3.—25.
The 23 other most powerful people in Texas politics.
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HE’S THE TROUBLESHOOTING lawyer for Republicans whose political problems become legal problems, a job that’s kept him plenty busy since he became the top assistant to newly elected attorney general John Cornyn, in 1999. In private practice since 2001, Taylor has made a career of putting horse heads in Democrats’ beds: trial lawyers who enriched themselves in the megabillion lawsuit brought against tobacco companies by Cornyn’s ill-starred predecessor, Dan Morales; plaintiffs who sued the state over contentious redistricting battles in 2001 and 2003; Travis County DA Ronnie Earle, whom Taylor sued in an effort to block Earle’s Public Integrity Unit from investigating whether corporate funds were used illegally in 2002 to ensure the election of a GOP majority in the House; and, currently, state representative Hubert Vo, of Houston, who defeated incumbent Republican heavyweight Talmadge Heflin in November, only to have Heflin—represented by Taylor, of course—file an election challenge. All of this would be enough to establish Taylor’s power credentials, but there’s more: When Rick Perry was considering whom to appoint to fill recent Texas Supreme Court vacancies, Taylor was one of several people who interviewed potential candidates and assessed their strengths and weaknesses. Being in a position to give advice about judges who might hear your appeal of cases—now that’s power.
THE BRIDGE
James Huffines, 53, Austin
RICK PERRY HAS TWO sets of advisers. One, comprising his staff and his campaign operatives, is young, tough-minded, and ideological. The other is an informal group of friends who are more seasoned and more moderate. Huffines is the unofficial chairman of this kitchen cabinet. Cast in the old Republican-businessman mold—he grew up in a well-to-do Dallas family and is now the regional chairman of PlainsCapital Bank—that formed the core of the party before the social conservatives took over, he got his schooling in politics under Bill Clements, Texas’s first GOP governor in the modern era, in a time when Democrats still ruled the Legislature, and he learned the value of building bridges to the other side. He’s a macro thinker who acts as a counterweight to the governor’s occasional propensity to be obsessed with micro political gamesmanship. Perry rewarded Huffines with one of the state’s most coveted appointments: chairman of the UT Board of Regents. It was a shrewd choice, calming rampant paranoia at UT that Perry’s conservatism—and Aggieism—would cause him to try to remake A&M’s ancient and more liberal rival. Huffines’s Dallas ties are another asset to Perry, who faces two problems in that city: Kay Bailey Hutchison’s hometown popularity, and anger over the Robin Hood school finance law, on which Huffines has Perry’s ear. You can’t beat experience in politics, and Huffines, more than any other Perry adviser, has it.
THE PROPHET
Steve Murdock, 56, San Antonio
TRAVIS COUNTY STATE district judge John Dietz heard five and a half weeks of arguments about Texas’s school finance system last summer, but in the end, it was a five-hundred-page report by Steve Murdock that got his attention: If current gaps in education spending continue unabated, wrote the state demographer, we face a grim future of ever-accelerating numbers of high school dropouts, a precipitous decline in household per capita income (and therefore tax revenue), and an explosion in felony prisoners and welfare recipients. “The lesson is this,” Dietz told his courtroom audience before ruling that the state’s school finance system was unconstitutional: “Education costs money, but ignorance costs more money.” Chalk up one more convert for Murdock, the director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who has been preaching about the implications of population change on Texas’s social fabric for 25 years. Here’s one of his thought-provoking statistics: Between 2000 and 2040, Texas’s population will grow from 20 million to 50 million, and 96 percent of the net increase will be non-Anglo; that’s why the state’s priority must be to educate young Hispanics. Murdock controls no votes, contributes no money, passes no legislation, but his message affects politics every day: He transforms raw data into a compelling story that changes the way the state’s business, civic, and political leaders think.
THE POWER COUPLE
Deirdre Delisi, 32, Austin
Ted Delisi, 31, Austin
SHE’S THE CHIEF OF STAFF for Governor Rick Perry. He’s a political consultant who got his start in Karl Rove’s direct-mail shop. Together their contacts reach deep into the GOP. Ted, the son of state representative Dianne Delisi, of Temple, worked for former attorney general John Cornyn until Rove signed on with the Bush presidential campaign, in 1999; Ted and another Rove alum, Todd Olsen, bought Rove’s business and soon found themselves doing lucrative work for Bush—almost $1 million in billings in 2000. Ted has since moved on to establish his own direct-mail and consulting firm, as well as a joint venture with HillCo Partners. His clients have included Cornyn, now a U.S. senator, and congressional race winners Mike Conaway, of Midland, and Mike McCaul, of Austin, the latter in an unforgettably mean primary battle last spring. Deirdre guided Perry’s 2002 campaign for reelection against Tony Sanchez, then moved into the governor’s office as deputy chief of staff under Mike Toomey, the formidable lobbyist-turned-staffer-turned-lobbyist; when he exited the revolving door, Deirdre inherited the job—to the delight of just about everyone in the Capitol, who hoped for a kinder, gentler governor’s office and, so far, appear to have gotten their wish (but don’t think she can’t play hardball). It is not hard to see the power couple partnered someday in business as well as matrimony, competing to be the next Karl Rove. Of course, a line is already forming.
