Regular Joe
How a (somewhat) moderate Republican (almost) no one had ever heard of became the most powerful politician in Texas (maybe).
Joe Straus III
Photograph by Michael Thad Carter
On the morning of January 2, state representative Joe Straus III, of San Antonio, was a little-known member of the Texas House who had not yet served two full terms. Many of his fellow members hardly knew him; few could say where his desk was located on the House floor. As he prepared to drive to Austin for a meeting with a group of ten Republican colleagues who had sworn to prevent controversial House Speaker Tom Craddick from being reelected to a fourth term, Straus’s wife, Julie, asked him when he would return. Having no inkling that his life was about to change, he didn’t suspect that the correct answer was “June.”
Heading up Interstate 35, Straus debated whether he should allow his name to be entered in the voting that would take place that afternoon to determine a challenger to Craddick. He was such a long shot that he hadn’t bothered to submit the requisite papers declaring his candidacy to the Texas Ethics Commission. When he arrived at the private residence where the anti-Craddick group, known as the ABCs, for “Anybody but Craddick,” was meeting, Brian McCall, of Plano, hastily arranged for Straus to file.
Nine of the eleven dissidents put their names on the ballot—the two exceptions being Rob Eissler, of the Woodlands, who was out of the state and participated by telephone, and Charlie Geren, of Fort Worth. The group had agreed that each member would circle two of the nine names. The two lowest vote-getters would drop off, and the process would be repeated. After three rounds, the choice was down to McCall, Straus, and Burt Solomons, of Carrollton. McCall was eliminated in the fourth round, and Straus edged Solomons by a single vote. As the news got out, House members began calling one another, beginning their conversations with a one-word question freighted with disbelief: “Straus?”
Texas politics is full of surprises, but no one, least of all the 49-year-old Straus, was prepared for the stunning announcement that he was the dissidents’ choice to challenge Craddick for the speakership. Because most House Democrats had been exiled to the backbenches during the six years of Craddick’s speakership, they were ready to embrace whomever the ABC contingent chose to challenge him. Together, the ABCs and the 64 Democrats who had signed their names to a pledge not to support Craddick for Speaker added up to 75 members—exactly half the House. If everybody stayed hitched, Straus was the favorite to be the next Speaker.
But there was work to do. The House would convene on January 13 to select its Speaker. Straus needed to recruit enough supporters to ensure a governing majority. Many Republicans were leery of supporting a coalition in which their party would be a minority. After two difficult days on the phone, Straus had the numbers he needed. That night, Craddick had scheduled a meeting with his supporters at a downtown Austin steakhouse, but it was too late. He conceded defeat, and Straus was elected by acclimation.
The improbable rise of Joe Straus carries with it potentially large consequences. The ABCs did not support Straus—and Straus did not take office—with the intention that he be a caretaker. Their number one goal—to remove Craddick from office—had been accomplished. But they also sought to change the way the House worked (or, more aptly, didn’t work) and to change the direction of the Republican party. In his three terms as Speaker and his forty years as a member, with connections to influential Republicans and lobbyists, including the party’s biggest donors, Craddick had become the most powerful and most reviled person at the Capitol. If a member crossed him, he could—and often did—target the member for defeat in the Republican primary by directing hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds to a challenger he had recruited. Chairmen were kept on a short leash and given little leeway to make decisions; five onetime Craddick chairs—Solomons; Eissler; Jim Pitts, of Waxahachie; Jim Keffer, of Eastland; and Byron Cook, of Corsicana—eventually defected to the ABCs.
The Democrats, meanwhile, found themselves without a constructive role. Except for the handful who supported Craddick in return for plum appointments and legislative favors, they became a permanent opposition party that challenged him daily on his management of the House. Toward the end of the 2007 session, the House twice broke out in rebellion against Craddick, objecting to his rulings. At one point, half a dozen of the Speaker’s own chairmen lined up at the microphone at the back of the chamber to take him on; even the most grizzled House observers could not remember anything like it. Faced with an attempt to remove him from the speakership, Craddick ruled that he didn’t have to recognize a member seeking his ouster. He had gone too far. The mutiny was on.
What finally brought Craddick down, however, was the one thing that, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t control: elections. When he became Speaker, in 2003, Republicans had an 88—62 majority. By election night 2008, they had lost a net twelve seats, reducing their margin to 76—74.
Four days after the election, a Republican legislator made the first public comment about the cost of Craddick’s leadership: “I’m deeply concerned about the Republican party, and I’m concerned about the Texas House. There are a lot of Republicans who feel the way I do. This goes deeper than the speakership of Tom Craddick. There is a feeling that the status quo is not acceptable.”
