He’s Sisyphus, and He Approves This Message
Does Chris Bell have a chance in hell to be governor?
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Along the way, Bell famously crossed swords with Brown, once leading a council walkout to break the quorum on a vote on a city contract the mayor wanted. He also joined conservatives to pass a 2-cent property tax rollback in 2000, handing Brown his first major council defeat. The eventual result was open war. Brown stripped Bell of the chairmanship of two committees, and Bell soon decided to run against him. “He basically forced my hand,” Bell says. “In his defense, I think he felt that if he did not take a stand, he would be viewed as weak. And meanwhile, I refused to guarantee him that I was not running for mayor. I said, ‘If you mess with me, I will consider my options at some later time.’ After that the battle was fully joined.” Though Bell surprised most political observers in Houston by raising $1.3 million for that race and was impressive in several televised debates, he finished third behind Brown and Republican Orlando Sanchez in the nonpartisan election. He showed his political savvy by immediately throwing his full support behind Brown, who later actively supported Bell in his 2002 run for Congress.
Bell also became known for what turned out to be bruising and sometimes bitter election campaigns. The Houston Chronicle called his congressional race against Republican Tom Reiser “one of the nastiest local congressional races in years.” At one point, Bell demanded that Reiser withdraw an ad that (incorrectly) stated that Bell had been investigated for bribery and sexual harassment while on the city council. Bell, who has not been shy about counterpunching when attacked, ran his own ads accusing a company Reiser once owned of fraud. “We had kept everything positive,” Bell says. “But we made it clear that if he chose to turn negative, we would hit back and hit back hard.”
Bell arrived in Washington in January 2003 fully expecting a long career in Congress. He was quickly made assistant whip, a rare honor for a freshman. “I promoted him because it was clear that he was respected by so many of the freshmen and also well liked by the senior members,” says Representative Steny Hoyer, of Maryland, the House Democratic whip. “It was clear that Chris was one of the stars of his class.”
There was only one problem. In October of that year, the Tom DeLay—engineered redrawing of Texas congressional district boundaries morphed Bell’s district into one intended to be represented by a minority Democrat, and Bell immediately got a black primary challenger: Al Green, the former president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In spite of this, Bell was convinced—along with the Houston media—that he would be reelected. He got crushed, 66 percent to 31 percent. He says his defeat was “like a gut punch. It just changed everything.”
One thing it did not change was his opinion of DeLay, whose district lay slightly to the west of Bell’s on the west side of Houston. In early 2003 Bell had begun discussing with Texas colleagues Martin Frost, of Dallas, and Max Sandlin, of Marshall, the possibility of filing an ethical complaint against DeLay. Bell’s defeat in March 2004 sharpened his determination, even though, at that point, he was the only member of Congress still interested in pursuing it. In June 2004 he and his staff, independent of the Democratic leadership of the House and in concert with a watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, lodged a formal complaint alleging that DeLay illegally solicited and accepted contributions from Westar Energy; that DeLay’s PAC, Texans for a Republican Majority, laundered $190,000 in corporate funds in September 2002; and that DeLay misused his office the following year by asking the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Justice Department to help track down Democrats in the state legislature who had fled to Oklahoma to prevent Republicans from passing his redistricting plan.
Bell’s action produced two results. Republicans damned him as a bitter, lame-duck congressman who was upset about losing his seat. (“These partisan accusations … are untrue, based on innuendo and prompted by campaign considerations” was how DeLay’s own office responded.) Democrats, meanwhile, rallied to Bell’s cause, and he was anointed a star at the Democratic National Convention in Boston that July. According to a story in the Chronicle that summer, Bell, who was appearing at a number of “posh” receptions, had “become a darling of the Democrats. Texan delegates to the Boston convention clamored … to have their picture taken with him. They asked for his autograph and encouraged him to run for statewide office.” And Bell’s House colleagues truly did think he was brave. “I really admire his courage,” says House whip Hoyer, “especially since he did not get a lot of support. He filed the complaint notwithstanding the fact that he faced very substantial retribution.”
