Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  The internal polling by Harrison Hickman showed that 59 percent of respondents felt Ann had “new ideas to improve government,” 78 percent believed she was “out front on important issues,” 75 percent felt she presented “a good image of Texas to the rest of the country.” In March, Kirk Adams had written to supporters with advance word of a poll by the Houston Chronicle and Dallas Morning News: “The poll results will show Governor Richards with a 50 to 40 lead over George W. Bush among decided voters and a 52–42 lead if leaners are included.”

  But that summer, Chuck McDonald wrote to Ann’s supporters and contributors: “The Texas Poll reveals what most of you have known for a long time: This is going to be a real race. The Bush campaign has closed the gap to 4 points—the results of a nearly $2 million TV buy they put up during the two weeks the poll was in the field. Bush ran an attack crime ad playing to voters’ fears about crime and got this bump as a result. . . . The good news for this campaign is that Ann Richards still has a 47–43 lead in this race. There’s more good news in the governor’s fave/unfave ratings. She is still at 63 in personal favorabilities. You should brace yourself for more scary crime ads from Bush” (emphasis in the original).

  That summer the governor was personally wounded by a gay-bashing incident in northeast Texas. Ann liked and had worked closely with the Mount Pleasant senator Bill Ratliff on education issues. A regional coordinator of Bush’s campaign, Ratliff suddenly appeared at a press conference and blasted Ann for hiring gays and lesbians and giving them “hundreds of administrative positions.” He went on, “It elevates the lifestyle. . . . I don’t agree with appointing avowed homosexual activists.”

  Bush then got to say, “That’s not an issue with me.” And in his heart and in his face-to-face encounters with people, no doubt it wasn’t. But Karl Rove had earned his reputation as a youthful dirty trickster and the best friend of the elder George Bush’s attack dog, Lee Atwater, and again, one cannot ignore the perspective provided by subsequent events. When George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign wobbled on the brink of defeat by John McCain, a campaign run by Rove benefited from vicious, barely whispered attacks in the South Carolina primary: the Arizona senator was mentally unstable because of his torture at the hands of North Vietnamese captors, and he had won favor from those same captors because he had fathered a bastard Vietnamese child, but on the other hand, he was really gay, and his adopted daughter from Bangladesh was really a love child with a mother who was an American black woman. Democrats were baffled by Ratliff’s turning so contemptuously on a woman he had always treated with great courtesy and cooperativeness on some of their mutual legislative priorities. Rove strenuously denied the accusations. But Ann’s aides and politicos grew ever more convinced, though they could offer no proof, that the lesbian smear against Ann happened because a campaign manager and a candidate countenanced those kinds of tactics as long as they could claim their own hands were clean.

  Compared with Ann’s brawls with Jim Mattox, Mark White, and Clayton Williams, the 1994 race was remarkably short on fireworks. Ann’s team tried to make an issue of Bush claiming to be a Major League Baseball executive while owning just 2 percent of the Texas Ranger franchise. That was just lame. But one story was circulating that could have hurt Bush—his record as an Air National Guard officer during the Vietnam War. It was fairly well known by then that Ben Barnes, when he was Speaker of the House, had made some calls that helped bump Bush up a long waiting list and remove the danger of his being drafted. No one who remembered the home-front politics of that war could have been surprised by that; it was just more evidence of Bush’s lifetime of privilege. But the more damning part of that story was that he had skipped several of his monthly meetings while volunteering on a campaign in Alabama during 1972 and 1973. That was the one sure way a reservist or member of the National Guard could get called up to active duty and sent to Vietnam; and it was all the more outrageous that Bush could have gotten away with that as an officer.

  The governor and her challenger had just one debate, in Dallas, in the 1994 race. In Karl Rove’s memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, he wrote that Bush was coming down out of an elevator and was surprised when the doors opened, and Ann and her security detail stepped in. In his Dallas Morning News column, Wayne Slater later offered this quote from Rove’s book: “They all stepped aboard. Bush said, ‘Governor,’ and tilted his head to greet her. She said nothing. Then, as the elevator reached the ground floor, Richards turned to Bush and said, sotto voce, ‘This is going to be tough on you, boy.’”

  Slater continued: “None of those with Richards that night recall such an encounter. Not only was there no such exchange, they said, the candidates were never in the same elevator together. For one thing, the governor’s security typically holds an elevator so that doors on various floors don’t open, making such an encounter unlikely.”

  Whatever the truth or falsehood of Rove’s allegation, the Dallas debate was a tipping point in the race. Starting that night, Bush developed a habit of holding his own, contrary to expectations, against an experienced and highly rated debater. Truthfully enough, he laid out his premise, “I’m the conservative candidate and she’s the liberal.”

  Again according to Slater, Ann lapsed into sarcasm in scoring one point. Bush had been criticizing wasteful free-lunch programs in the schools. “Perhaps he means the free-lunch programs that I heard Kay Bailey Hutchison saying how proud she was to provide.”

