Short Cuts: Episode VI 
The Great White Hope
Democrats haven’t won a statewide race since 1994, so why does this middle-aged guy with a bald head and big ears think he's the fresh face of the party? Because outgoing Houston mayor Bill White has a record that makes some Republicans envious, he can raise a ton of money, and he will kiss as many babies as it takes (whether they want him to or not).
Doug says: Without a doubt, Texas needs Bill White! Think of it, going from "big hair" to "big brain!" (November 27th, 2009 at 9:39pm)
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Riding with him I get the sense—it’s almost surreal—that I am touring a small town, not the nation’s fourth-largest city. This is enhanced by the behavior of White himself, who has what city council member Anne Clutterbuck calls “an excruciating capacity for detail.” On his rides he takes note of everything from potholes and abandoned lots to apparent drug houses and crimes in the street. These notes make their way quickly to city department heads, as the equivalent of “action today” memos. Four years ago, when riding with state senator Rodney Ellis and others in Independence Heights, White came upon two men in a pickup illegally dumping building materials in an abandoned lot. He confronted them and asked what they thought they were doing. His companions, meanwhile, were concerned for his safety. “The mayor is back there saying, ‘You guys can’t do this,’ ” recalls Ellis, “and he looks like he is about to make a citizen’s arrest. I am worrying about a citizen about to get shot.” A few minutes later, a police cruiser arrived and arrested the men.
Today White spots an empty lot in Independence Heights, with a ditch full of garbage. He knocks on the door of the adjacent home, an old, ramshackle bungalow, and questions the man, who of course recognizes him immediately. White asks if he saw who dumped the garbage and gives him a number to call if he has any information. Since there is a For Sale sign on the lot, White calls the real estate agent and leaves a message: “This is Mayor Bill White. Your client’s lot is full of garbage, and I thought your client would want to know that.” Dumping offends White. It just isn’t right.
So it goes on our trip through the city. He shows me the renovations in Freedmen’s Town, the spectacular new $125 million downtown park called Discovery Green—built with combined public and private funds—that he thought up, helped raise the money for, and bird-dogged from inception to final bricks, mortar, trees, and grass. “This was a series of run-down parking lots,” he says. “Nobody knew what to do with it. Now it’s a great park. But there is also”—he points to the skyscrapers looming above—“a billion dollars’ worth of new investment going up around it.” At a market he consults with the owner, whose awning was blown off by Hurricane Ike and who is having trouble getting a city permit for a replacement. White takes notes and pledges help. Then the man’s daughter comes out with a camera to take a picture of her father and the mayor, and then more people arrive with cameras, and a small crowd gathers. White’s city rides are often like this.
After six years in office, Bill White has become something more than just the mayor of this massive megalopolis. He has been so successful and has become so powerful that it seems that he and he alone controls the city’s vast social and political machinery. This partly stems from the real power given to him by the city charter. There is no city manager, and he directs the city council’s agenda, which essentially means that nothing can come to a vote unless he says it can. He also directly oversees the bureaucracy of city government, which means that he can tell city employees what to do. They all work for him.
Partly it is the way White has wielded that power, a quiet, bipartisan, consensus-building approach, that has transformed the Houston City Council from the often rancorous foe it was under his predecessor, Lee Brown, into a docile—some would say too docile—and cooperative ally. Of more than 13,000 city council votes since he has been in office, White has lost 3. Most are unanimous. “He doesn’t like to do anything on an eight-to-seven vote,” says council member Sue Lovell. “He really wants the clear majority of stakeholders and council members to be comfortable with it and in favor of it. If you come to him and say, ‘I don’t think this will work,’ he will listen to you and sometimes come back to you and say, ‘You are absolutely right, we need to do it this way.’ ” Though a faint bleating can be heard in some quarters of city hall from council members who may have felt ever so slightly stepped on or who find White a trifle dictatorial, you can scarcely find any credible political figure who is willing to speak against the most popular mayor in memory. Calls to those who have had differences with him, including city council members Jolanda Jones, Pam Holm, and Ron Green (all of whom vote with him most of the time), were not returned.
“He has instilled confidence, and he has gotten people to trust him to such a degree that people have this feeling that the city is in great shape because Bill White has been taking care of it for six years,” says Nancy Sims, a longtime observer of Houston politics who writes a popular political blog, texas-musings.com. “There is really not a group of people that you can find that, as a whole, hate Bill White, which is a rare thing to say about a mayor.” Says Craig Varoga, a national political consultant who has worked extensively in Houston: “Even people who are unhappy or dissatisfied because of their particular issues will say that they think he has done a good job overall. A lot of that is rooted in Katrina, which was the perfect confluence of reality and politics.”
