Short Cuts: Episode IV 
The Thrilla in Vanilla
Straitlaced Rick Perry and demure Kay Bailey Hutchison going toe-to-toe in a Republican primary doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping. Ali-Frazier it ain’t. But it’s the heavyweight title bout every political junkie has been waiting for.
(Page 4 of 4)
Texas has been getting many such kudos in recent months for its economic health relative to that of the rest of the country. The Financial Times recently ranked states according to four economic indicators—employment growth, state product growth rate, personal income growth rate, and home foreclosure rate—and found that Texas had the best state economy in the country in the context of the national economic crisis. Perry also likes to point out the state’s role in generating new jobs; almost half of the nation’s new jobs from April 2007 to April 2008 were created here.
Can Perry justifiably claim credit for all this? Or did it happen because Texas has a history of being business-friendly in its tax structure and regulatory climate that long predates this governor? And let’s not forget oil and gas prices, which were a bonanza for the state treasury for many months. Here’s what Perry told me in an interview: “I think Texas is a better place because I served for the last eight years. In the last five years in particular, I have tried to look into the future and anticipate the needs of a state that is growing by a thousand people a day. We need to create wealth in this state. Wealth makes it possible to address our infrastructure needs—roads and bridges, reservoirs, schools. It’s not a chicken-and-egg thing. You have to have wealth.”
Touting the recent announcement that Caterpillar was relocating its manufacturing operations to the San Antonio bedroom community of Seguin, his excitement was palpable. “Fourteen hundred jobs! A $170 million plant! Twenty-five hundred more jobs for suppliers. How many governors would like to have made that announcement?” He leaned forward and tapped me on the arm. “All of ’em.”
Hutchison has done her share to help the state’s economy. Over the opposition of senior tax policymakers in both parties, she pushed for a measure to allow residents of states that have sales taxes but not income taxes—that’s us—to deduct their sales tax expenditures. This keeps almost a billion dollars annually from flowing to Washington. She won a repeal of the Wright Amendment, which restricted flights out of Love Field to adjacent states or within Texas. The repeal helped not only Love Field but also DFW Airport by limiting the possible loss of traffic to Love. In 2007, as a ranking member on an appropriations committee, she observed that overseas bases lacked sufficient land for training exercises and pressed Pentagon officials to make better utilization of Fort Bliss and Fort Hood. Fort Bliss is anticipating a buildup of 14,000 troops, plus dependents, that will bring considerable growth to El Paso. And during her time in the Senate, she has worked to raise Texas’ share of reimbursement for federal gasoline taxes on every dollar collected, from 76 cents to 93 cents.
In addition to the foregoing, Hutchison, like all members of Congress, seeks funding for her home state in all sorts of areas; in her case, this includes everything from Hurricane Ike relief to dredging the Houston Ship Channel. In a GOP primary, however, her ability to deliver federal money could be a weakness rather than a strength: Republicans are generally hostile to government spending.
TALE OF THE TAPE
Sometimes things happen in politics because somebody makes them happen, and sometimes things just happen. It is particularly hard to apportion credit for something as complex as the economy. What is clear is that (1) Perry made economic growth the centerpiece of his governorship and (2) Texas is, relatively speaking, better off than any other big state. Under these circumstances, he will be able to run on his record. Hutchison may well respond that one of the crucial elements of future economic growth is the education of the workforce, and it is being neglected. I mentioned to Perry that many school districts are facing the prospect of insolvency in the next decade under the school finance system that the current state leadership put in place, and his response was “School finance never leaves the radar screen.” Of all the economic issues that are likely to play a role in the election, the most important may be the $700 billion bailout of the financial system. In September, just days after the rescue of insurance giant AIG, Hutchison criticized bailouts in the Amarillo Globe-News: “It is better to let free market economics pick winners and losers, not the federal government,” she wrote. “Corporate bailouts set a dangerous precedent and stand to impact market dynamics over the long-term.” Ten days later, however, she voted for the bailout. Perry promptly came out against it.
ROUND 9: HIS WEIGH-IN
In boxing, fighters hit the scales a few days before the actual fight, and it’s often an occasion for trash-talking. My interview notes are full of this. Here is what the Perry camp has to say: “She wants a coronation, not an election . . . She’s already started to waffle . . . We’re going to make this a race between a Washington Republican and a Texas Republican . . . He is a budget cutter. She’s a spender.”
