Mr. Right
Can you name the most influential Republican in Texas? It's not Rick Perry or any other elected official. It's James Leninger, a little-known San Antonio physician whose ideology and millions are pushing the GOP to be more conservative than ever.
(Page 4 of 4)
Yet the voucher movement was not a total bust. Whether because of the money involved, the hope of appealing to minority voters, or because they just happen to like vouchers, Republican state officials rallied to the cause. In 1999 Governor Bush announced his support for vouchers in his second inaugural speech. "I was sitting on the dais behind him, and I almost fell out of my chair," says Sadler. "It was a pander to the hard right. This was a man who had looked me straight in the eye and said that he didn't like vouchers when we were rewriting the education code in '95. I could not believe my ears. That was the first ring of insincerity I ever heard in George W.'s voice." And as lieutenant governor, Rick Perry pushed hard for vouchers that year. "I would describe the lieutenant governor's interest in that issue to have been intense, whatever his motivations were," says Republican state senator John Carona, who voted against a voucher proposal in 1999, despite heavy pressure to support it. "He spoke to me several times in the chamber and expressed his views emphatically."
LAST YEAR, AFTER THE CLOSE of the legislative session, Austin political newsletter editor Harvey Kronberg was invited to speak at a dinner sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which Leininger attended. "I was laying out the case on paper for [2002 gubernatorial candidates] Sanchez versus Perry," he says. "I've been pretty outspoken in talking about Perry's approach to the vetoes as a failure of the governor's office and one that could come back to haunt him." (Last year Perry vetoed 82 bills, in many cases after never having indicated his opposition to a bill during the session.) Kronberg continues, "There was a question and answer period after that. Dr. Leininger, who has always been very congenial and very relaxed when I've met him, asked me, 'So what kind of baggage is Perry going to have?' I said, 'Obviously the vetoes and the business dealings, including some of his business dealings with you.' And he just nodded."
Those business dealings surfaced in 1997: The Perry campaign co-owned an airplane with Leininger and his brother Peter and sought taxpayer reimbursements for its use. Perry also made $38,000 from selling KCI stock that he had bought on a day when an investment company began buying 2.2 million shares, raising the share value. Perry spoke at a TPPF luncheon that same day. (Perry has called the timing of the speech, the stock purchase, and the investment spree a coincidence.) But Leininger's donations to Perry's campaigns far exceed Perry's KCI profit: $56,000 in the 1998 cycle, plus the last-minute loan, and at least $75,000 since then. "If Rick Perry were a baseball team, Leininger would be the owner," says George Shipley, a Sanchez campaign strategist. "When he calls, Rick Perry jumps and shuffles." As of mid-October Kronberg's prediction had yet to be validated: The Perry-Leininger connection had not become a major issue in the campaign.
Have the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Leininger has given to Republican statewide officeholders affected how they conduct the state's business? It is not a question that the officeholders themselves seem eager to address. Perry, land commissioner David Dewhurst, comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander, Attorney General John Cornyn, and Texas Supreme Court justice Greg Abbott have all received more than $50,000 from Leininger in the past; all declined to comment or did not return phone calls for this article. Critics say that to detect Leininger's influence, one need look no further than Perry's, Rylander's, and Dewhurst's support of vouchers; Perry's veto of a bill that would have transferred oversight of the Permanent School Fund, the multibillion-dollar endowment for public schools, from the SBOE to professional fund managers; Perry's far-reaching transportation plan (which has many similarities with that of one of the TPPF's researchers, a privatization enthusiast named Wendell Cox); or Cornyn's advocacy before the U.S. Supreme Court of prayer at football games (in a case for which the Texas Justice Foundation wrote an amicus brief). In February 2001 Rylander drew press criticism for having sent out a fundraising letter for the TPPF on official comptroller's office stationery. In the wake of that incident, Dewhurst also sent out a fundraising letter on the foundation's behalf, but on nonofficial stationery headed "David Dewhurst, Texas Land Commissioner."
Yet, those who know Leininger describe him as a hands-off donor. "Leininger is not somebody who picks up the phone and discusses issues," says Cyndi Krier, a former state senator and county judge from Bexar County. "He tends to support candidates he thinks would make good representatives and then lets them decide what to do. He probably receives many more phone calls than he ever makes. He's not your typical political power broker, behind the scenes trying to manipulate things."
THIS SUMMER'S STATE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION in Dallas drew more than eight thousand of the party faithful, who streamed back and forth between the meeting halls at the cavernous Dallas Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency Hotel, with its hospitality suites and atrium bar. Although Leininger, if he attended, did not appear publicly, evidence of his pervasive influence was everywhere. Promised Land Dairy was a corporate underwriter of the event—its logo everywhere, its flavored milks available for tasting in the exhibitor area, and its mascot, a clean, tawny Jersey cow named Molly, lazing in a trailer nearby. ("Yes, Molly's a Republican," said Jenny Claridge, Promised Land's public relations director.) Leininger's support of the party goes far deeper than helping underwrite the convention; over the past two and a half years he has given more than $340,000 to the Republican Party of Texas. The involvement of chair Susan Weddington seems to have spurred Leininger's generosity. (Leininger was not so generous when Weddington's predecessor, Dallas lawyer Tom Pauken, led the state GOP. Pauken says that Leininger was one of a group of donors who, at Karl Rove's bidding, declined to support the party after Pauken displaced a Bush ally as chairman. "Leininger wanted to have a foot in both camps, the Bush establishment camp and the religious-right camp," Pauken says.)