That legislator was Joe Straus.
If the anointing of Straus as the Speaker candidate of the ABCs baffled most House members at first, on reflection it made a lot of sense. His obvious shortcoming—lack of experience—was actually an advantage. Most of the ABCs were burdened with well-established histories of opposition to Craddick; two of them, Pitts and McCall, had run against him for Speaker in 2007. Straus had no such history. He stayed on the sidelines during the boisterous uprisings that split the Republican caucus in the 2007 session. As a junior member, he had done what he was supposed to do: Say little, learn a lot, and pass a couple of useful bills. (One repealed a tax that was obsolete; another increased energy efficiency requirements.) Second, Straus was ideologically compatible with the ABCs. He’s a mainstream Republican who has little affinity with the social conservatives who were Craddick’s most ardent supporters.
One other asset that Straus brought to the speakership was an impeccable Republican pedigree. This was important for the ABCs because of Craddick’s extensive support in the GOP hierarchy, which he could bring to bear against any challenger. But Straus’s GOP credentials were as stout as Craddick’s. No one could accuse the ABCs of backing a RINO, or “Republican in name only,” as conservatives call those they deem insufficiently doctrinaire. Straus is, as he described himself in an interview in early January, “Republican to the core.” His parents and other kin were Republicans when many of today’s Republicans, Rick Perry included, were conservative Democrats. Straus’s mother, Joci (pronounced “Jah-see,” short for Jocelyn), has been working for Republicans since 1959, when she formed “Nixon girls” organizations at local high schools. She has served as a precinct chair and as a member of the State Republican Executive Committee. The walls of her spacious office in her Alamo Heights home are covered with photographs of her family with prominent Republicans (including one of nine-year-old Joe sitting at U.S. senator John Tower’s desk with a pen in hand, his family and Tower standing in the background). On the day I visited her, she also had a cornucopia of Republican memorabilia on display, most notably a “Bush bag”—a wicker basket with a needlepoint design on one side (featuring an elephant with an upraised trunk) that was stitched by Barbara Bush, a souvenir of George H.W.’s unsuccessful 1970 Senate race.
The Strauses are also Texan to the core. A photograph in the Speaker’s private quarters displays the family business on San Antonio’s Main Plaza. It was taken in 1870, shortly after Straus’s great-grandfather’s uncle founded L. Frank Saddlery Co.; later it bore the name Straus-Frank. The Strauses were, and are, horse people. They manufactured saddles and harnesses under the slogan “The horse—next to a woman, God’s greatest gift to man.” Another family photo features Joe’s great-grandfather as a director of the San Antonio racing fair in 1898. That was the year Teddy Roosevelt brought his Rough Riders to the Menger Hotel on their way to the Spanish-American War; rarely told is that they came to pick up Straus-made saddles, harnesses, and whips. “A few of those whips would be handy right now,” Straus mused to me, reflecting on his new job.
The coming of the automobile forced the Strauses to alter their business plan. They became wholesale distributors for Remington guns and ammunition and Uniroyal tires, and they were the exclusive Texas distributor of Frigidaire appliances. By this time, around 1920, they were among the most prominent families in the city. Joe’s grandfather, the first Joe Straus, was an All-America football player at the University of Pennsylvania; he was offered the chance to play professional football by the New York Giants, but his father said no. Within a few years, he found himself missing the competition that he had enjoyed as an athlete, so he got into horse-racing partnerships with his business partners. One of these stables raced at the great tracks of New York: Saratoga, Belmont, and Aqueduct. The Strauses also stabled a few horses at Gulfstream Park, in Florida, from which they sent their horses to Sabinal, a town of about 1,500 in Uvalde County, to train with Tommy Oliphant, who had learned the business from legendary trainer Woody Stephens. (Today the family has broodmares at Nuckols Farms, in Lexington, Kentucky, but no longer has a large stable.)
The Straus family’s prominence in the racing world was such that young Joe worked summers in the office of the racing secretary at Saratoga and at Belmont and at the Jockey Club, in New York, the governing body of Thoroughbred racing. One of the Straus family’s best horses, Clev’er Tell, would have been the second favorite to Seattle Slew at Churchill Downs in 1977, but he sustained a chip fracture on his left knee. The Straus stable’s best horse was No Le Hace, who won the Arkansas and Louisiana derbies in 1972, ran second to Riva Ridge in the Kentucky Derby, and finished second in the Preakness by a length and a quarter. The last great Straus racehorse was Soy Numero Uno, a handicap racer and the son of Damascus, a famous sire. (The family prefers to breed horses rather than buy them.)
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