For Bell, it was the beginning of what would soon become a campaign for governor. “Life has never been the same, and I don’t think that’s too dramatic of a statement,” he says. “It wasn’t like it made me clearly any kind of household name”—here he pauses and emits one of his trademark short bursts of laughter at the very idea that he could be a household name—“but it struck a chord with Democrats at the time. I started getting invitations to speak, and people started to encourage me to think about looking into a statewide office.”
BELL’S FATE RIDES not only on Strayhorn’s ability to split the Republican base. Like fellow Democrats across the country, he is also hoping for the sort of political backlash that swept the Republicans into power and the Democrats out during the 1994 midterm elections. “In recent weeks a startling realization has begun to take hold,” noted a Time magazine story in April. “If the elections were held today … the Republicans would probably lose the fifteen seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well.” The litany of grievances, on the national level, is now familiar: the conduct of the war in Iraq, the government’s response during Hurricane Katrina, rising gas prices, failed Social Security and Medicare reform.
But there is a long list at the state level too, including the school finance debacle, which lasted through three regular and three special sessions (and counting); congressional redistricting; DeLay’s fund-raising antics in 2002 and the resulting indictments; and the paralysis of government at its highest levels due to the endless sniping and turf battles between Perry, House Speaker Craddick, and Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst. There are also the much-ballyhooed signs of just such a voter revolt: improbable victories in Texas House races by Democrat Hubert Vo over powerful Appropriations Committee chair Talmadge Heflin in Houston in 2004 and Democrat Donna Howard’s stunning upset of the well-funded Republican Ben Bentzin in a special election in Austin in February 2006.
While all this is encouraging for Democrats, it is hardly conclusive. Texas is still a deeply conservative state, a place where George W. Bush not only won 61 percent of the vote in 2004 but also averaged 41 percent in the heavily Hispanic counties along the border. “It took a long time for the pendulum to swing in favor of the Republicans,” says Perry pollster Mike Baselice. “It is going to take a long time for it to swing back in the direction of the Democrats.” And even if a counterrevolution occurred, it is not immediately clear that it would favor Bell. It could just as easily benefit Strayhorn or, less likely, anti-establishment candidate Friedman.
In Bell’s favor is time. There are many months left in the campaign in which to tour the state, run advertisements, and get his education-and-ethics-reform message out. Because he is the Democratic nominee, he is guaranteed a minimum amount of media coverage, thus taking care, to some extent, of his name ID problem by Election Day. And while he has lost the first round of fund-raising to Strayhorn, political money, always fickle, could still come back to him. “When the campaign gears up, he is going to have enough money to run the race,” says state representative Garnet Coleman. “People are hedging their bets now. I guarantee you that certain people who are supporting Strayhorn and not Bell will come to him because he is the standard-bearer for the party.”
For the moment, Bell is out pounding the pavement, spending large chunks of time trying to raise money and persuade the media that they ought to start writing about him as though he has a chance (that kind of coverage would be worth, literally, millions of additional dollars to his campaign). The old days of traveling on commercial flights, alone, to cities like Midland, are over. He now crisscrosses the state in sleek private jets provided by his wealthy patron Ricardo Weitz. And he has a personal aide, a young politics major from Georgetown University named Adam Briscoe, who drives him around in an equally sleek black Dodge Magnum plastered with “Bell for Governor” stickers; the two logged 19,000 miles in less than two months.
As we cruised to Houston’s Hobby Airport in the Magnum on a sunny afternoon last April, Bell’s eight-year-old son, Connally, observed, with great enthusiasm, “Hey, Dad, today I saw a car with a Chris Bell bumper sticker that belonged to someone we don’t even know!” Bell responded with a deadpan look, then said, very slowly, “Well, if that’s true, Connally, it is a major breakthrough.”
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