Short Cuts: Episode V 
Can Rick Perry Stand On His Own?
With George W. Bush no longer at the top of the ballot for the first time in five elections, Texas can look forward to the most intriguing political year in a generation: four big races, two strong tickets, and a healthy debate over whether this is still a two-party state. Can the Republicans stomp out the challenge, or will the Democrats send the governor and his allies to Boot Hill?
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It seemed natural for me to ask Perry, at the start of my interview with him shortly before Christmas, how Republican Texas will be different from Democratic Texas. “There will be a little less of the partisan bickering,” he said, leaning his head back. “That’s probably good. I’ve been painted as a partisan, but I’m no more of one than Speaker Laney or any other Democrat state officeholder.” The chemistry that enabled Bush, Laney, and Bob Bullock, Perry’s predecessor as lieutenant governor, to work together went sour when Perry, Laney, and Ratliff met. “The day George Bush left here, the muzzles were taken off,” Perry told me. “I look forward to 2003 to work with people. It will be a lot different with a Republican lite gov and Speaker.” (Ratliff, of course, is a Republican.) The significance of Perry’s observation is that he views himself as a victim, not a perpetrator, of partisan politics.
Much of what Perry talked about in our interview didn’t seem revealing at the time. Only later, after I talked with longtime Perry friends, did a pattern begin to form. When I asked him why he thought he would make a better governor than Sanchez, he gave two reasons. The first was “I’ve had legislative experience, agency experience, executive experience. It’s been a long time since anyone came to office with the experience in government I have had.” When was the last time a Republican has touted his credentials as a government insider? The other was “my life experiences.” We are all the product of our life experiences, but Perry is quite a sentimental fellow, in a good way, and the formative events of his life have affected him profoundly.
The first of these, Perry told me, was growing up on a tenant farm. He comes from a tradition in American politics that goes back to Thomas Jefferson, who held that farmers were the embodiment of American virtue. At home he was taught not to overuse the word “I,” a friend of Perry’s told me, and to this day he doesn’t like to use it in his speeches. Attending Texas A&M was the second formative life experience. Its political manifestation is Perry’s desire to see every family send their kids to college. “Just one in five go to college,” he said. “That’s not good enough.” (No, it’s not, but so far he hasn’t done anything dramatic to get the numbers up.) The third influence came in 1987, when he served on the House Appropriations Committee during hard times. Perry was one of a group of sophomore lawmakers known as the Pit Bulls who were frustrated by bureaucracies and their resistant cultures and wanted to shake them up, an attitude he continues to have today. He regards his appointees as his biggest accomplishment (“That’s how you really impact state government”), and most people around the Capitol would agree. The last of the formative experiences was his decision to switch parties. Like many converts, he will always wonder how he is accepted by the faithful. As a result, the kind of bipartisanship that Bush practiced would be unthinkable for Perry.
Two consistent themes emerged from the interview. One is that insecurity may have affected his performance in his first year as governor. Party switching is not the only possible source. He faces constant comparisons to Bush, he lacks a mandate from the electorate (although, as he points out, he has won three statewide races), and he is from a small corner of the world, something that haunted Lyndon Johnson when he became president. The second is that while Perry is a completely loyal Republican when it comes to politics, he seems more like a conservative Democrat when it comes to government. Which is to say, he doesn’t approach government from an ideological standpoint at all. He looks at politics and he looks at how to make government work. He is still very much the pit bull.
One more piece of the puzzle: During our interview, Perry mentioned that his “favorite movie of all time” is The Wizard of Oz. For him it has lessons that translate to politics. (No, no, it’s not that you can get along without a brain.) To Perry, political power is often an illusion, a little man behind a curtain projecting an image. Bullock inspired awe and fear with his temperamental outbursts, encyclopedic knowledge of state government, and micromanaging of the Senate, but Perry took a completely different approach. “To be lieutenant governor you’ve got to be able to hold hands, stroke, smooth feathers,” he told me. “It’s about being a big mother hen.” Again, you want to say, no, it’s not. It’s about substance, not style. It’s about coming to work every day to look for ways to make Texas a better place, which is what, for all his faults, Bullock did and Bill Hobby before him.
