Money Talks
In an exclusive interview, press-shy Republican power broker James Leininger explains his support for school choice and defends his big-bucks intervention in the 2006 primaries.
(Page 2 of 2)
At the moment, though, it’s a moot point. All of this is done through private philanthropy. No tax dollars are involved. And I’m wondering why that is. Presented with your set of statistics and anecdotal evidence and recognizing that Texas schools are ranked somewhere in the low middle and understanding that we have some real challenges on school finance, why wouldn’t the Legislature jump at the opportunity to board that train?
What we’re talking about here is the status quo. We’re talking about a very powerful, entrenched bureaucracy and special interests that don’t want to see any change.
The education community.
Yes. The information, or I should say, the disinformation that is given to the legislators by hundreds of lobbyists paid for by our tax dollars is just wrong.
Your attempt to get the Legislature to deal with this issue began when?
Nineteen ninety-three, I think.
That was your entry point into politics?
Yes. I just went up there. You talk about naive. I just had no clue what was going on. I talked with [then-Speaker] Pete Laney and [then—lieutenant governor] Bob Bullock.
What did they say?
Basically, they told me, “You need to get a lobbyist.” At the time, I thought, “Man, these lobbyists are just ridiculously expensive. And anyone who looks at this issue and is intellectually honest is going to say, ‘This will help everybody.’ So I’m not going to waste any money on lobbyists; I’m just going to appeal to whichever legislators I can and see if we can’t win this on the merits.”
So what happened?
It became politicized.
By whom?
By the Democrats.
I seem to remember some rural Republicans not being in favor of vouchers either.
Oh, sure. Yeah.
But in your mind it was the Democrats, as opposed to the Republicans, who blocked this?
Here’s the thing. In 2003, two legislative sessions ago, we had four Democrats who were in favor of a voucher program. The education establishment went after all four of them, and they beat three of them. Not too remarkably, the fourth one is not willing to vote for vouchers anymore. So it became very political.
Certainly somebody who put as much money into the past election cycle as you did can’t be shocked to discover that if you have a position you want to support, you finance the campaign of the opponent of the person who is not supporting your issue. And, lo and behold, if you’re successful, that opponent goes away.
That’s the way the system works.
So why is what the Democrats did in that case politicizing it, but if your side does it, it’s not politicizing it?
I didn’t say that it’s not politicizing it if someone on the other side is doing it. You know, it was clear to me after that happened that if I was going to have any success in helping these children get a better education, I was going to have to get more votes. And that’s what we set out to do this last election cycle.
There are differing opinions out there about how much money you spent on the recent primaries. I’ve heard as much as $3 million.
I never added it up, but that’s a little high. It’s more like $2.5 million.
How did you come to feel it was necessary to be in individual legislative races in such a big way?
Since 1993 we’ve been trying to get school choice passed. In that time, an entire generation of kids has gone through schools that certainly haven’t improved much, if they’ve improved at all. Lives are being lost every day with the delay. We felt an urgency to help these kids. So we said, “What can we do? Who can we support who’s in favor of this? Who can we oppose who’s against it? What can we do to try to move the needle?”
All your activity in the primaries this spring was directed at defeating Republicans. If, as you said earlier, the Democrats are the problem, why not spend your money to defeat Democrats?
That’s something we’ll have to consider. But that’s in the general election, not in the primaries.
So you’re not done spending the sort of amounts we’ve just seen in this election year?
There is no amount of money that I wouldn’t spend to help these kids. I’m willing to spend whatever it takes.
You’ve been very successful in business, so you understand the concept of return on investment. If you’re Jeff Bagwell of the Houston Astros and you hit .400, that’s pretty good. But if you’re James Leininger and you spend $2.5 million in hopes of defeating five incumbent Republicans, as you just did, and you only defeat two, which is what happened, that’s not good. Do you consider your return on investment to have been sufficient?
I’d say that that’s an awful lot of money to spend to win two races.
No regrets?
I have no regrets. As we all know, it’s very difficult to beat an incumbent. That we were able to beat two out of five speaks to the fact that there is a lot of discontent in those districts and with those incumbents.
People wonder when these things happen if there was coordination. Were you acting in these primaries completely independently of the leadership? Did you coordinate your efforts in any way with either Speaker of the House Tom Craddick or Governor Rick Perry?
Absolutely no coordination in any way.
Any conversations with anybody else in the leadership encouraging you to do what you did in those five races?
A lot of legislators encouraged me to do it.
In the past few years, there’s been quite a bit of intraparty fighting that cuts against the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s famous eleventh commandment of politics, “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Can your party accommodate both of its wings?
The party does accommodate both wings. I don’t think there’s a need for a purge of any kind; we’ve already seen that in the Democratic party, as I’ve pointed out. Anybody who helped with tort reform was summarily dismissed, just as those who were in favor of school choice were beaten in the primaries.
A couple of pro—tort reform Democrats managed to get reelected.
Very few. And it was tough, and they were punished.
So your efforts don’t amount to an attempt to cleanse the Republican party of moderates?
No.
But if a moderate Republican doesn’t support school choice, that person becomes a target of your efforts.
Possibly.
If a conservative Republican doesn’t support school choice but is right on the other issues—
They would be just as much a target of my efforts as liberal or moderate Republicans.
In the most-recent primaries, the money you spent in support of those efforts was essentially handed over to the campaigns. You did not get personally involved in the details of how the campaigns were run.
Yeah. For the most part I didn’t give to the campaigns at all. I gave to a consultant.
With the idea that the consultant would put money into the races that you specified.
He would decide what races needed what resources.
And at that point, you were out of it.
Yeah.
In the Longview race, the incumbent, Tommy Merritt, has sued his challenger, whose campaign was largely financed by your contributions, over statements he alleges were defamatory. In the New Braunfels race, the incumbent, Carter Casteel, insisted to me that there were lies told about her by the challenger’s campaign, which was also largely funded by your contributions. Do you feel in any way responsible for the conduct of those campaigns?
Well, obviously, when I make a donation, I don’t have control over the conduct of the candidates. I would certainly care if there were inaccuracies or distortions. But let me say that I don’t believe the conduct was inappropriate in either of those races.
Let me ask a big-picture question about you. If somebody from another planet read the press coverage of your activities during the past few months—read the mainstream media and the blogs in particular—he would think you had cloven hooves and a pitchfork. What’s fueling that perception?
A lot of people just don’t understand the issue [of school choice]. And the reason they don’t understand it is because there’s been a lot of misinformation spread by our opponents. I was told by candidates in this last cycle, “I know you want to have vouchers in every school district all over the state and you want to start a whole chain of for-profit schools to make millions of dollars.” That’s ludicrous.
Nothing you’re advocating could even be fairly mischaracterized as for-profit?
No! No! And that’s my point. Our opponents have gone out of their way to demonize me. It’s the old communist [approach]: If you can’t kill the message, kill the messenger.
You know, of course, that that’s what they say about you—that you can’t kill the message of the other side, so you spend all your money to defeat them.
I’ll let you decide that one for yourself.
What else don’t we understand about you?
Originally, I was supposed to be a recluse who lived in a cave, and then I was an absolute right-wing zealot, and now I’m this rich tycoon who’s trying to buy democracy. None of those things are true. I certainly don’t need to make any more money, and I’m not trying to make any money out of this; I’ve probably given $100 million away, so that’s a totally false accusation. What I’d like to say is that I think the lives of every one of these little kids who are trapped in these unsafe and failing schools are too important, and I’m willing to take the abuse in order to help them. And that’s my only motivation.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
