent them to Christian schools, to urban minorities whose kids were stuck in the worst public schools, and to the core of Republicans who preferred the free market to government on principle. Nevertheless, according to Austin entrepreneur Jimmy Mansour, who chaired the A+PAC and then the PCF, Leininger's enthusiasm for vouchers had nothing to do with strategy. "I was involved in this political effort for eight, ten years, and you run into all kinds of people, and many have a personal agenda," says Mansour. "Jim does not. His motives are clean. He thinks it's a way to help kids who are trapped in poor schools. He knows many of the kids [in San Antonio's voucher programs]. He's learned their names, followed their careers."
Putting Children First, however, could not escape its partisan aura, which Leininger had helped endow. (In particular, it could hardly expect support from Laney.) "We were supposed to be a moderate voice," says Greg Talley, the executive director of Putting Children First. "My charge was to go out and get a broader voice. We had a big chunk of LULAC [the Hispanic advocacy group] board members, we had [black Houston Democrat] Ron Wilson, and then we had some more traditional business guys. But there was no way to get away from Leininger, and the opposition would tie Leininger around us, like they knew it would scare people off." While no voucher bill made it out of committee, a last-minute amendment forced a vote on a pilot program; the amendment failed by a one-vote margin.
In the end, the Texas voucher battles fought in the nineties were about perception more than policy, says House Committee on Education chair Paul Sadler, a Democrat. "As long as the public believes we are underfunding public education and there's a single dime [spent on vouchers], it's a problem." Because of the money behind vouchers, Sadler adds, many legislators were reluctant to address the issue at all. "I had a large number of members on both sides of the aisle that simply did not want the issue to come up for a vote. Clearly there was a feeling that they didn't want to face an opponent in the next election. If I was a Republican member and Leininger said he was going to put money into my opponent, then I really would not want to vote on that. It's the same with tort reform; if Texans for Lawsuit Reform has threatened members with opponents, then they just as soon would not vote on tort reform." (Sadler says that he has never heard any such threats made directly, but that a little rumor goes a long way.)
Public support for vouchers, meanwhile, never swelled the way Republican consultants hoped it would. Even many religious conservatives opposed vouchers, out of concern that they would lead to government involvement in private education. The kiss of death for vouchers came the following year, when the news media got hold of a fundraising letter from Putting Children First asking wealthy out-of-state donors to give money to another effort to unseat Laney. Then-lieutenant governor Bob Bullock, who had joined PCF's board, promptly resigned from the board, and as Talley tells it, "Mansour got one of those classic ass chewings from Bullock." The letter incident, according to Talley, "was enough of a tread on our back that all of us sort of chilled on being school-choice advocates."
Leininger himself "never really put any pressure on us," says Talley. Nevertheless, Leininger's conservative stamp defined the effort, probably to the detriment of the cause of vouchers. At the nexus of ideology and power lies a basic political conundrum: To advance a particular issue, it is useful to have bipartisan backing, but to advance a political party, it is often necessary to attack the opposition. Because Leininger seems to want to advance both things, he has, at times, been at cross-purposes with himself.
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