Now it’s off to the races for Perry and the rest of the field, a sprint followed by a marathon: first, the Democratic primary on March 12 (Republicans have no seriously contested statewide battles for the big-four offices), then the general election on November 5. Even before a vote has been cast, this election stands to be remembered as the year when the political world accepted the reality of demographics. The ballot is the future of Texas politics made present tense: Hispanics and blacks are all over the statewide lineup for both parties, and women too (Democrat Sherry Boyles, a former state party official, is running for railroad commissioner while Republicans Carole Keeton Rylander and Susan Combs, the incumbent comptroller of public accounts and the commissioner of agriculture, respectively, are up for reelection). No matter how the races turn out, the result of the 2002 election will have an impact on Texas politics for a long time. It will set the benchmark for Hispanic turnout. It will reveal whether the presence of Hispanic and black candidates in high-visibility races can increase traditional voting activity. It will test the theory that unknown Hispanic candidates in Democratic primaries can defeat politicians with years of experience in office without even mounting a campaign, on the strength of their names alone.
Here’s a closer look at the races for the big-four offices.
Senate.
With the Democrats holding the slenderest of majorities in the Senate, this battle for an open seat in the president’s home state will get a lot of national attention. Cornyn starts with three advantages. He will be able to outspend his opponent by a considerable margin. He is a made-for-TV candidate with silver hair and senatorial bearing. (In focus groups, says a Cornyn confidant, “you can see heads start to nod as soon as he appears onscreen.”) And he will get all the campaign help from George W. Bush that he needs. If the race is close, Bush will try to convince voters that it is their patriotic duty to send Cornyn to Washington.
The leading Democratic contenders, Bentsen and Kirk, face a dilemma without a solution: How can they run a statewide primary campaign with little money and less time? It’s impossible. As a consequence, the primary will really be two separate primaries, with each candidate targeting the areas of the state where he is strongest—for Kirk, Dallas, upper East Texas, and Central Texas; for Bentsen, Houston, lower East Texas, Corpus Christi, and the Rio Grande Valley—and mostly ignoring the rest. Each will pick up some votes on their opponents’ turf, Kirk from Houston’s black community and from the Democratic establishment, whose strategy for winning in November depends upon having a black candidate on the ticket, and Bentsen from those who recognize the familiar political name (although fourteen years have passed since Lloyd Bentsen last appeared on a ballot). But the main idea is to make sure that your strongholds have a bigger turnout than the other guy’s.
The numbers work in Bentsen’s favor—or at least they ought to. The five big South Texas counties and El Paso constitute a big chunk of the Democratic primary vote, and Houston has more Democratic votes than Dallas. But two obstacles lie in the way. One is that Bentsen, who is well regarded in Washington, has smarts but not much pizzazz while Kirk has both. As political consultants are prone to say, Kirk could turn into a rock star, with grave consequences not only for Bentsen but also for Cornyn. The other problem is the candidacy of Victor Morales. As an unknown in 1996, he drove around in a pickup truck and defeated two congressmen to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Will that act play twice? If it does and he squeezes into a runoff, he could be a real threat because the high-turnout areas are likely to be in South Texas, where there will be runoffs in local races.
In this race, as in every statewide race except the battle for lieutenant governor, the Republican is the presumptive favorite, and the Democrats’ hope for an upset lies in turnout. But Bentsen and Victor Morales would face an additional problem as the party nominee: If Kirk loses, black voters may be so frustrated that they will stay home in the fall.
Governor
Sanchez is the linchpin of the democratic strategy to defeat Perry. Lieutenant governor candidate John Sharp, who lost his 1998 race for that job to Perry, determined that if the Hispanic turnout that year had been as high as it had been in 1994, he would have defeated Perry. But not just any Hispanic candidate would do. Out of power, the Democrats would have a hard time raising money. So the party needed a wealthy Hispanic who could run as a businessman and finance his own campaign and a get-out-the-vote effort that would boost the entire ticket.
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