He’s Sisyphus, and He Approves This Message
Does Chris Bell have a chance in hell to be governor?
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Why, based on these contingencies, is Strayhorn receiving such a large share of the Democratic dollars? The answer can be found in a private poll commissioned by the Texans for Insurance Reform political action committee in April. In a one-on-one matchup, Perry beat Bell 54 percent to 31 percent (with the rest of those polled undecided). But when Strayhorn was added to the mix, the numbers changed dramatically: Perry now got 41 percent, Strayhorn 25 percent, and Bell 18 percent, with Strayhorn pulling equally from Perry and Bell. (A separate poll, with Friedman included, showed Perry at 41, Strayhorn at 21, Bell at 14, and Friedman at 9.) “Strayhorn’s entry into the race makes it possible to defeat Perry,” says Democratic consultant Dan McClung, of Houston. “On the strength of her profile alone, she picks up a quarter of Perry’s support. That makes him a vulnerable incumbent.” McClung believes that Republican voters go to either Perry or Strayhorn, meaning that if her campaign fizzles, her support goes back to Perry, with no advantage to Bell.
Bell, meanwhile, insists that both the media and potential donors have mistakenly discounted the advantages of being the nominee of a major party. He thinks that it’s worth somewhere between 38 and 42 percent, in part because of voting history and in part because the Democratic party is able to put thousands of operatives on the ground—something the party-less Strayhorn cannot claim. “The fact is that Texas favors majority-party candidates,” he says. “The Valley votes on a straight ticket. Carole can’t deliver Travis County.” Close Bell ally Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston, agrees. “The Democratic party nomination comes with a base,” he says. “It’s clearly about 40 percent of the vote. Al Gore didn’t spend a dollar in Texas, and they ran out of voting machines in some places.” The way they see it, in a race featuring bloody combat between Strayhorn and Perry, leading to a deep splintering of the Republican vote, 40 percent wins.
BELL MAY BE A NOBODY in most of the state, but he is a familiar figure in Houston, where he was a prominent city councilman for five years, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor, and a one-term congressman from the serpentine, city-spanning Twenty-fifth District. At a roast of Texas AFL-CIO president Emmett Sheppard on Houston’s west side on April 1, a very different Bell is on display from the one I have been following to Democratic hinterlands such as Midland, New Braunfels, and Temple. He is clearly in his element, among friends. Though Bell shares the dais with some of his party’s best public presences—including former attorney general Jim Mattox, Congressman Al Green, former congressman Nick Lampson, and state senator John Whitmire—he is by far the funniest speaker of the evening, and he has the room laughing uproariously. There is plenty of politicking going on here too. When Green, who beat Bell in a hotly contested primary in 2004, endorses him for governor, the audience responds with a minute-long standing ovation.
That same weekend, I pay a call on Bell at his four-bedroom ranch house on a shady street in Braes Heights, in southwest Houston. He lives here with his wife of fourteen years, Alison Ayres Bell, and their two young boys, Atlee, ten, and Connally, eight. The place is attractive, a bit overgrown with vegetation, resolutely unfancy and unremodeled. It is cluttered—in a comfortable, lived-in sort of way—with backpacks, blocks, kids’ books, dog toys, video games, and family photographs.
Chris and Alison—who worked for Mosbacher Energy for many years and was the scheduler for Republican Rob Mosbacher’s 1994 campaign for lieutenant governor—are easygoing and informal, with a knack for making and keeping friends. They entertain frequently. To give you a sense of how social they are, two years ago Chris threw Alison a surprise birthday party attended by three hundred people; they are also known for giving large Christmas parties for their political friends. Humor is the order of the day at home as well. After bringing us box lunches, Alison twits Chris for being too demanding. In the living room, buffeted by young boys with various balls and weapons and by the frisky golden retriever the family recently adopted, the candidate and I sit down to talk.
Like his house and his neighborhood, Bell is solidly of the lower echelons of the upper middle class. The son of a land man in the oil business who also sold real estate, he was raised in the affluent town of University Park, just north of Dallas. “Mom and Dad had both grown up in the Park Cities and very much wanted my brother and me to be able to attend Highland Park schools,” he says. “I’m sure they could have lived much more comfortably somewhere else, but they gave up just about everything in their own lives, and what you saw in other folks’ lives in Highland Park—fancy cars, clothes, vacations, et cetera—so my brother and I could have everything.” He was popular and smart, serving as a student council representative.
At the University of Texas, he was president of the Intrafraternity Council and, in 1982, helped lead a successful effort (abetted by future Democratic political consultant Paul Begala) to reinstate student government and write a new student constitution. He majored in broadcast journalism, and after he graduated he got a job as a television reporter in the small-market city of Ardmore, Oklahoma. From there he moved to Amarillo, where he had quick success and became the ABC affiliate’s weekend anchor.
Amarillo was also his introduction to politics. Owing to his growing public visibility, he was soon asked by a member of the local Democratic establishment to run for state representative. He was 24. He accepted, won the primary, then was eviscerated in the general election in spite of nine months of concerted campaigning. “I was upset but also somewhat relieved that I could go back to what I was doing,” Bell says. “Humility is a useful trait in political life. I went back to journalism, but I knew that at some point, I would want to run for something again.”
He soon moved to Houston, where he took a job as a radio reporter covering the Harris County courts (in 1990 he was named best radio reporter in the state for major markets by the Texas Associated Press). But he was changing direction. After filing his radio reports during the day, he attended night classes at South Texas College of Law. After passing the bar, in 1992, he began a career as a trial lawyer, handling mostly criminal cases. He spent a year with an established law firm, then went out on his own.
But politics, and ambition, again beckoned. In 1995, having barely launched his own firm, he ran for a seat on the Houston City Council and lost—the first of a more or less continual chain of political campaigns he has conducted since then. He ran again in 1997, winning both a special election and a regular election, and was reelected in 1999. In 2001 he ran for mayor and lost but spun his widening name recognition into yet another campaign—this time a successful try for Congress in 2002. Then came redistricting. As Tom DeLay and the other mapmakers had hoped, Bell lost his seat in the 2004 primary, but less than a year later he was back out campaigning, this time for governor, a race to which he has been devoting almost all of his time ever since.
On the city council, he championed both ethics reform and what was known as “customer-driven government”—various ways to make the city more responsive to its citizenry. In the former case, he persuaded then-mayor Bob Lanier to make him the chairman of a new ethics committee, and in that post he passed laws that limited the use of soft money in city elections and prohibited city employees who left government from cashing in on their connections. In the latter, says Jay Aiyer, a Houston lawyer who is the former chief of staff to Lanier’s successor as mayor, Lee Brown, “You could certainly make the argument that the 311 system [a sort of 911 number for city services like sewage, water, street maintenance] grew out of Chris’s ideas to make the city a more customer-oriented place.”
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