Who Let the Dogs In? (29 page)

G
RACIOUS
DEARIE
ME,
who would have thought the sensibilities of Texas Republicans had become so delicate? They are in a tizzy, having the hot fantods, close to swooning because Governor Ann Richards indirectly referred to Shrub Bush as “some jerk.”

I distinctly recall having heard Republicans refer to their opponents as commies, queers, traitors, drug addicts, and murderers during past campaigns. And of course, what Texas Democrats have called one another cannot be repeated in a family newspaper. Those were the days, my friends, when Texas politics earned its national reputation for hardball. And now we’re having the vapors over “jerk”?

I especially appreciate the fine flush of indignation rising from Republican Party chairman Tom Pauken, the man who taught Jim Mattox how to be mean. During two memorable Pauken-Mattox matches in Dallas in the early eighties, even grizzled veterans of Texas politics found the level of vituperation actually awesome. This is sissy stuff.

Of course, it does require us to examine the timely question:
Is
Shrub Bush a jerk? In fairness to Richards, it must seem as though Bush is a jerk. If you had spent much of your first term building prisons and doing law-’n’-order stuff—especially at the price of not getting a raise for schoolteachers and other things you really wanted to do—of course it would annoy you if some jerk came along and said that a drop in crime rates is unimportant. The jerk who actually said that was George W.’s campaign adviser, Karl Rove, and I confess that
jerk
is not the word that came to mind when I heard him—although
jackass
does also start with a
j
.

Shrub’s new TV ad only
implies
that the drop in the crime rate is unimportant by announcing in a voice of doom that “the number of violent crimes is up.” (Actually, even the number is up only in some categories. The rates are down across the board.) So I guess that makes Shrub Bush a jerk only by implication—or, as Richards’ campaign so genteelly put it, it was not a personal remark but was made “in a generic fashion.” That’s one of the funniest distinctions in the history of politics.

Actually, this raises a profound semantic question: Can one act like a jerk or sound like a jerk without being a jerk? Can we hate the jerkiness, but not the jerk? I leave this to theologians.

The fact is that Shrub is not a jerk. It would be nice to dismiss him as a hopeless lightweight because he has no credentials. Ted Kennedy’s first opponent used to go around saying, “If this man’s name was Smith, nobody would vote for him.” Kennedy has since gone on to amass the third-longest legisla-tive record in American history—not, one suspects, a precedent that the Republicans are happy about. But young Ted Kennedy, like Shrub Bush, was especially galling to his opponents because all he had was a famous name, and he hadn’t even earned it himself. It’s not as though Bush were Tom Landry or Willie Nelson or even Ronald Reagan, who at least earned his own fame before he went into politics. Had Bush’s name been Shrub Smith, he wouldn’t even have gotten the nomination.

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s smart for the Richards campaign to try to dismiss Shrub as though he were some political pygmy, to be brushed off just because he’s never held office before. In the first place, pointing out that you have political experience and your opponent has none is not exactly shrewd politics these days. For veterans like Richards and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, who know how hard it is to get anything done and who carry a lot of scars from the fights they’ve been in, the temptation to dismiss some puppy who’s yapping “Vote for me—I’ve never done anything” is understandable. But folks are so fed up with politicians these days that anyone who can claim outsidership has a built-in advantage. It’s the same impulse that drives the term-limitation movement: The people who are in office have made such a mess, let’s put in a bunch of people who have no experience—they can’t possibly do worse. (Although this flies in the face of a time-tested theorem: Things can always get worse.)

Besides which, as anyone who has met Shrub Bush will attest, he’s not a lightweight. He’s a lot brighter than some people who already hold public office, he’s working like a dog at this campaign, and it’s real hard to dislike the guy. Now, I don’t think his ideas about state government amount to much. The very fact that he’s running around saying he’ll do this and that and the other if elected is proof that he doesn’t know how state government works. (Welcome to the weak-governor system, Shrub.) But when did you ever hear of anyone running for public office without making promises impossible to keep?

In sum, let us put this teapot tempest where it belongs in the long view of Texas politics: Referring to your opponent as a jerk—in the generic rather than the personal sense, of course—is gentility personified.

August 1994

Ann Richards vs. Shrub II

O
K, OK, I’M
so partisan that after seeing the debate between Ann Richards and George W. Bush, instead of saying it was 2–1 in Richards’ favor or 3–2 or whatever all those other commentators said, I find myself asking, “WHAT ARE YOU, OUT OF YOUR TINY MIND THAT YOU WOULD EVEN CONSIDER VOTING FOR SHRUB BUSH?!”

