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.
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Patrick didn’t see it that way. “I knew the district,” he told me. “I looked at the three candidates, and I felt we needed change.” He also did polling that showed he had an astonishing 91 percent name identification—“higher than the governor’s,” Patrick told me. And 95 percent had no idea who Joe Nixon was. “My competition,” Patrick said, “was one-dimensional. I’m multidimensional.” Patrick had expected to be forced into a runoff, but his polling showed he’d win so easily that his campaign consultant urged one of the candidates to stop wasting money and get out of the race.
Patrick began meeting with all 120 precinct chairs in the district, setting up coffees and promising that he would involve them in the political process—and attend to their needs—like never before. “My opponents had never talked to them,” Patrick told me, shaking his head at their “arrogance.” And, of course, he was on the air every day until he formally announced his candidacy on December 29, 2005.
“We saw as the race went on that we could not start a conversation with these people,” someone from Nixon’s campaign told me about the voters in the Seventh District. “Dan was their guy. They’d had him in their homes …We were like jackasses in a hailstorm. We had to stand there and take it.” Even though Patrick wasn’t supposed to be on the radio—he put his son, Ryan, in charge after he began running in earnest—Patrick would call in occasionally for remote chats, taking the opportunity, for instance, to label Nixon a RINO (with no regard for reality; in fact, Nixon had been a standard-bearer for the conservative agenda—on tort reform, lower taxes, you name it—since first getting elected in 1994). “His opponents did not comprehend the dynamics of talk radio, the media, and the Internet” is the way Dave Walden, a longtime Houston political operative, put it. And neither Nixon nor Hamric chose to go negative against Patrick, believing that each would need Patrick’s support in the runoff.
What runoff? When, at a debate, Nixon brought up evidence that Patrick had dual homesteads—how can we expect you to handle our taxes when you can’t manage your own?—Patrick spun the situation into a heartbreaking tale of his mother-in-law’s death from cancer. Nixon was booed; Patrick was cheered. “Dan went straight past the question to the core emotional thread,” said a member of Nixon’s campaign. Patrick’s devotees drove into the district from all over the county to volunteer; the opposition didn’t have a chance in the sign war. A Republican who did not want his name used told me: “This whole group in Harris County—they reminded me of Dallas in 1963. They are that nutty and that mean.”
The Houston business establishment saw the barbarians at the gates. A group of them paid a consultant to come up with opposition research, and he discovered that Liberman Broadcasting, the owner of KSEV and a $5,000 contributor to Patrick, was predominantly a chain of Spanish-language stations and was so pro-immigrant that it had put up billboards all over Southern California with messages like “Welcome to Los Angeles, Mexico” and even sponsored a game show (¡Gana la Verde!) in which winners received sessions with an immigration lawyer to help them get a green card. Patrick, in contrast, had spent much of the past year and more exhorting his listeners to pressure politicians to secure the border. Patrick, it seemed, might be vulnerable to his own favorite charge of hypocrisy. But it was too late to lob the grenade; polls showed him with a huge lead. On primary election day, Patrick soared to victory without a runoff—and Austin shuddered.
The general election posed no problem, as Harris County Democrats had written off the district. In fact, Patrick’s opponent, Michael Kubosh, was a Republican who registered as a Democrat simply out of disgust for his own party’s abandonment of its far right wing. He looked like a fringe candidate; heavyset, with white hair and a carefully trimmed white beard, he was sort of a Santa Claus for conservatives. After Patrick won his primary in March, Kubosh signed a waiver with the FCC freeing Patrick from giving Kubosh equal time on his station and thus allowing Patrick back on the air. The two men got on so famously that in May of 2006 Kubosh became a $580,000 investor in Patrick’s Dallas radio station. At the very least, Patrick saved a small fortune by not having a real Democratic opponent in the race. Kubosh hopes for the best when Patrick goes to Austin but knows there are pitfalls ahead. “There are lots of demons out there,” he told me. “Some of them have money in their pockets and some of them have short skirts. But I believe if Dan does the right thing, maybe in eight years he will be the governor.”
