Carole Keeton Strayhorn Has Guts. Carole Keeton Strayhorn Is Nuts. Discuss.
If anyone wants to tell us what the bomb-throwing, slogan-spouting, governor-antagonizing comptroller of public accounts is up to, we’re all ears.
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The dilemma, then, for Strayhorn has always been—and continues to be—how to make herself known to the world outside the Capitol and position herself for a major race. As important as the comptroller is, she holds center stage only twice in two years: when she gives her revenue estimate before a legislative session and when she decides whether the budget is balanced afterward. The rest of the time she has to fight to be heard above the crowd.
When she was elected comptroller, in 1998, Strayhorn brought two assets to the office that elevated her name recognition. One was that inspired nickname—One Tough Grandma—which captured her feisty personality. The other was her maiden name. Her late father, Page Keeton, was a highly regarded dean of the University of Texas law school for 25 years, known to generations of Texas lawyers; a street near the school bears his title and surname. (“I have two heroes,” she told me. “Page Keeton and Sam Houston.”) In her political career, which has spanned 33 years, she has served under the names of three husbands: McClellan, Rylander, and Strayhorn, while Keeton remained a fixture. She won the comptroller’s job as Carole Keeton Rylander and took the name of Strayhorn when she married again, in 2003—a revealing personal decision for a politician who had invested millions in raising her name ID for a suddenly defunct name. One prominent pollster told me that in order to get an accurate idea of how voters view her, he has to use the name Carole Keeton Rylander Strayhorn.
But a nickname and a maiden name alone do not a future governor make. Nor does a résumé, even one impressive enough to earn her a place on the Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Texas’s list of the state’s one hundred most influential women of the twentieth century, alongside the likes of Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Bush, and Barbara Jordan. Now 65, Strayhorn started her career as a teacher, a root she tugs at frequently. When I went to her office to interview her, she saw that my attention had been diverted by a series of charts leaning haphazardly against a wall. “I’m an old schoolteacher at heart,” she said, “still doing show-and-tell.” She owes her place on the top-one-hundred list to a careerful of “first woman to be elected to” designations: president of the Austin school board, president of the Austin Community College board, mayor of Austin, and, statewide, railroad commissioner in 1994 and then comptroller.
Her first legislative session, in 1999, provided little opportunity to build a record for a future race or even enhance her visibility. The entire Capitol was caught up in Governor George W. Bush’s then-unannounced race for president. He wanted a $2 billion tax cut from the Legislature, but Democrats, who still controlled the House, wanted to spend some of the money for a teacher pay raise. A lot depended on the comptroller’s final estimate of available revenue. Would it be enough to accommodate Bush’s tax cut and the teacher pay increase? This time she was a team player: At the end of the session, she hiked her revenue estimate by $800 million. Bush got his tax cut and teachers got a $3,000 raise.
The trouble started in 2001. Bush had gone to the White House, Perry was governor (having moved up from lieutenant governor when Bush left), and Hutchison was talking about running against Perry in 2002. A lot of offices figured to be open that year, and there was plenty of speculation, even in news stories, that Strayhorn was looking to move up too. That had been her history. In 1986 she had become a Republican to run for Congress against the incumbent Democrat, Jake Pickle. The Reagan realignment was going full throttle in Texas—but not in Austin (then or now), and Pickle, a folksy ex-LBJ hand who was hugely popular, rolled up 72 percent of the vote. Nonetheless, she had established her Republican credentials. The first president Bush rewarded her with an appointment to the National Petroleum Council, which gave her the inside track to run for an unexpired term on the Railroad Commission, the body that regulates oil and gas, in 1994. She won the race and won again two years later for a full six-year term. But when Sharp vacated the comptroller’s office in 1998 to run against Perry for lieutenant governor, she opted to run for his job. Paul Hobby, her Democratic opponent, ran ads criticizing her continual office-seeking, but she edged him by 20,000 votes. Now, three years into her first term as comptroller, she was looking again. The press release before the 2001 session that contained the announcement of her revenue estimate was more politics than substance: “As a mama and a grandmama, I know that our Texas family must budget like any other family—spend wisely, invest wisely, and save for a rainy day.” It was the sound of ambition flapping in the wind.
