Here Comes Trouble
If you think dan patrick has made a lot of noise as a radio talk show host, wait until he gets to the Texas senate—and starts his campaign for governor against his new boss, David Dewhurst.
(Page 4 of 5)
Around this time, it began to dawn on Patrick that he was not a happy man. His lawyers were suing him for more than $1,000 in unpaid legal fees (which Patrick attributes to a misunderstanding), he had filed for bankruptcy, and his former partners were suing him as well. He had always been a churchgoer, but he would later say that he was living by “Dan’s rules instead of God’s rules.” Patrick calls this period his “preseason as a Christian” (“Even though I lost sight of God, he never lost sight of me. He didn’t cut me from his team!”).
In 1992 Patrick became a member of Ed Young’s Second Baptist Church, the venue of choice for Houston’s business-oriented, upwardly mobile evangelicals. As with so many other things in his life, Patrick threw himself obsessively into his walk with Christ, becoming an active participant in Bible study (not so obsessively, however, that he could keep himself out of hot water. In 1993 he drew ire and a front-page story in the Post when he labeled Connie Chung’s program Eye to Eye as “Slanted Eye to Eye”). In 1994 Patrick attended a television-and-radio convention in Las Vegas, during which he got an offer to sell KSEV and KPRC, a Houston station he had bought a year earlier. Immediately afterward, Patrick jumped in a cab and asked to be taken to the Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, a church he had visited previously, which, this being Vegas, happened to be near the Tropicana, a casino. It was there, Patrick says, that he repented his sins and was, finally, saved. “I felt like a new person after that encounter with God,” he would later write in The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible, which was published in 2002. “I had an awesome sense that God had been preparing me for the opportunity.” A combination self-help book and mea culpa, it could easily double, in its selective illumination, as a campaign biography. Patrick believes that all the miracles that have transpired in his life—a happy family, substantial wealth, a successful career—spring from the moment he stopped “believing in God” and began “believing God.” At one point, he even thought he heard God’s voice, speaking to him directly. His family started calling him Bible Boy.
The deal for the radio stations made Patrick a rich man. Clear Channel bought an 80 percent interest in both KSEV and KPRC for $26.8 million. Patrick was allowed to stay on, and he continued to air the issue-oriented show he had been doing since 1992. However, his on-air enthusiasm for Christianity and conservative politics made Clear Channel uncomfortable. Asked to limit both topics, Patrick resisted for years, and in 2000 he resigned. He worked briefly as station manager for Joel Osteen, who was then running his late father’s TV ministry, before he got the news that his old station KSEV was being sold to a California company, Liberman Broadcasting. Liberman offered him an arrangement that allowed Patrick to return to the airwaves and grow richer by the minute: He could lease airtime while keeping much of the advertising revenue for himself and his partners. It was a great deal for Patrick.
Right away, Patrick picked up where he had left off, haranguing local establishment figures (such as Ken Lay) for their love of expensive sports stadiums paid for by taxpayers and what he called “the toy train” that now runs from downtown to Reliant Stadium. Soon he was also proving himself an expert at new media: He exhorted his audience to bury his targets in e-mails and contribute to his blog (now called the Lone-Star Times, it was initially called Chronically Biased and contained attacks on the Houston Chronicle, which Patrick urged his listeners to boycott in 2004 for what he considered its liberalism). In short, Dan Patrick had made himself into Houston’s version of the tar baby.
A watershed moment occurred in March 2003, when Austin first noticed Patrick. He recounts this story frequently, putting himself, as he often does, in the role of savior when, as he tells it, he stood up to the lobby-corrupted government in the Capitol and demanded that he and his supporters be heard on the issue of appraisal caps. In 1997 the Legislature had passed a law that property appraisals couldn’t rise more than 10 percent in a given year. To Patrick the cap was too high; by his calculations, if the values continued to rise at that rate, working people would soon be priced out of their homes. He wanted the increases capped at 3 percent per year. When a hearing on the measure was scheduled in the House of Representatives, Patrick brought several busloads of angry supporters to Austin.
There they encountered Fred Hill, of Richardson, a crusty Republican who was the chairman of the House Committee on Local Government Ways and Means and a mainstream conservative. Hill believed that lowering appraisal caps would unfairly punish the poor and would eventually so starve municipalities that a state income tax would be necessary. Dropping the caps to 3 percent, he believed, could create in Texas the municipal ills that had devastated California in the wake of Proposition 13. “What you’re doing is giving a tax break to people in upscale homes,” he told me. The burden would fall on apartment dwellers, small-business owners, and middle-class home-owners. “We will become like California,” Hill continued. “Local communities cannot raise the revenue they need because of all the restrictions put on them.” Patrick, he believes, practices “bumper sticker politics.”
Another group was present that day, about sixty elderly and handicapped people eager to testify about two other bills; Patrick’s crowd was notified upon arrival that they would have to wait in the audience. Patrick would later claim that his people were kept waiting on purpose and that other witnesses, who opposed lowering the caps (including paid lobbyists), were called to testify about the caps before his supporters were allowed to speak. After two and a half more hours, Patrick began screaming furiously at state representative Glenn Hegar, of Houston, swearing that he would make sure Hegar was not reelected; Hill says—and Patrick denies—that Patrick later told him that he could elect or defeat anyone in Harris County. (Not only was Hegar reelected, but this year he, like Patrick, won election to the Senate.) Knowing that Patrick had a tendency to grandstand, Hill had earlier asked that a state trooper be present for the hearing. When the trooper took his only break of the afternoon, Patrick began screaming that Hill “should be ashamed to call himself a Republican” while his supporters keened in the background. The trooper returned and Patrick and his group walked out, but he subsequently returned and testified for almost half an hour.
To this day Patrick frames the story as he does many others: Thanks to his efforts, the people were not silenced. Few days have passed since then without an enemy-of-all-true-conservatives mention of Hill by Patrick on the air. (Patrick purchased a radio station in Dallas in fall 2006; Hill’s constituents can now get the word locally.) In turn, Hill’s office is regularly flooded with hate mail. “Patrick demonizes everybody who disagrees with him,” Hill said. “My problem is that I cannot respond to all the people he has misled. I don’t have a radio station.” Patrick has also suggested since that blowup that if Dewhurst doesn’t move to the right, his chances of becoming the next governor of Texas will be doomed.
“That [fight] actually created Dan,” said his friend Paul Bettencourt, the Harris County tax assessor. “That was the crucible. Dan had no idea Fred Hill would martyr his group.” Sometime after that, Patrick started thinking seriously about running for office.
Some of patrick’s followers had previously suggested that he should run, but he’d always demurred. “I just didn’t feel at peace about it,” he said. “I got serious about my faith in the mid-nineties, and I know intuitively if I’m supposed to be doing something.” By the time Jon Lindsay decided in 2005 to retire as the senator representing the Seventh District, most of which lies outside the Houston city limits, Patrick was a lot more at peace about running. He had a district he thought he could win—these people were his listeners. Though Patrick owned a house in Montgomery County, he proceeded to buy a condo in the district and started planning his campaign.
With Lindsay out of the picture, three candidates in addition to Patrick filed for the seat. Two were current House leaders and committee chairs: Peggy Hamric, a moderate known for grassroots organizing, and Joe Nixon, the presumed front-runner, who had the complete backing of the high-dollar tort-reform crowd after passing its pet bill in 2003. The third entry was Mark Ellis, a well-regarded city councilman. In other words, it was a race that might have looked unwinnable to a political novice, especially someone with Patrick’s controversial persona.
My Library
