The Idiot’s Guide to the Speaker’s Race 
1. Tom Craddick
How did Tom Craddick become the most powerful Speaker ever— and the most powerful Texan today? Let us count the ways.
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As Craddick talked about his business career, the intensity of his ambition punctuated every story. While an undergraduate at Texas Tech, he joined with his finance professor, George Berry, in an attempt to buy a savings and loan. Their bid wasn’t accepted, but the episode turned out to be the start of a profitable real estate partnership. Still a student, Craddick got together with Berry and Coley Cowden, a member of a prominent Midland family, and set up a chain of seven gas stations with car washes, all over West and Central Texas, called Scrub a Dub. Soon the threesome, now known as CBC Inc., branched out further, buying a Dr Pepper bottling plant—for which they paid $450,000—and a 7 UP bottler in Big Spring and acquiring a bunch of duplexes. They were doing it largely with bank loans from Midland. Craddick had little money of his own but a full one-third ownership in the business. By this time he was pursuing graduate business studies at Tech. In addition to his schoolwork, he was teaching classes, managing apartments, running a maid service, and selling life insurance. Not yet 25 years old, he was already so driven that he told a friend that he wanted to be able to leave his children a million dollars.
In 1968, at age 25, he ran and won his race for the Texas House, which gave him a new career but did not slow down his business life. Of his ambitions at the time, he said simply: “I wanted to make a bunch of money and I wanted to go into politics and I was doing both of them.” He began to invest heavily in real estate, acquiring properties both with CBC and on his own. He sold his interest in CBC in 1972, taking with him substantial commercial and residential properties in Midland, and from that point forward he conducted all of his business for his own account. It was around that time—his early thirties—that he became involved in the oil business, first selling drilling mud and later putting together lease deals in the oil fields of the Permian Basin.
For Craddick, the mud business was phenomenally lucrative, especially during the oil boom of the seventies and early eighties. In 1977 he had struck a sort of partnership with a man named Bob Duke and a company called Mustang Mud. Craddick, who insisted on a straight commission, neither wanted to work for anyone nor have anyone work for him. He just wanted to do the deal, make the money, and walk away. That is the quintessential Craddick. Mustang Mud did lots of business with major oil companies. It was so successful that at one point it owned two corporate aircraft. Craddick stuck to his percentage-only agreement. He made a bushel of money.
As an oilman, Craddick will often start by hustling to find properties on which major or large independent oil companies own the mineral leases but have decided not to drill wells. He will package a bundle of such leases—called farmouts—and then find an operating company that is interested in drilling on that land. For putting the two parties together, he takes a 1.5 to 3 percent overriding royalty on every dollar of oil the wells produce.
But the deal does not end there. Craddick, wearing his hat as mud salesman, often sells his product to the same company that he just made the lease arrangement with, into the very same drilling project he helped put together. And then, sometimes, he takes the money he made from selling the mud and invests it in those same oil wells, buying himself a direct working interest. Still, the deal does not end. Craddick often persuades the oil company to invest some of its money with him. “I needed investors,” he explained, “so I’d give them a piece of one of my real estate deals, and they would let me into their oil deals, and then I would sell them the mud on top of that.” Craddick does this all himself. He has no assistants, no one keeping track of his activities, no one screening calls.
His new job as Speaker has slowed down his deal making, but only a bit. He was recently the middleman in the rescue of Schlotzsky’s restaurants from bankruptcy, putting buyer and seller together. When I asked him in September how many oil and gas deals he was working on at the time, he hoisted a fat folder and estimated around 25. “The art of making the deal is the thing for me,” he said. “I love to make the deal and see it work.”
The Partisan
TOM CRADDICK HATES TO LOSE. At anything. Even fishing. “He is one of the most competitive people I know,” said his closest Capitol friend, Bill Messer. “He fishes competitively. If we go fishing someplace and we come in at lunch, he wants to know how many fish I caught and whether I won or he did. Go dove hunting, and he wants to know how many shells it took you to get your limit compared to how many shells it took him to get his.”