THE SCHMOOZER
Bill Miller, 54, Austin
THE MOST MYSTIFYING MEMBER OF THE POWER LIST: Nobody knows exactly what he does, but they know he does it very well. Mainly, he schmoozes—with clients like Houston builder and mega-donor Bob Perry; with Speaker of the House Tom Craddick (for whom he arranged an audience with the pope); and with reporters looking for insight or an incisive quote (he was widely presumed to be speaking as a Craddick surrogate when he told the Houston Chronicle’s Kristen Mack last November that an election challenge by former chief House budget writer Talmadge Heflin was doomed: “It’s irreversible, and that’s a fact of life, and he needs to move on”). Miller frequently turns up as the spokesman for folks in trouble, most memorably for a hapless senator of yore named Drew Nixon, who managed to get himself arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover Austin cop. Blessed with one of the quickest wits—and the heartiest laugh—in the Capitol, he zoomed into the power stratosphere in 1998, when he and lobbyist Buddy Jones co-founded the consulting firm HillCo Partners. But what exactly does he do all day? “If I told you,” Miller says, “the jig would be up.”
THE CONSCIENCE
Scott McCown, 49, Austin
HE’S THE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS in Texas politics, a former Travis County state district judge who left the bench to become executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, Texas’s most effective—some would say only effective—advocate for liberal causes (notwithstanding the occasional conservative jest that the think tank’s acronym ought to be CCCP, the Cyrillic characters representing the old Soviet Union). McCown first came to prominence as the trial judge in the Edgewood school finance lawsuit; his ruling that the state’s method of funding public schools violated the Texas constitution led to the passage of the Robin Hood law, which is still in force today. As a judge, he was confronted with so many heartbreaking examples of abused and neglected children who had fallen through the state’s social-services safety net that he poured his concern and frustration into a lengthy document addressed to then-governor George W. Bush and the Texas Legislature, pleading for better funding for the state Child Protective Services agency. A work worthy of a law school professor (which he once was, at the University of Texas), “A Petition in Behalf of the Forsaken Children” made a powerful statistical and political argument that resulted in a $200 million increase in CPS funding in 1999. Now Republican state leaders, including Rick Perry and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, are calling for CPS reforms. Democrats won’t win many battles in the Legislature, but with McCown and CPPP around to provide research on the manifold shortcomings of state government, they’ll at least have enough ammunition to make a fight.
THE NUMBERS CRUNCHER
Billy Hamilton 53, Austin
WHAT DO BOB BULLOCK, John Sharp, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn have in common? Their reliance on deputy comptroller Billy Hamilton, whose genius at tax policy has allowed a succession of state comptrollers to transform a once-obscure, green-eyeshades accounting office into a power center. Under Texas’s pay-as-you-go system of budget writing, the Legislature can spend only as much as the comptroller says is available—and for more than twenty years Hamilton has done the math. He cemented his reputation for credibility in the eighties as then-comptroller Bullock’s chief revenue estimator, accurately predicting the state’s intake despite the mercurial behavior of oil prices. His expertise attracted the attention of then–vice president Al Gore, who had him draw up a blueprint to streamline the federal bureaucracy in 1993, and of the Terminator, who tapped him last year to help ease California’s budget woes. How much do Texas budget writers rely on his numbers? When Bill Ratliff, then the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, heard in 1999 that Hamilton might take a job in the private sector, he placed an alarmed call to Strayhorn to say, “You can’t let Billy Hamilton leave. I can’t write a budget without him.” Guess who got a raise?
THE REALITY CHECK
Mike Baselice, 44, Austin
IF WE COULD SNAP our fingers, all pollsters would disappear and every politician would do what is right instead of what is popular. So much for fantasyland. Polling is here to stay, even if snafus like the exit polls in the 2004 presidential race discredit the profession. In any case, Republican pollster Mike Baselice isn’t the problem. His reputation and his power rest on the uncanny accuracy of his numbers. Take a look at these percentages Baselice predicted in the 2002 election. For governor, Baselice’s projection: Perry 57.4, Sanchez 40.2. Actual result: Perry 57.8, Sanchez 39.96. In the attorney general’s race, Baselice told Greg Abbott that he’d win by 15.8 percentage points and made a mock apology when the actual margin was “only” 15.64. Texas Republicans aren’t the only ones who rely on him. When the California Chamber of Commerce wanted to know which Republican had the best chance of being elected governor if Democrat Gray Davis was recalled (we could have told them for free), they asked Baselice, whose poll showed you-know-who far ahead of his GOP rivals; Baselice’s follow-up poll was the first to show Ah-nuld leading Democrat Cruz Bustamante. In a party that is chock-full of ambitious politicians seeking higher office, his reality check separates the contenders from the pretenders.
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