Patricia Kilday Hart
Little Did We Know...
. . . that the outcome of the election for governor ten years ago between Ann Richards and George W. Bush would affect more than Texas. An oral history of the race that changed the world.
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McDonald: We were hesitant to go out there and really aggressively portray his weaknesses in spring and summer. We probably should have done that. If you start off, as you do in Texas, with more people voting for the Republican than the Democrat, the only way to win is to convince people, first, not to vote for the Republican, and then, step two, “Here’s why it’s okay to vote for me.” We thought we had to make people comfortable with the job she had done, and that wasn’t good enough. Later in the campaign, we wanted to use his failed business career to make people realize that he was not very accomplished in any regard, that he didn’t merit being elected governor. And frankly, it didn’t take hold.
Bonner: It was very hard to get Ann to project why she wanted to be governor for four more years. You couldn’t say, “These are the three reasons she should be governor.” I’m not sure Ann Richards really wanted, deep in her heart and soul, to spend four more years as governor. I think there was a yearning not to do that job again. She felt like she had to run for everybody else’s sake.
Richards: I know there’s some kind of psychobabble out there [about whether she really wanted to be governor]. No, I put everything I had into it.
I thought the campaign was dispiriting because I never thought we got traction. We spent too much time telling people what we had done and not enough time telling them what we were going to do.
East Texas
Rogers: They ran a stealth campaign in East Texas. It was on guns. It came out in flyers on cars at churches, in radio spots on small rural stations. It was an underground campaign: “She’s gonna take away your gun.” She had vetoed a concealed handguns bill. [The stealth campaign] was aimed at the Democratic base, or what was left of it. Where we thought we still had traditional yellow-dog Democrats—those East Texas counties—she lost them to Bush.
Gays was another one of those East Texas issues. They had no hesitation playing it—never in the mainstream media, but there was always that undercurrent. There was always someone to do the dirty work, little front groups. It is a tactic that they have carried through to this day. Richards: It was huge. I had no idea it was going on. They started a below-the-radar whisper campaign that there were people who worked for me in the governor’s office who weren’t married, and because they weren’t married, they were probably gay, and then the next step was, well, maybe if they were gay, maybe I was too. I saw the piece of material they were putting on windshields of automobiles in parking lots of right-wing churches that showed a black man and a white man kissing each other, with the message “This is what Ann Richards wants to teach your children in the public schools.” It was a key part of their campaign, and I was just flabbergasted by it. My God, I’d been married thirty years! I had four children!
Rove: I think what she had done on guns and gays had already had the influence that it was going to have before the campaign began. When she touted, “I’m appointing this person to the funeral commission because they’re gay,” that offended some people. It was not the fact that the gay person was on there. It was that she was touting the fact that being gay somehow qualified them to be on the funeral commission. I think the gun issue and generally her lack of cultural connection with East Texas—she didn’t connect well with them—were problems of her own creation, not ours. Richards: We had funeral parlors in the state that were refusing to bury people who’d died of AIDS. It was an issue of some significance, so we appointed a man whose partner had AIDS to the funeral commission. It was a very serious problem at the time.
Rogers: It’s much easier to be a challenger than an incumbent, because your stance as an incumbent is pretty much defensive. I think the campaign against Ann started the day she took office. With Karen Hughes as the spokesperson for the Republican party, there were relentless attacks, so we were always fighting that rearguard battle. It just started immediately. We had so many open-records requests that we had to hire somebody to stand at the copy machine. It was an onerous burden.
The “Gaffe”
McDonald: We had that bad moment in September when it was reported in the press that she called Bush a jerk. We were going to have this education rally, and we had to get teachers there, and we really wanted the press there. It was a hugely high-stress event, and it all came together. We ended up with a gigantic crowd of teachers and a great press contingent—unfortunately.
I lost this fight with the press. She didn’t call George Bush a jerk. All the teachers were whooping and hollering, and she said, “You know how it is. You are working your tail off and doing a good job and then some jerk comes along and tells you it’s not good enough.” And everybody goes, “Whoooo!!” to the rafters. She was talking about the people who say Texas education isn’t good enough. It wasn’t too hard to make the leap to say she called him a jerk.
Rove: I thought it said, “We are totally inside her brain. She’s totally focused on us. She’s not focused on her agenda, on her mission.” That gave us the freedom to stay focused on the four big issues.
There were constant moments on the campaign where it was clear she was totally reacting to us. When she went to East Texas and made those comments over there—the “jerk”—I thought, “Way to go. Absolutely way to go. Thank you so much.”
The Debate
Joe Allbaugh, Bush campaign manager: I walked with him backstage, and it was the first time Governor Richards and he had met, and he was very gracious, and she said—to this day, I can’t get over this. I think she was just trying to psych him out—she said, “Are you ready for this, boy? This is going to be rough on you.”
One question was “Governor, what is your vision for Texas?” [She said,] “Well, I wanna give teachers a pay raise.” And that’s all she said. Well, hell, everybody wants to give teachers a pay raise. I still am dumbfounded by that response. It revealed something to me, that they had basically played their cards. It was a signal to me that it was over, and that night was not rough on George W. Bush by any measure at all.
Rove: First they turned to Richards, and she made an opening statement about the horrific flooding in Houston, and Bush said, “Well spoken, Governor.” Complimenting her. That showed such confidence and comfort, that he was capable of complimenting a competitor. She couldn’t shake him. He stayed focused.
Rogers: I felt like Ann was superb—that she had made her case for what she had done, she had made her case for what she wanted to do in the future, she was gracious, she was charming, and she looked beautiful. He had a couple of answers that were kind of stupid, but that’s not how it played. Immediately afterward, everybody was spinning, and I realized that the press was in awe of Bush because he didn’t make a major mistake. He didn’t do what his dad did and look at his watch. So people thought, “This guy’s not so bad. There’s nothing scary about him.” After the debate, he came off looking like a knight in shining armor. That’s not what I thought watching the debate, but by the time I went to bed that night, I knew.
Election Night
Rove: The day before the election, we were in the car and we started joking, and I started making imaginary phone calls to all those people who had sat on the sidelines and said “I’m with you” and then popped up on the other side or who had taken cheap shots. Everybody chimed in. The candidate, Karen and me, and [finance chairman] Don Evans were just rolling by the time we finished making imaginary phone calls to all the people we wanted closure with in the campaign.
Election night was extraordinary. I think [Bush’s] first reaction was one of accepting an enormous responsibility. And then there was joy. He called his dad to share the news, and he literally was standing in the bathroom of his hotel room in order to be able to hear his dad and to tell him he was winning. His dad was getting bad news from Florida about Jeb losing his race, so it was a mixture of family pride and anguish.
Rogers: I think we knew how it was going the last ten days of the campaign. It didn’t stop us from doing everything we possibly could. It’s devastating to lose a race like that. You put your heart and soul into it. It was a real hard loss. You have to come to terms with the things you can’t control and the things you can control. Until the demographics begin shifting again—as they are going to, but we’re not there yet—Texas is pretty much a Republican state.
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