He has done it with a complex and ambitious plan that few mayors anywhere would have attempted. Against the advice of his friend, former mayor Bob Lanier, White has not cherry-picked a few prominent urban problems to solve. He has instead taken on more than a dozen major issues, many of which carried considerable political risk. He banned, for all practical purposes, lobbyists from city hall and from any involvement in city contracts, thereby cleaning up what many had come to call “the trough.” He took on the city’s legendary traffic jams and, in a series of programs, untangled some of them and sped up commuting times. He reduced the city’s property tax rate five years out of six; shored up the city’s wobbly pension system; reduced the City of Houston’s energy consumption by 6 percent, making Houston one of the greenest cities in the country; took on petrochemical companies over air pollution; added parks and libraries; cleaned up decaying neighborhoods and built affordable housing; revamped a badly managed police department, resulting in the city’s lowest crime level in decades; and signed new contracts with firefighters giving them 38 percent raises, the first salary increase in six years.
White has also made the most of the economic boom time that coincided with most of his tenure. He balanced his budgets every year—meaning that the city did not borrow to pay for operating expenses—and used the additional revenue both to cut property tax rates five times and to build up the city’s surplus fund, all while increasing key city services. When recession-bound Houston faced a $101 million shortfall this year due to declining revenue, he bridged the gap in part by drawing down on that surplus. White and his council also strengthened the city’s wobbly municipal pension fund by both significantly reducing benefits and upping the amount the city contributed to the system. These moves were not without controversy. Many people believe that the pension system will need further shoring up through increased employee contributions, and White himself acknowledged in a staff memo that “the recent downturn in the value of investments for all defined pension plans . . . can pose challenges for the future.” And there has been plenty of talk in this campaign season that White was in effect balancing his budget by using his rainy day fund. White insists that the purpose of the surplus is to cover shortfalls in hard times. Either way, voters seemed happy with his fiscal management, and Houston thus far has survived without any of the major layoffs or budget cuts that have come to define life in most large American cities. “With little more than seven months remaining in his last term,” reads a May editorial in the Houston Chronicle, “Mayor White has deftly steered Houston through both fiscal and tropical storms. His successor will have a tough act to follow.”
Indeed, Katrina is what people will always remember. Though Houston’s humanitarian response to the problem is now a source of civic pride, at the time not everybody in Harris County was keen on having what was perceived to be the dregs of New Orleans relocated to their city; a subsequent crime wave seemed to confirm their fears. Many of those evacuees have now been completely absorbed into the city’s fabric, as White had hoped and believed they would be. For his leadership in that crisis, White was honored in 2007 with the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and named by Governing magazine one of America’s top public officials.
It is endorsements like this, and his track record as mayor, that have propelled White into the race for the U.S. Senate. Because of term limits, he will find himself out of a job in January, and a December 12 runoff will decide whether city controller Annise Parker or former city attorney Gene Locke will take his place. Though many Democrats had hoped he would run for governor in 2010, he has announced his intention to run for the seat left open by Kay Bailey Hutchison, assuming she resigns to run for governor against Rick Perry. If she does step aside early, the race to succeed her could culminate in a multicandidate special election scramble as early as May.
At first glance, White would seem to have enormous advantages, which include his popularity in the state’s largest city and name recognition from his public role in Katrina. And he has proved that he can raise money. As of the reporting cycle that ended October 1, he has $6 million in his war chest; his closest Democratic rival, former comptroller John Sharp, has only $3.8 million. But the reality is that he is facing an uphill battle in a red state that went 55 percent for John McCain in 2008, has not elected a Democrat to statewide office in fifteen years, and where big-city mayors, even successful ones, have historically gone nowhere. He will be running against extremely well-funded Republican opponents. If White faces Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, he will also be facing Dewhurst’s money: He dropped $10 million of his personal fortune in the 2002 election and could spend at least that much in 2010. Then there is the rather stark fact that, no matter what people may think of White personally, his candidacy amounts to a referendum on President Barack Obama himself. A vote for him means that Obama’s supermajority in the Senate increases by one. It is by no means clear that most Texans want that to happen.
To meet Bill White is to be underwhelmed. He has an open face; a slow-breaking, ingenuous smile; and a measured, courtly way of talking, in an accent deeply inflected by his native San Antonio, that does not suggest either extreme ambition or razor-sharp intellect. Most politicians talk in crisp sound bites. White, as his friend Paul Hobby once observed, speaks in footnoted paragraphs. As University of Houston political science professor Richard Murray puts it, his speech is “a maddening stream of consciousness without periods.” He does not seem, in short, to be what he is, which turns out to be a huge natural advantage.
At no time was this more true than during his fourteen-year career as a trial lawyer. White attended Harvard University on an American Legion scholarship, where he majored in economics, then went to the University of Texas School of Law, where he was editor of the law review, graduated first in his class, and seemed, according to a classmate, “ten years older than everybody else.”
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