All this is for show. What matters are each combatant’s strengths and weaknesses. Perry has been a consequential governor. For better or for worse, he has transformed the role of the office. State government is organized so that most state agencies are overseen by a board or commission composed of (hopefully) outstanding, civic-minded Texans who are involved in politics and are interested in the activities of the agency they oversee. Governors traditionally have little to do with the day-to-day functioning of the executive department. Perry takes a different approach. His appointees frequently come from his inner circle—staffers and longtime loyalists. He is able to direct the policies of these agencies, sometimes through executive orders. In fact, though not in name, he operates as a chief executive in a cabinet form of government. This represents a total departure from the views of the framers of the Texas Constitution, who came out of Reconstruction convinced that executive power should be fragmented.
In his eight years of office, Perry has made 4,932 appointments to state boards and commissions; presumably, those people remain loyal to him. This allows Perry to involve himself in the everyday function of government to a degree other Texas governors never dreamed of—for example, the selection of the president of Texas A&M or the hiring of a key staffer at the Teacher Retirement System. The knock on Perry used to be that he was more interested in campaigning than in governing. Not anymore. When I asked him about establishing a de facto cabinet form of government, he said, “If you really want your government to be effective, efficient, and consequential, I think you need that.”
Perry’s greatest strengths as a politician are those of every champion fighter: experience and discipline. During his years in office, hardly a week has gone by when he has not been the object of derision—from the media, from the public, from the bloggers, even from his fellow pols. “Governor Good Hair.” “Governor 39 Percent.” Kinky Friedman’s slogan, “How hard can it be?” If it bothers him, he has never let the outside world see it.
He has two big weaknesses. First, he can’t, or won’t, govern beyond his own ideology (the sole exception occurred when the Texas Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce reliance on the use of the property tax to finance the public schools and Perry supported a revision of the business tax). In the battle over toll roads, he could have solved the funding problem by raising the gas tax and issuing bonds; instead, he chose to pursue enormous cash payments from foreign corporations, instantly arousing suspicions that he would use the money to help friends and allies. He has shown little interest in improving the public schools except through conservative programs such as merit pay and vouchers.
His second weakness is extreme partisanship, as reflected by his call for mid-census congressional redistricting in 2003 and his propensity to bestow favors on his supporters. The most notable example of the latter was his approval of a bill that required disputes between dissatisfied homeowners and builders to be settled by a newly created, builder-friendly state agency rather than in court. Neither of these weaknesses is likely to prove fatal in a Republican primary.
TALE OF THE TAPE
What could hurt him is something he can do nothing about: He is asking Texans to give him four more years at a time when change is in the air. His 39 percent showing in the ’06 race was a sign that Perry fatigue might be afflicting GOP voters.
ROUND 10: HER WEIGH-IN
The Hutchison camp has already done its share of trash-talking: “Look back at 2006. He got 39 percent of the vote. They were not leaning forward at the finish line. If you want to lead, you use an election to grab people’s imagination. They played for just barely getting by.” The line I remember best, though, was from Hutchison herself, back in 2002, the first time she looked hard at running for the state’s top job. When I asked her why she would give up her Senate seat, she said, with a twinkle in her eye, “Because Texas needs a grown-up for governor.”
Hutchison’s strength is her personality. Put her in a room and she’s a crowd magnet, able to communicate in a way that wins people over—including skeptical journalists. In the fall of 2007, after reading an article about a bus tour during which she told Peggy Fikac, of the San Antonio Express-News, that she might not run for governor after all, I wrote that I doubted her seriousness about making the race. The next time I saw her, she pantomimed putting her left hand on an imaginary Bible and her right hand pointing upward and said, “When I am doing this, I want to see you on the front row.”
Another potential strength is that the Hutchison camp appears to be reassembling the Bush organization. The rumor, which her strategists deny but everyone else believes, including Perry’s strategists, is that Karl Rove is advising her. There never was any love lost between the Bush and Perry camps, and Rove brings with him the ability to resurrect the Bush fund-raising apparatus. Even as Bush was dividing Washington, his friends back home were lamenting how Perry’s partisanship was destroying the unity Bush had built in Austin.
Her vulnerability is that she seems unwilling or unable to engage Perry. She is still sparring rather than fighting; her advisers say that she doesn’t want her candidacy to be an issue in the legislative session, as if she can prevent it. When I interviewed her, we talked mostly about her Senate career. She enjoyed telling old war stories about the passage of her homemaker IRA bill: “I remember when I was a single, working woman, and then I got married, and I couldn’t put aside more than $250 a year.” She went out of her way to praise Barbara Mikulski, her Democratic colleague from Maryland, for allowing her to be the author of the bill, although the normal practice is for a senator in the majority party to author it. Not for the first time, I wondered why Hutchison would leave the Senate.
TALE OF THE TAPE
The answer is she cares more about Texas issues than national issues—and governor is a better job. Just ask Rick Perry.
My Library
