7/26/00 12:40 p.m.
Texas Backfire
Al Gore's messing with Texas. It won't work.

By David Guenthner, managing editor of The Lone Star Report

ith friends like Vice President Al Gore, Texas Democrats may not need many more enemies. Gore's election strategy is clear: Mess with Texas. Paint the Lone Star State as a Third World country, governed by a daddy's boy who combines the worst traits of Ronald Reagan and George Wallace. Gore sees this as a low-risk gambit. He wasn't going to carry Texas anyway, and painting such a picture may push him into the White House if he can convince independents in more-competitive states that Gov. George W. Bush is a wing-nut.

Will it work? Probably not. Gore has plenty of political baggage of his own, not the least of which is his affiliation with President Clinton. He is also grappling mightily with his own identity, which is coming to be viewed by the electorate as divisive and dissembling.

Bush has also moved to sand down the rough edges of the Republican platform, drawing a contrast between himself and other Republicans vilified so easily by the Democrats. Casting Bush as a right-wing zealot is a tough sell.

In fact, the ultimate victims of Gore's "scorched earth" strategy might be his fellow Democrats in Texas.

(1) The Gore campaign has neglected one of the most basic steps of political research: the vulnerability check. "If I launch this attack, will it boomerang and hit my friends or me?" A few examples:

"Houston has the nation's worst immunization rate." The city has held that distinction for the last three years, during which time the city has been led by two Democratic mayors — Bob Lanier and former Clinton drug czar Lee Brown. The federal government has sliced in half the amount it has allocated to Houston for immunizations, yet the Democratic-controlled city council has declined to fill in the gap.

"Gov. Bush cut taxes too much." The bill that became the vehicle for the entire tax package was authored by a Democrat. Many of the provisions in the bill were either initially proposed by Democrats (sales-tax cuts) or embraced by Democrats (franchise tax credits for investments in "strategic investment areas"). The bill passed with a broad bipartisan majority. And the Republican party of Texas discovered that several of the critics trotted out by Gore last week to attack the tax cuts had touted their support for the package in their constituent newsletters last year.

"Texas doesn't spend enough on highways." Again, the Gore folks tried to blame the Bush tax cut. But Sen. Mario Gallegos, Gore's lead attack dog, single-handedly killed last session's proposed open-container law at the behest of the liquor lobby. Because Gallegos blocked the legislature from meeting the federal mandate for such a law, Texas will have to divert more than $40 million in federal funds away from highway construction into a driving-safety campaign.

Shoddy research alone can lose a campaign, and I continue to be flabbergasted at what the Gore campaign is putting out. There are legitimate issues on which to challenge the Bush record — LSR has highlighted several — but the Gore folks are consistently missing the mark.

(2) Gore is perilously close to provoking a backlash against himself and the Democratic ticket.

That Gore's attacks to date haven't stuck is only partly a function of them being misleading or factually inaccurate. A big part of it is that Gore has only been able to trot out bit players in the legislative process to do his dirty work. The leadership Democrats — including Texas House Speaker Pete Laney and House Appropriations Chairman Rob Junell — are refuting Gore's claims and sometimes even defending Bush outright. They recognize that these sorts of attacks on Texas policies splatter back on them, and they have to set that record straight. This division within the Democratic ranks makes it easier for the Bush campaign not only to reinforce Gore as a conventional Washington, D.C., partisan politician, but also to morph his attacks into attacks on Texas.

Texans are very chauvinistic when it comes to defending our state, and we get our dander up when it gets bad-mouthed. (Example: See William Murchison's Monday column.) There are things about Texas government that may look peculiar to folks on the two coasts, but they are a reflection of our beliefs and experience and they work pretty well for us. Most Texans are satisfied with the direction of the state and are confident about the future.

Bush has almost always been an accurate mirror of the Texas political mainstream, which is center-right in nature. That hasn't endeared him to either the ideological left or right, but he is hugely popular with independents and moderate-to-conservative Democrats.

(3) A Gore-induced backlash could cost Democrats their control of the Texas Legislature...and possibly also their chance at the U.S. Congress.

Never before has the Texas Legislature been so evenly balanced. Republicans have a 16-15 majority in the state Senate, while Democrats lead 78-72 in the state House. Both chambers could flip this time, although the majority parties are the current favorites.

However, a lot of these pivotal races are in rural west and east Texas, where longtime moderate-to-conservative Democratic incumbents are hanging on by their fingernails and where Bush's popularity is as strong as a habaņero. General-election turnout runs about 20 percentage points higher in presidential years. Most of them are casual voters, but there's also a big chunk of active-duty military. They tend to vote Republican at the top of the ballot and split their tickets further down, although, if riled, they can be pushed into the straight-party column.

Right now, I am predicting that Republicans hold 74 House seats after November, falling just short of getting a majority in the Texas House. But a Gore backlash could push that number up to around 78 or 80.

The Texas House is the Democrats' only hope for any leverage in redistricting — all of the other levers are under Republican control. If the GOP takes that, they can draw bulletproof legislative majorities that last 20 years instead of 10 to 15.

But here's the national angle: A Republican Legislature can draw congressional lines that shift six to eight seats into the GOP column, offsetting anticipated Democratic gains in California and possibly preserving the GOP advantage into the next decade.

So even if Gore's carpet-bombing of Texas gets him into the White House, the price might be a Republican Congress.

That is why you might be hearing more Democratic voices — some sans twang — admonishing Al Gore: "Find some other way to go after Bush, but don't mess with Texas."