Mr. Happy Man Goes to Washington
Ron Kirk would like to ride his record as the mayor of Dallas and his jovial personality into the U.S. Senate. Alas, the Republicans keep bringing up race—and so do the Democrats.
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Still, he was not without his critics. Laura Miller, who had been the city hall reporter for the alternative newspaper, the Dallas Observer, led the opposition during Kirk’s second term as mayor. (Miller declined to be interviewed for this article.) An ally of Miller’s on the council, Donna Blumer, blames Kirk for heavy-handed treatment of council members who questioned his initiatives. Her poor relationship with Kirk began on his inaugural day, when she and four other council members voted against his choice for mayor pro tem. “From that day on,” she says, “he declared war. He denied us committee chairmanships and froze us out. He can turn on the charm when he wants to, but he is a very vindictive man.”
Much of Miller’s and Blumer’s criticism of Kirk was based on his support of public funding for private projects. “There was no need for any public funding of the sports arena. It is corporate welfare,” Blumer says. “The mayor encouraged the city to cut a deal that was so one-sided, anybody could see it was a rip-off of the taxpayers.” Kirk defends the deal, saying the city was competing against suburbs in enticing the developers to select downtown Dallas as the site for the new arena. “You have to strike the very best deal you can, and we did that. We capped our investment, and when the project grew from $250 million to $430 million, the city’s contribution never increased one bit.” He credits the arena with drawing nearly three million visitors a year to downtown Dallas. “That’s the way you make your downtown viable. You invest.”
Blumer also notes that former city manager John Ware, “who was very tight with the mayor,” left the city and went to work for Hicks shortly after the arena deal was reached. Kirk acknowledges the timing “looked bad” but defends Ware’s participation in the arena negotiations: “I can tell you from having been there that he was hard-nosed and kept his eye on the bottom line.” Hints of impropriety with Hicks hit closer to home when the Dallas Morning News revealed that Matrice Kirk, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who had worked for the trust department at a bank and later became the budget director of DART, served on the corporate board of one of Hicks’s companies. Kirk points out that at the time his wife joined the board, Hicks didn’t own the company. “She went on the board with a private company with zero relationship with the city, the Mavericks, or the Stars at a time when Tom Hicks didn’t own it,” he says. “But I’m not nuts. It looked bad and she resigned. She did the right thing, and I’m proud of her.”
Although Miller and Blumer seldom won a battle with Kirk—one exception was a battle to keep aging neighborhood pools open—Miller was able to exploit resentment over tax subsidies to win the mayor’s job in January after Kirk stepped down to run for the Senate. Kirk endorsed her main opponent, local businessman Tom Dunning. “She came in with the idea that she was against Kirk,” says Dunning. “There is a natural resentment by populists. They don’t want to see any deals done with people who are considered rich—but Dallas won as a result of these deals.”
ANOTHER CITY, ANOTHER APPEARANCE. Several hundred Texas public school teachers have assembled at Austin’s Renaissance Hotel for the Texas State Teachers Association’s annual convention, at which Kirk is the featured speaker. Before he can say a word, the applause that greets him blooms into a standing ovation, complete with whistling and cheering. The energy seems to surprise him. “Daa-yumm,” he says, grinning. “It’s too bad y’all are in such a bad mood.”
He plows ahead with his speech, ending with a deft reminder that he is Texas’ first African American nominee for the U.S. Senate. “I’m here because someone dared to believe in me, because of people who saw a whole lot more than a busboy,” he said. “We need to tell a child, ‘I love you and you can do more.’” As the audience erupts in raucous applause, a throng gathers along Kirk’s exit path. “I’m a teacher and that was an A plus,” one woman gushes as she clasps Kirk’s hand. Another says that she works part-time at Neiman Marcus and waited on Kirk and his wife the previous summer. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she says, and he cuts her off with a quip: “As if I could remember everybody that waited on my wife at Neiman Marcus! Do me a favor, will ya? Next time you see her in there, you run her out!”
This performance is a balancing act of charm and substance that Kirk has been perfecting since his father admonished him at a young age: “Boy, you can’t get by on just charm alone.” He will need to find the right balance to have a chance to defeat Cornyn, whose biggest advantage in the Senate race comes from his support for—and from—President Bush. Kirk, the Republicans will argue, will support the policies of majority leader Tom Daschle and the Democratic left. They will try to draw him into a debate on issues that will highlight his differences with Bush. Kirk will respond as he did in El Paso, when a TV reporter asked him, “How do you feel about being on the Dream ticket?” Kirk’s answer: “That’s not what this election is about. It’s about what’s been happening in Washington for too long. There’s too much partisan bickering.”
Kirk’s immediate problem is money. With his financial resources depleted to around $500,000 after the Democratic runoff, he has spent most of his time trying to raise the $10 million or so he will need for the race. Before he can expect to get any help from the national Democratic war chest, he will have to show that he is competitive—both in the polls and in the ability to raise money. In the spring, statewide polls taken in Texas showed Cornyn with a lead of five to seven points, which is close to the Republicans’ built-in edge in voter loyalty. However, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recently released the results of a sample of eight hundred registered voters that showed Kirk leading by 46 percent to 42 percent; an early summer poll conducted by Richard Murray of the University of Houston showed him with an even bigger lead.
But the campaign hasn’t really begun in earnest, and Cornyn’s strengths—money and the White House—have yet to come into play. A lot of things will have to go right for Kirk to win. Above all, he will have to be able to raise the money. “It’s tough,” he says. Next, he must find a way to keep Cornyn from turning the race into a referendum on the policies of Bush (or, equally bad, Daschle). Corporate cheating, the uncertain economy, and health care rank as the best issues for Democrats; the war and tax cuts are the worst. Then there are strategic decisions, starting with how he can find a way to get his personality to come through on television. The campaign must exploit his popularity in the huge Dallas-Fort Worth media market to woo some swing votes. A lot of Dallas Republicans crossed party lines in the spring to vote for Kirk—but will they do it in November? Finally, he must successfully define himself on the issue of race. We know he isn’t Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, but he has to establish himself as a centrist black Democrat. Is it possible to run as a black candidate in order to increase minority turnout and, at the same time, run as a candidate who, among other things, is black in order to get the 35 percent or so of the white vote that he will need to win? Ultimately, the color of his skin may decide the Senate race, but in which direction? Democrats need to play it up to increase their turnout. Republicans need to play it up to prevent Kirk from getting that magic percentage of the white vote.
The fascinating thing about the race is that each side must engage in racial politics, and yet there are big risks for each in doing so. You can’t apply a racial stereotype to Kirk, and here is a cautionary tale for those who would try. One evening while he was mayor, he was waiting for his car at a valet station following a Dallas charity event. He was dressed in a tuxedo, his wife next to him in a smashing dress, when a man walked up and tossed his keys to Kirk so he could fetch his car. Then, in Hollywood timing, the real valet pulled up with Kirk’s BMW. Still holding the man’s keys, he climbed in and drove happily away.
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