She followed up by unveiling a list of policy proposals that she wanted the Legislature to pass. They included some novel ideas that deserved consideration, like reforming the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), long a bureaucratic nightmare, and privatizing the troubled Texas Workers’ Compensation Fund. But the lawmakers ignored them, a frequent fate of novel ideas in the Capitol. They did accept some of her money-saving proposals, but rather than declare victory, Strayhorn chose to focus on her defeats. She hammered TxDOT, an agency with entrenched support in the Legislature, for resisting her reforms (“I am deeply concerned that this antiquated agency is so mired in the past and so afraid of reform that it would deny the people’s plea for help to protect its good-old-boy way of life”). Then, before certifying the budget, she slammed the Legislature for employing $5.1 billion in accounting gimmicks to balance it—in effect, borrowing from the next budget cycle. Strayhorn told the Austin American-Statesman, “I’ve been somewhat disappointed in what I see as a lack of leadership this legislative session.” The feeling was mutual.
THE STRAINED RELATIONS between Strayhorn and the leadership would evolve into total estrangement in 2003. Before giving her official revenue estimate in January of that year, she scolded lawmakers again about the ’01 budget, saying that they had “thrown a party” and “left the taxpayers with a hangover.” Then she hit them with the bad news: The 2003 Legislature faced a whopping $9.9 billion shortfall that had to be made up just to maintain the current level of state services. This included the $5.1 billion hole the ’01 Legislature had dug for itself. Strayhorn chided lawmakers like a schoolmarm: “The Legislature should make a commitment to the people of Texas that they will never again spend every last dime of taxpayer money, nor establish program after program while leaving an IOU for the next generation of lawmakers.”
It was impossible to imagine Bullock or Sharp talking this way. (The latter used to joke that the difference between Republicans and Democrats was that they both spent every penny they could find, but Republicans felt worse about it afterward.) Strayhorn was just getting started. Her deliberate use of inflammatory language set her up as the guardian of fiscal responsibility against the spendthrift whims of the Legislature. “I’m telling it like it is,” she said at the time. “I will not abdicate my responsibility.”
As the legislative leadership—by this time totally Republican—saw it, this was a declaration of war. Since the 2002 elections had come and gone without offering her a realistic chance to move up to higher office, she knew that 2006 would be her last chance. She was in good shape politically, having won reelection with 2.8 million votes, more than any other candidate on the ballot, but she still faced the quandary of how to get her name before the public and keep it there. Now she had found a way to do it—at the leadership’s expense.
But it wasn’t only politics that caused the rift. Behind the battle between the comptroller and the top state officials, namely Perry and Dewhurst, lay a philosophical disagreement over the constitutional role of the comptroller. Strayhorn sees herself as holding a policy position—CFO of Texas, chief fiscal officer, the anointed watchdog of the state. If she proposes ways to improve the state’s economy (and, therefore, tax collections), the Legislature should enact them into law. If she thinks the Legislature is spending and budgeting unwisely, it is her duty to speak out—as she did to criticize the Senate’s version of the ’03 budget, overseen by Dewhurst: “[It] is riddled with one-time payments, delays, deferrals, and seriously raids the Rainy Day Fund,” a Strayhorn press release read. “God help us if there is a true emergency in this state.” But the leadership—especially Dewhurst, who was already rankled by talk that Strayhorn had targeted his seat in 2006—sees the comptroller as a bean counter, a clerk, a functionary, whose job is to add up the numbers and deliver the answers to two questions to the Legislature: (1) How much revenue do we have to spend? (2) Does the bottom line balance?
“I love the independence of this office,” Strayhorn told me during our interview. “Of all the offices I’ve held, I’ve enjoyed this one the most. There’s not a facet of state government this office doesn’t touch. You’re OMB [in the federal government, the president’s Office of Management and Budget], comptroller, tax collector, all rolled into one. My responsibility is to the people.”
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