There is a lot of handicapping going on now about what will happen when Patrick actually takes office. One lobbyist spoke to the hopes of many when he predicted: “Dan is going to get repeatedly taken to the woodshed.” Not surprisingly, Patrick disagrees. He points out that he has already engaged in several meet and greets with senators and lobbyists, trying to calm their fears, and is eager and willing to work with the leadership despite his nearly constant on-air criticism. “My whole life I’ve had plenty of attention,” he told me. “As far as influence and power, that’s nothing new. And the fact that ninety percent of my money came from citizens—I don’t owe anything to anyone. I’m going there just to legislate. I’m going to be a leader.”
Maybe so. But what’s calmed legislators most is that, after branding Nixon as the candidate of special interests, Patrick proceeded to open his door to some special interests of his own. The postelection contributions to his campaign look like the Late Train Lobby Express, with those onboard including insurance companies, hospitals, police, beverage distributors, optometrists, restaurateurs, Friends of Time Warner Cable, and, of course, GOP megadonors Bob Perry and James Leininger.
Patrick will have other problems as he makes the transition from talk show host to legislator to, perhaps, gubernatorial candidate. The skill set is different—working alone versus playing well with others, something he’s never excelled at. His radio harangues against those who toil in the Capitol have raised the expectations of his supporters, and he’s led them to expect change overnight. Patrick could try to maintain his outsider status with interminable filibusters, but that will take him only so far. “It will bother Dan that he won’t be able to get things done in the Senate,” one lobbyist told me. But getting things done will require the kind of horse trading he has so often criticized. To get anything done Patrick has to work with the leadership. Meanwhile, his fans will be demanding red meat.
Which, of course, raises the question of Patrick’s ultimate goals and how he intends to achieve them. He believes that the GOP’s failure last November occurred because the party had moved too far from its conservative roots, refusing to act aggressively on illegal immigration, abortion, and reducing spending and taxes. If Patrick doesn’t see change on the issues that matter to his constituents, he says, he will try to propel himself higher up the political ladder, perhaps to the governorship. “I’m keeping my options open,” he told me. “If this party gets back on track and a good conservative emerges …” He shrugged off that scenario and then added, “If this party doesn’t get back on the conservative path, then we have to evaluate where we are.”
Clearly, he’s already done a lot of evaluating. A few weeks before the election, for instance, Rick Perry came to Houston and enlisted Patrick in an event to inspire the Republican base. (After the election, Patrick would declare that his party’s success in Harris County was all due to KSEV’s get-out-the-vote efforts. “We urged our voters to lead the state in turnout, and it appears Perry did better in Senate Seven than almost anywhere else,” he said. “So maybe Austin needs to think about embracing the conservative principles of KSEV and their listeners, because it looks like that was the only key to success on election night.”)
The venue was a small storefront in District Seven, right off busy FM 1960. The crowd was mostly bused-in schoolkids and drawn, elderly women with tight white perms and men with sagging bellies and sun-worn faces. I’d seen them before, at a barbecue for Patrick north of town; they’d come out for him in a driving rain, proud of their activism and adoring of their candidate. Most of them lived not in the enormous new McMansions spreading almost to Katy—though some did—but in the small slab houses built amid the pines thirty or forty years ago. The group reminded me in mood and appearance of an East Texas church supper in the early sixties. They didn’t evoke Ronald Reagan as much as Barry Goldwater.
In this crowd, Perry, in a crisp plaid shirt and chic color-coordinated blazer, looked as if he’d parachuted in from GQ land. “It’s a great time to be a Republican in Harris County!” he declared, pumping his fist in the air, but he couldn’t get the audience going. Listing his accomplishments—“Education! Progress! The border! Creating jobs!”—he kept looking to Patrick, who had received a rousing welcome much bigger than his own.
“Right, Dan?” Perry asked, turning once more to look at Patrick, who hung back against the wall, his arms crossed and his jaw set.
“Absolutely,” Patrick answered.
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