November 2002
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.
LIKE MANY CONTENDERS FOR ELECTED office these days, Sue Ann Harting says she ran for the Texas Legislature last March because her supporters urged her to do it. Unlike many other candidates, though, Harting seems to have been genuinely reluctant. The way she tells it, she had been trying to get out of politics for nearly a decade. She retired from the Greenville City Council in 1993, only to be persuaded the next year to enter the race for mayor, which she won with 80 percent of the vote. "I really didn't want to run again," says Harting, who before entering city government had served as the president of Greenville's Coca-Cola bottling plant, a business that had been in her family for four generations. "But there wasn't a soul interested in the job. People said, 'We need you. Please run.'"
She won, then retired again in 2000; her greatest ambition at that point was to spend more time tooling around Lake Texoma in her powerboat. Yet politics intruded once more last winter, when a group of Greenville Republicans grew concerned that state House candidate Dan Flynn would, if elected, occupy himself less with the needs of the district than with an ideological agenda. Flynn's ties to a group of conservative activists in neighboring Van Zandt County, where he had served as county judge, were well known, and says Harting, "I frankly don't want my state representative to be controlled and told what to do by any extremist group." Shortly before the filing deadline, Harting announced that she was entering the race.
The campaign would turn out to be one of the most bitter experiences of her life. One mailer, sent by a Flynn supporter, lambasted Harting for having received an open-container citation and for having helped bring "pornography" (i.e., cable television) to Greenville. Flynn claims he didn't know about that particular mailer before it was sent; yet his official campaign literature was itself strident, denouncing Harting as a sham Republican. "What's worse than a wolf in sheep's clothing? A liberal who claims to be a Republican," read one mail piece, citing among other things her past support for Democratic state senator David Cain and for keeping abortion legal.
Harting ultimately lost to Flynn by 1,146 votes. Today she lives in a redbrick house built by her great-grandfather in downtown Greenville, a town of 24,000 east of Dallas. At 55, she is slender and vigorous; she speaks quickly and allows her large blue eyes to flutter shut when she is emphasizing a point or remembering something unpleasant. As she recalled the primary, sitting in the parlor where she was born, she shut her eyes repeatedly. Flynn's campaign "would just take a hairline of truth and build the most monstrous story," she said. "It's one thing to respectfully disagree. But they tried to discredit everything I have ever stood for or believed in. I don't resent losing the primary, but I resent someone distorting the truth so completely that local folks had to question who I really am and what I stand for." After finishing that sentence, she promptly stood up and excused herself from the room. When she returned, she seemed to have calmed down.
In the Republican primary last March, Flynn was one of a cluster of conservative candidates whose opponents would accuse them of resorting to below-the-belt campaign tactics. What several of these candidates had in common, besides an emphasis on litmus-test notions of what the Republican party ought to stand for, was that a sizable percentage of their money could be traced back to a seemingly limitless source: James Leininger, a 58-year-old San Antonio physician. Leininger gave Flynn $5,000, while groups to which Leininger has contributed heavily chipped in another $27,500, making Leininger directly or indirectly connected to more than 60 percent of the nearly $48,000 Flynn raised during the primary. Flynn also rented the phone bank of a Van Zandt County company called Winning Strategies, which Leininger had started in San Antonio.
Few Texans have heard of James Leininger, as his involvement in politics takes place far behind the scenes. But his influence is pervasive. The founder of Kinetic Concepts, Incorporated, a specialty medical-bed company that made him one of the richest men in Texas, Leininger is among the state's most active political donors. He was the top contributor in the 1996 and 1998 election cycles, when he gave a total of $1.9 million and, in the latter, co-signed two last-minute loans, of $1.1 million and $950,000, respectively, to Rick Perry's campaign for lieutenant governor and Carol Keeton Rylander's bid for comptroller. (Many attribute Perry's and Rylander's narrow victories to advertising blitzes in the last week of the campaign, paid for by those loans.) In the 2002 election cycle, Leininger has again proven himself an aquifer of campaign cash: Between January 2000 and June of this year, he dropped $1.5 million on state campaigns and causes. And while Leininger's giving is liberal, his leanings are decidedly not; he supports Republicans and conservative groups almost exclusively.
