Texas Politics

A year is a long time in politics


 

 

Looking backward, the adage that a year is a lifetime in Texas politics is certainly proven once again.

Remember mid-July of 2011, when Gov. Rick Perry was about to announce his candidacy for president, and shot to the top of the polls? If Perry won the presidency, we wrote at the time, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst might have to choose between accepting a seat in the U.S. Senate, or, moving into the governor’s mansion.

We figured that facing that choice, Dewhurst would pick being one of one as Texas governor than being a 67-yearold freshman in a seniorityconscious body with 99 other egos.

But either choice would vacate the lieutenant governor’s office, and leave it to the 31 senators to decide who among them would be the acting lieutenant governor until 2015.

There began some mostly low-key jockeying and odds- making about which senators had the best shot to be chosen as presiding officer. And, other statewide officials began eyeing the presumed race for the open lieutenant governor’s job in the 2014 election. Ooops!! That scenario began to unravel, and Dewhurst’s potential choices, dwindled — rapidly at first, and more slowly over time.

First, Perry’s bumbling presidential campaign turned out embarrassingly humiliating, for him and for Texas. He finally got out Jan. 19 of this year.

That took away Dewhurst’s potential choice to pick the governorship over a senate seat. Dewhurst’s huge personal wealth had caused several would-be U.S. Senate candidates to either drop out or switch their ambitions to other races. Former Texas Railroad Commission member Michael Williams chose to run for the newly drawn 25th Congressional District, from just south of Fort Worth south past Austin. Former Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams did likewise. He won in a runoff over Wes Riddle. Former Railroad Commission member Elizabeth Ames Jones switched to a GOP primary challenge to state Sen. Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio. Problem was, she finished third; second-place finisher Donna Campbell thumped Wentworth in a runoff. Eight other candidates besides Dewhurst remained in the senate race. The two who weren’t also-rans were former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz. Then, Dewhurst’s senate race took a blow when the primary election was postponed from March 6 to May 29. It was a deserved blow, since the pro-Republican torqued redistricting performed by the Legislature was abetted by Dewhurst as the Senate’s presiding officer.

It hurt Dewhurst by giving Cruz, and presumably Leppert, 13 additional weeks to build name identification and organization against the betterknown and better-heeled Dewhurst, who has run statewide every four years since 1998.

The result on May 29 was that Dewhurst didn’t win outright with a majority — as he may well have done had the election been held on March 6. He got 44.6 percent, to 34.2 for Cruz, 13.3 for Leppert, and 7.9 percent total for the other six.

Then, Cruz – a tea party poster boy – had yet another 10 weeks before the runoff. The result? Cruz added 151,254 votes to his first primary total, while Dewhurst lost 147,605 votes from his. Cruz won, with 56.8 percent.

And now, both Perry and Dewhurst are dropping hints about running for re-election in 2014. Either or both might be serious. Perry might be angling to run for president again. Or, they might just be trying to avoid being lame ducks during the coming legislative session if they say they aren’t running.

So. A year later, Perry and Dewhurst are back at their jobs. The senators can shelve for now the intramural competition to preside over the Senate. Meanwhile, those interested in Texas public schools may wonder if Perry, Dewhurst and the new Republican legislative majorities will take their responsibilities to fund education more seriously than the previous one did two years ago.

• • •

Romney and Ohio. . . . The election will be over before you read this. But you’ve got to wonder what Mitt Romney was thinking when his campaign ran a misleading TV ad intimating Chrysler’s Jeep division would soon move United States jobs to China.

“Let’s set the record straight,” Chrysler executive Gualbert Ranieri wrote in a statement. “Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.”

Not only did the campaign of President Obama and Vice- President Joe Biden attack the ad head-on, the news media in Ohio and Michigan — and elsewhere — denounced the tactic.

The stupidity of the desperate ad was that its principal impact was to reinforce Romney’s biggest problem: that the “Big Change” he’s called for during the past week could well be a reference to his continually shifting policy pronouncements.


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