  She conceded, “He means well,” but went on, “This is not a joke. We’re talking about who is going to run the State of Texas.”

  When she discredited his spotty record in the private sector, he countered, “This business of trying to diminish my personality based upon my business career is, frankly, astounding to me. We ought to be discussing welfare reform, juvenile justice, ways to make Texas a better place for our children.”

  That retort was the best and most telling line in the debate.

  Though it was nothing like the gantlet that Ann had to run over the drug question four years earlier, several reporters were eager to press Bush on how he got in the Air National Guard in the first place and then how he got away with effectively going AWOL during his months in Alabama.

  Asked about his military record by one of the moderators, he looked hurt and pointed out that he was flying an F-102 fighter. “It was a thrill, but it also wasn’t trying to avoid duty. Had that engine failed, I could have been killed.”

  Ann dismissed the matter as irrelevant with a flip of her wrist. Bush looked at her and said, “Thank you, Governor.”

  She gave him a pass, doubtless to George Shipley’s chagrin. She waved off the one advantage she might have had with independent and conservative-minded white men. A prominent theory was that the issue was taken off the table because a son of Lloyd Bentsen had gotten in the Guard the same way. After that debate the issue evaporated in the campaign.

  A columnist named Bill Thompson assessed the outcome thus: “When asked who won the debate, a Star-Telegram citizens panel gave Richards the edge by a ratio of 4–3 because, one panel member said, the governor had more ‘stage presence.’ As it happens, Texans won’t be voting on stage presence when they go to the polls November 8. They won’t be selecting a raconteur and song-and-dance artist, or a Secretary of Snide Remarks.”

  Bill Cryer told me that the Richards campaign was terrified that the press and the Bush campaign were going to spring a story that would hand the Republicans the equivalent of the Willie Horton bogeyman that had sunk the Dukakis presidential campaign in 1988. The reporter who had the story was R. G. Ratcliffe of the Houston Chronicle. “The criminal was a guy named Howard Pharr,” R. G. e-mailed me the story years later. “He’s dead now. But he went to school with Ann and Dave. He had a fairly successful middle class life, and then suddenly one Christmas he cracked up and robbed some banks. . . . Some very prominent Austin folks testified as character witnesses trying to get him probation, but the judge
gave him a prison sentence because a gun was involved.

  “Then the family started trying to get him paroled. They talked to Ann on the phone and in person at the Governor’s Office. Pharr had a parole [consideration] date set for about a year away. . . . If my memory is correct they met with Ann in early December 1992. Then I think the parole board chairman told Ann no early release was possible. But in January 1993, I think, suddenly the prison system cuts Howard loose. The signature on the release form is impossible to read. Howard had heard from another inmate about a couple near Houston who had an oil well on their farm and didn’t trust banks, so thousands of dollars were stuffed in their mattresses. So a couple of days after getting out of prison, Howard goes down there and tortures and kills this elderly couple. He ends up getting convicted of capital murder with a life sentence.

  “Pharr’s son told me he had no idea whether Ann was involved in his father’s release. He told me he couldn’t see how it could have happened without her intervening. But there was no smoking gun.

  “I talked to an editor and had mixed feelings. It was a damn good story. But it was only weeks before the election, and was it fair to do it that close to the voting? The line editor I was talking to thought the story needed to be presented to higher-ups. She told me to go ahead and get a comment from the Richards campaign. That’s when I called Bill [Cryer]. And all hell broke loose.

  “The Richards people started calling every Republican in the prison system or parole board to accuse them of leaking the story. . . . By ten that night, I was getting calls from Republicans wanting to know what the story was. I couldn’t tell them, and besides, I knew at that point that upper Chronicle management had decided to hold the story because of the timing issue. . . . Republicans got talk radio stations in Houston to allude to it, saying the Chronicle was sitting on a story that would blow Ann out of the water. At the Bush-Richards debate, a high-ranking Republican consultant accused me of sitting on the story to protect Richards . . .

  “My only regret is that the story did not run after the election. So much pressure had been put on the Chronicle editors that they thought if the story ran it would look like we sat on it to protect Ann, when it really was a question of the fairness of timing.”

  So Ann and her campaign dodged the worst October surprise they could have imagined. Mary Beth Rogers told me, “Polls were always fairly close. I went back and looked at all the succession of polls after it was over. I realized I didn’t see the trends as they were developing. And our pollster, Harrison Hickman, was afraid to tell us the truth. Ann’s likeability was always high. But when the question was, ‘Who are you going to vote for?’ Ann never got over 47 percent. Now she was leading Bush with that; it wasn’t like he was getting 49 percent. There was a Libertarian in the race, who we thought would pull 2 or 3 percent, hurting George. But it didn’t happen. The last ten days, when we weren’t moving up and he was, we knew what was coming. We got a little bump when Ross Perot endorsed her, but it probably didn’t last more than a day.”