Weddington herself seems to embody the tension between the party's ideologically driven activists and its big-tent strategists. A thin and rather rigid woman with a fount of brown hair, Weddington is a Christian conservative who in 1990 placed a black wreath that read "Death to the Family" at the door of Ann Richards' gay-friendly campaign headquarters. At the convention's Saturday morning prayer rally, she called upon the Lord to watch over the caucus rooms and the convention hall ("For you are the King of Kings, and you are welcome in our family, Lord! Lord, bless the leaders of our state. . . . There is no one after you, Lord. Thank you for blessing the leadership of this party. Lord, this is not just a convention going on; you are doing mighty and awesome work, preparing and equipping people to be leaders in our communities, Lord! O Lord, praise your holy name! . . . People believe that Christians have no role in government, but God is the creator of every institution. Jesus himself understood the government of his day.")
In spite of her religious bona fides, she has been criticized in the past by conservatives for emphasizing party growth over party purity. She took the opposite tack in this year's primaries, however, appearing in a commercial to endorse John Shields, one of the most conservative members of the state House, in his race to defeat incumbent state senator Jeff Wentworth, who is a pro-choice, old-guard Texas Republican. As it happens, Leininger was a major Shields backer: He contributed just shy of $100,000 to Shields's campaign, Texans for Governmental Integrity donated $26,000, and Leininger family members pitched in another $30,000. "Leininger was the one who urged John to run," says auto dealership tycoon Red McCombs, who is Shields's father-in-law and served as his campaign treasurer. (According to Shields, many people urged him to run, including his mother. It was a close race; Shields lost.)
Accordingly, as Weddington addressed the assembled delegates during the convention's first general session, at least one member of the audience was unimpressed: Jeff Wentworth. The trim former Army officer shifted in his chair and rolled his eyes as her soprano twang resounded from the speakers. "A lot of people consider the role of the state chair to be to unite the party to fight the Democrats in November," Wentworth said at the time. "Let's don't fight among ourselves. The only issue that sticks in their craw," he continued, referring to the socially conservative party members, "is my refusal to support the platform plank on abortion. They would like to make that a litmus test. It's got to be a more inclusive party."
During last spring's primary, Wentworth was one of six Republican incumbents to be targeted by mailers that showed two men kissing. The mailers, which criticized the incumbents for supporting a hate-crimes bill, were the work of the Free Enterprise Political Action Committee (Free-PAC), a group to which Leininger has contributed $155,000 since 1996, according to an analysis of Ethics Commission records by Democratic lobbyists. Leininger apparently also steered other contributors to give to the group. Lieutenant Governor Bill Ratliff, who was targeted by one of the Free-PAC mailers and who held a Capitol press conference denouncing them, says, "some of the contributors [to Free-PAC] called me to say they regretted having contributed. I asked them if they would tell me who solicited the contribution, and they said Mr. Leininger had." All six incumbents targeted by Free-PAC won, and Ratliff believes that the mailers backfired: Public distaste for Free-PAC, he says, may well have helped Wentworth survive the primary. As for his own race, he says, "I think they increased my margin. Independent and swing voters are repelled by those kind of tactics."
Perhaps because the challengers fared so poorly, the flap over the primaries subsided quickly. How much of a direct role Leininger had in the Free-PAC debacle or in the Shields-Wentworth campaign is unclear, since he has declined to speak publicly about either. Yet those races were marked by the Leininger thumbprint: His contributions helped propagate a right-wing message, but in the end the Free-PAC mailers did not prove effective with the majority of voters.
What Leininger's millions, routed to his policy groups, candidates, and the Republican party, have done effectively is to push political discourse to the right in an already conservative state, whether the subject is textbook content or the party platform or one of the myriad issues raised by the TPPF. And while this pleases the staunchest of conservatives, some Republicans are concerned that Leininger's money has helped spread an exclusionary strain of politics that threatens to chase moderates out of the party. Ratliff says the Free-PAC approach "stands every chance of driving the citizens of Texas, who over the years have drifted toward the Republicans, back into the arms of the Democrats."
Sue Ann Harting is one such citizen. Brought up as a conservative Democrat at a time when nearly everyone in East Texas was a conservative Democrat, Harting started voting in Republican primaries in the eighties. Over the years, she has hosted Hunt County fundraisers for Phil Gramm, George W. Bush, and other GOP candidates. But in the wake of her recent campaign, that is over. "After almost twenty years," she says, "I have no desire to have any affiliation with that kind of mind-set, that kind of exclusionary way of dealing with members of your own party. I've decided I'm not a Republican. I'm an independent."
My Library