I really don’t get it. Is this some total failure of imagination on my part? Am I missing some sparkling quality of Shrub’s that’s apparent to others? I’ve said from the beginning that Bush is a guy you could take anywhere. He’s not going to tell rape jokes in public or drop his trou in his office or have a paranoid episode on
60 Minutes.

I still don’t see anything particularly wrong with him. He’s nice. He’s not dumb. He works real hard at making people like him. True, he is awfully . . . privileged, but that’s not his fault. It’s a little creepy to hear him say that the schools are his top priority when you know that he went to prep school and his kids go to prep school. It’s fine for him to say he’s going to clean up welfare . . . do you think he’s ever actually known anyone who was stuck on welfare?

Of course, he inherited money and has been given a lot of breaks in business by his daddy’s friends, but no one ever said this was a level playing field. He’s had some business losses; lots of people did in the 1980s, including Claytie Williams, if you’ll recall. Being born lucky is not a character flaw, and folks in business do take risks.

The problem is not Shrub Bush; it’s the comparison with Ann Richards. Richards really is one of a kind. Just unique. She’s a great politician who also happens to be remarkably good at governing. The two things do not always come in the same package. Richards is an “OK, let’s work this thing out” kind of governor rather than a “Do it my way or I’ll break you” kind. All over the country, people comment on Richards’ “star quality,” but what strikes me most about Richards—first, last, and always—is that she’s a hard worker.

I cannot remember Richards when she was not doing something, not out of nervous energy but just plain efficiency. For years, she has had a Christmas Eve party for family and old friends, which always includes singing Christmas carols around the piano. The highlight is the patented Richards version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which everyone imitates lords a-leaping, geese a-laying, and so forth. Toward the end of the evening, as old friends settle down for quiet chats, Richards is always to be found in the kitchen, doing dishes. Even at the mansion. Dish towel tucked into her belt, sleeves rolled up, a steaming sink of soapy water in front of her, handing spotless plates to a team of wipers while they all discuss some way to make Texas work better.

Richards has always been interested in how to make things work better; she’s one of the most practical people I’ve ever met. I’m confounded when I read that Richards is “too liberal.” I am a liberal. I’ll talk theories of social justice all night while Richards finishes the dishes, peels potatoes for tomorrow’s picnic salad, sews a child’s Halloween costume, and figures out how to make the House and Senate agree on the appropriations conference bill.

State government is fairly simple in some ways: roads, schools, prisons, and what Allan Shivers called “eleemosynary institutions”—help for the blind, deaf, disabled, and mentally ill. Richards started in politics as a county commissioner, doing roads. This is a woman who knows her road graders. And she knows everything else about state government in the same from-the-ground-up way, including how to run bureaucracies. (Don’t get her started on bureaucracies unless you really want to hear a forty-five-minute lecture on just how many ways bureaucrats have of not doing anything about a problem.)

Her real passion is kids and education. I guess that’s why Bush struck me as so flat when he said that schools would be his top priority. Of course, Richards started out as a teacher (“spent her entire adult life in politics” is just one of those charming little election-year lies we’re all so used to) and also spent twenty years raising four terrific kids.

Anyone who has ever seen Ann Richards with a bunch of schoolkids knows the magic of a great teacher. I’ll never forget Richards with a group of forty or so Anglo, black, and brown kids from Dallas visiting the Capitol. She uses the Socratic method: She asks the questions; they figure out the answers. “Who owns this building?” she asked. It took several steps for the kids to realize they’re taxpayers, too, and finally shout out in delight: “
We
own it. It’s
ours.
”

Ann Richards is not a perfect person. In the first place, she has serious perfectionist tendencies; in the second place, she gets crabby when she’s tired. But you’ll never find a former employee of Richards’ telling tales about what a stinker she is, the way Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s do. Because on top of the smarts, the discipline, and the fact she works harder than anyone around, she has warmth, wit, and charm. They are genuine, and she is generous with them.

It’s not that there’s much wrong with Bush; it’s the comparison to Richards that makes one want to refer to him as “little,” “young” (as though forty-eight were young), “callow,” and, frankly, sort of a jerk. When you compare the two of them in wisdom, life experience, understanding and liking of people, and knowing how to get things done for Texas, he
is
a shallow little twerp who’s too dumb to realize how much he doesn’t know.

He may well beat her. It’s up to you.

November 1994

Adios, Annie

A
VE
ATQUE
VALE,
Miz Ann. Hail and farewell, Governor Richards. Adios, Annie. Keep your wagon between the ditches. May your days be full of laughter. Good on ya.

Ann Richards’ electoral loss to George Dubya Bush will keep political scientists studying for years. By all the conventional measures, she should have walked back into office. Her approval rating was and is over 60 percent—practically golden. The state’s economy is ginnin’, crime rates are down, school scores are up, she never raised taxes, and never had a scandal.