  Governor Ann Richards makes her speech of concession to George W. Bush that was the conclusion of the 1994 governor’s race and the end of her career in electoral politics. Watching Ann are family members (from left) David Adams, Dan Richards, Linda Richards, Lily Adams, Ellen Richards, Hannah Adams, Clark Richards, and Sharon Zeugin.

  The race wasn’t decided when Bush performed well in the debate, Mary Beth said. “Ann knew the die was cast before that. Karl Rove has since said there was one point when he knew Ann was out of control, and they had a real shot at winning it. This had occurred during the summer. We knew we had to take the high road. We had planned a full day where she was hitting cities all over the state, and she was going to end with a rally in Texarkana. The day had been perfect. Bill was calling me from the road all day long. About 10:30 that night, Ann called me at home and said, ‘I’ve just done a horrible thing. I want you to know it from me. I just don’t know what happened to me.’

  “That was when she made the remark about ‘some jerk’ running against her. About thirty minutes after that, Bill called again. ‘This is the story,’ he said. ‘It’s not the great day we had.’ Some jerk. That shook Ann’s confidence in herself. It was a turning point for me too. It was when I thought this was really going to be hard to win. Because in effect, Ann had done what Clayton Williams did. Which was to let that resentment build and run away about someone having the audacity to challenge her.”

  Whatever her relationship with Ann might have become, Molly Ivins described the endgame of the race in a way that was wholly loyal to her old friend, yet not entirely hostile to George W. Bush—whom she had nicknamed “Shrub,” since he lived in his father’s shadow. One of her strongest statements about the race came in November, just days before voters went to the polls.

  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 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’s stuck on welfare? . . .

  The problem is not Shrub Bush; it’s the comparison with Ann Richards. . . . Anyone who has seen Ann Richards with a bunch of school kids 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 with delight “We own it. It’s ours.”

  . . . 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.

  Though the Texas news organizations were saying it was a dead heat, and several national observers predicted Ann would pull it out, her Austin supporters seemed to brace themselves for what was coming. You could see it on the faces of the crowd that greeted the plane when she came home the night before the election.

  Ann’s first gubernatorial campaign manager, Glenn Smith, spoke often of young women in Texas for whom the governor was a hero. These expressions of young supporters capture a ride coming to a bittersweet end. Austin, election night, 1994.

  Harold Cook is a political consultant and witty and well-read blogger who hadn’t been in the game too long in 1994. After the polls closed the next evening, the governor, her family, and the extended team gathered to watch and analyze the returns. “Kirk Adams knew we’d lost,” Harold told me, “but everyone was getting assignments—there were closure issues. We were waiting on returns from Dallas County, where she had run very well in 1990. It was getting on toward 9:30, and everybody was keeping an eye on Dallas County. It fell to me to break the news to her. I said, ‘Well, Governor, here’s what happened. Dallas is just coming in. It’s just not gonna be your night.’

  “She was not happy at all, hearing that, and I was not happy being the one standing there in front of her. Then one of her grandchildren started pulling on her skirt. There was just this reflex of hurt or embarrassment or rejection, then she looked down at that child, and the expression on her face completely changed. She leaned over and had this moment with that little girl, then she looked at me and said, ‘Well, all right then, what do I do now?’

  “I said, ‘Well, Governor, you know we took the precaution of drafting two speeches for you.’

  “She said, ‘All right, let me see it,’ and it
was like this burden had been lifted.” Ann got 91,258 more votes than she had in 1990. But she lost by 334,066—the new governor was proud of citing that number in weeks to come. He got 53.5 percent of the vote to her 45.8 percent. It was a rout.

  The Texas governor’s race in 1994 did not occur in a vacuum, of course. Hillary Clinton’s imperious mismanagement of the universal health care bill in Washington had been a disaster. Newt Gingrich and his fellow ideologues swept the Democrats out of power in the House of Representatives. Mario Cuomo, the eloquent orator whom Democrats had once longed for as a presidential candidate, was booted just as rudely from the governor’s office in New York as Ann was in Texas. Later that night, Bill Clinton called his friend in Austin to console her, and he told her it was his fault. That was also the verdict of the startled press in Washington and New York.

  But I have never believed that. The outcome was not preordained. Ann blew that election all on her own, and a man who was a decent sort and a very good politician was propelled toward occupying the White House; fourteen years later, he would leave office as discredited as Jimmy Carter, as Herbert Hoover.

  There were so many what-ifs surrounding the Texas race in 1994. What if Bush had gotten the job as the commissioner of Major League Baseball? What if he had listened to his doubts and decided not to run? What if Ann hadn’t run? What if she had won?

  On election night George H. W. Bush was both delighted and sad. George W. had won, but Jeb lost his race for governor of Florida. A citizen had asked him during the campaign what he was going to do to help the black community, and he replied, “I’m going to answer your question by saying, ‘Probably nothing.’” He went on, “I think what we ought to do is to have a society where you go out and pursue your dreams and you’re not punished.” But the two-word sound bite marked him as a bonehead, and the resulting Democratic turnout, especially among blacks, sank him like a stone.