WE LOOKED FOR OTHER candidates, honest we did. How about Lance Bass of *NSync, who wanted to play cosmonaut? He spent a week training at NASA in Houston, but when his backers couldn’t come up with $20 million, he was out O*Sync with the Russians. For saying that the national football champ would be UT, we could have picked ourselves because the Longhorns were p.u. against OU and a wreck against Tech. The Dallas Cowboys couldn’t pass the smell test either, and there was another big stink about the Þring of Aggie football coach R. C. Slocum. But none of these made the Þnal cut. Who did? Presenting the runner-up for Bum Steer of the Year: dem Dems, dem dumb Dems, who dem-inished the Democratic party by losing every statewide race. Foremost among them was Tony Sanchez, who spent $70 million of his own dough only to lose to Governor Rick Perry by some 800,000 votes. In an ordinary year that loss might have meant a Bum Steer win. But this year, even Sanchez couldn’t match the inimitable Anna Nicole Smith, whose cable television series was, from episode one, the most compellingly awful show ever. Millions of viewers tuned in to watch the former Playmate try on a Bo-Peep costume, chase her puppy dog on all fours across the living room þoor, and cuddle the urn full of her late husband’s ashes. (And those were the G-rated moments.) So here’s to you, Anna Nicole, our Þrst three-time winner of Bum Steer of the Year. Somehow it doesn’t sound right to say that the third time is a charm.