What makes Leininger one of the most powerful people in Texas politics is less the amount of money he has given over the years than the broad reach of his spending and his commitment to a conservative agenda. By pumping tens of thousands of dollars into the previously ignored State Board of Education races, he turned an obscure committee of retired teachers into an ideological hornet's nest, whose debates over curriculum and textbook content have made national news. In addition to funding candidates personally, Leininger has launched several political action committees to support conservative judicial and legislative candidates and advocate for school vouchers. He has, moreover, established an entire politics and policy conglomerate in Texas. He founded and provided seed money for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an increasingly influential conservative think tank, in 1989. He has invested millions in private school voucher programs in San Antonio, the first of which he initiated in 1993. Some regard the state Republican party as an extension of his empire; its chair, Susan Weddington, is a former Kinetic Concepts employee, and the $475,000 Leininger donated to state party and caucus committees in the 2000 election cycle far exceeded the amount contributed by any other individual or organization in Texas, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity.
For all that Leininger contributes, he is hardly alone in his generosity. Texas places no limits on the amount of money an individual may contribute to state political candidates or committees, and there are plenty of donors whose pockets reach right down to their shoes. Businessmen like chemical company owner William McMinn, homebuilder Bob Perry, and oilman Louis Beecherl shower candidates, primarily Republicans, with hundreds of thousands of dollars while trial lawyers like John O'Quinn and Walter Umphrey give comparably enormous sums, mostly to Democrats.
Rightly or wrongly, though, it is assumed that John O'Quinn gives money because he wants to see the passage of laws that are favorable to plaintiffs attorneys, and Bob Perry wants laws favorable to homebuilders. Leininger's motivations appear to be more ideological, which, depending on whom you ask, makes him either more pure or more insidious. A soft-spoken man who prefers to remain in the background, Leininger does not often speak with the press (he declined to be interviewed for this story). Political giving is "always an emotional thing for me," he told the Houston Chronicle in 1997. "If I sat down and planned it out, I think I'd just go to Bermuda instead." No doubt many Texas Democrats wish Leininger would just go to Bermuda, or Nepal for that matter. In the meantime, they help propagate the various specters of Leininger that swirl around the Capitol like so much Austin haze. These shadowy projections alternately resemble a Rasputin or a political ingenue, a religious-right crusader or a businessman who dabbles in politics, owning a percentage of the Republican Party of Texas just as he owns a percentage of the San Antonio Spurs.
"He's the sugar daddy and godfather of the Republican right wing in Texas," says Austin Democratic political consultant George Shipley. "There are two theories of Leininger. One is that he is somewhat naive and he lets himself be used by these single-issue groups. Or else he's the most megalomaniac guy around." Weddington, the state GOP chair, insists that Leininger is neither an extremist nor power hungry. "He's a political philanthropist, as opposed to a business or single-issue donor. He has a long-term vision of a world where underprivileged children have the same opportunities as his own children. He doesn't fit the mold, and that's why people have trouble with him. He's a man who follows his heart. He's a man of deep faith." So in one corner stands Leininger the pious patron of underprivileged children and in the other, Leininger the right-wing power broker. Surely neither caricature suffices to explain who James Leininger is, nor do caricatures of the man address the larger question of what his influence on state politics has been.
JAMES LEININGER WAS BORN IN Indiana, one of five sons of Hilbert Adolph Peter "Hib" Leininger, a doctor who encouraged his five sons to become doctors. Descended from Germans who emigrated in the 1830's, the Leiningers belonged to the strict Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, whose doctrine stipulates that the Bible is inerrant and that women may not be ordained as ministers. For the family, that meant "sticking exactly to the Bible and no funny business," James's mother, Berneta, told the San Antonio Current a few years ago. They moved to South Florida in the fifties, James went back to Indiana for college and medical school, and then he returned to Florida for his residency and internship, in family medicine, at the University of Miami School of Medicine. While there, he also founded a nonprofit organization to provide day care centers for migrant workers.