His career in politics has been all about winning too, though not in the way most politicians would define it. Back home, Craddick has never had to worry about keeping his seat, and in Austin he has rarely waded into floor debate, having little appetite for the limelight or the glory of passing and killing bills. What his career has really been all about is his patient, dogged, piece-by-piece destruction of the Democratic party in the Texas House. It began during his second session, in 1971, as Democratic Speaker Gus Mutscher became enmeshed in the burgeoning Sharpstown scandal, and it has never stopped. Craddick joined the Dirty Thirty group of outsiders—liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans—who criticized Mutscher for accepting favors from Houston wheeler-dealer Frank Sharp. Mutscher retaliated against Craddick by redrawing his Midland district so that Craddick no longer lived in it, and Craddick responded by suing the state. He won a landmark redistricting case.
For a while Craddick concentrated on his House career, becoming the first Republican committee chair in the modern era. His next major partisan step came in 1988, when he formed the first Republican caucus in the House, in deliberate defiance of his friend and patron Governor Bill Clements, who was afraid that the caucus would divide the House along party lines, isolating Republicans as a small and powerless minority. The governor personally told him in a private meeting not to proceed with his plans. Craddick was unmoved. “I said, ‘I’m gonna do it,’” said Craddick, “and I did.” The story illustrates a fundamental personality trait: He doesn’t much care if people like him or not. He does things not to win love or affection but to advance his agenda. His style calls to mind that of two other Texas politicians: Tom DeLay and Phil Gramm.
By the nineties, Craddick could see his ultimate goal of a Republican majority—which would elect him Speaker—in sight. While potential rivals were looking to their legislative concerns, Craddick began to work in earnest to get Republican candidates elected. He had always liked to campaign, always liked the grassroots side of politics, and now he began to operate as a sort of unpaid consultant to party hopefuls. “We recruited the candidates, helped them with their mailers, helped them with their media, and helped them lay out their campaigns,” he said. “We even monitored their efforts. We had a sheet I devised where they had to report how many phone calls they made, how many signs they put out, how many doors they knocked on every week.” He also began to raise large sums of money, setting up a series of political action committees whose main function was to gather money in urban centers and ship it out to rural areas, where most of the contested races were. He helped dozens of successful candidates this way. The effect was that Republican numbers in the House swelled, and each successive class of freshman Republicans owed allegiance primarily to one man. This explains a lot about him: why Democrats hate him so passionately, why he became the darling of the Republican establishment, and why he was able to build an unrivaled power base inside the party.
He paid dearly for this activity. In 1993 he had been appointed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, one of the most powerful positions in the House, by Democrat Pete Laney, whom Craddick had supported for Speaker. But pro-Laney Republicans and Democrats alike disapproved of Craddick’s relentless politicking—which, if successful, would result in Republicans unseating Democrats and imperil Laney’s speakership—and brought pressure on Laney to make him stop. Laney warned Craddick, but of course that had no effect; Craddick had no intention of stopping. Finally, in 1999, Laney “busted” Craddick, taking away his chairmanship, an apparently huge career setback. Craddick was unfazed. The ultimate effect of Laney’s action was to radicalize some of the Republicans who had bought into bipartisanship and build even more support for Craddick.
In 2002 Craddick’s years of work paid off. Republicans won a majority of seats in the House for the first time since Reconstruction. Two days later he stunned the Austin political scene—where the conventional wisdom was that the Democrats and the ABC Republicans would join forces to stop him—by announcing that he had already won the race for Speaker of the House, notwithstanding the presence of several other formidable candidates, including Laney and several Republicans.
Craddick had won by both outhustling and outflanking his rivals. In a Speaker’s race, votes are gathered secretly in the form of index cards, which members sign, pledging their support for a particular candidate. Craddick, who had declared his candidacy for Speaker more than a year before the general election, adopted a preemptive strategy: He began in October 2001 to solicit signature cards. His strategy was all the more striking since he aggressively pursued all primary candidates, Democrats and Republicans. In two races in Collin County, this meant meeting with eleven candidates and trying to persuade each one to sign a pledge card. This was a prodigious effort, often in the company of Nadine, and it was fully accomplished by the time of the 2002 primaries. “Everybody else thought they would wait until after the primaries were over and then come by and see members and say, ‘Now that you are the nominee, how about voting for me?’” said Craddick. “But most of the candidates said, ‘I already committed to Craddick.’ It was over.” Until his press conference on November 7 to announce his victory, no one knew what he had done.
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