Governing Magazine/July 1998

FEATURE: BUSH

THE TAMING OF TEXAS

All governors have to compromise to get things done. But few of them
look as good doing it as George W. Bush.

By Jonathan Walters

Ask George W. Bush how hard it is to govern Texas, and he's glad to
tell you. He swings his arms open wide to denote the vastness of the
domain that he can't control. "You don't get everything you want," he
says, understating the case considerably. "A dictatorship would be a
lot easier."
 Now, there's nothing unusual about a governor lamenting that he can't
get everything he wants--especially in Texas, where the lack of
gubernatorial power is written right into the state constitution.
What's unusual is what George Bush has done with his situation. He
hasn't merely accepted the limitations on his power--he has made them
into a political virtue. From tort reform to tax reform, the
provisions he has asked for and the provisions he has signed into law
have never exactly lined up; on some major initiatives, they have been
drastically different.
 And yet every time the governor has accepted half a loaf, he has
enhanced his reputation. Three and a half years into his first
gubernatorial term, he is on the verge of conciliating his way not
only to landslide reelection but to the front rank of Republican
presidential contention.
 Ever since the day he took office, Bush's approach has been based on
the simple realities of government in Texas: About all any governor
can do is hang on and hope to get the beast moving a few steps in the
direction he wants to take it. Bush has not only turned that technique
to political advantage--he has actually made steady progress in moving
Texas his way, even if it is a half a step at a time.
 "From the start," says Hugo Berlanga, a 22-year veteran of the
legislature, "Governor Bush truly understood his role as chief
executive officer of the State of Texas. He allows the legislature to
come up with initiatives and then he works with us accordingly, rather
than trying to dictate to the legislature what he wants us to do. He
is a good listener and is never set in concrete."
 Whether the governor's conciliatory style will hold up over the
trials of the next couple of years is the most interesting question
these days in Austin. At the moment, Bush is campaigning for a second
term on a platform that features one of the most ambitious educational
reform proposals to be floated in any state in recent years. It would
require every third-, fifth- and eighth-grade pupil to pass statewide
tests before advancing to the next grade. If enacted, it will make
Texas the nation's foremost experiment in doing away with "social
promotion," the pro-forma shuffling of students from one grade to the
next, regardless of achievement.
 The idea is already getting picked at by critics all over the
spectrum. Some think it would be unfair to minorities; some question
whether the state should be so deeply involved in promotion
requirements; others wonder about the potential cost, because Bush has
promised that with the new requirements will also come extensive
remedial help for students who don't pass the test on the first try.
 What's fairly easy to predict is how the governor will try to sell
his program. He will spend large amounts of time and energy
negotiating with the legislature over the details; he will impress
everyone with his sincerity, patience and personal goodwill; and he
will again end up with a half-step toward what was contained in his
original proposal--a half-step whose provisions will be dictated in
part by the Democratic opposition.
 Will it be enough to keep the Bush magic alive in Texas? Will it
further his prospects beyond Texas?
 Hard to say.
 As willing as he is to express his desire for a little autocracy, the
fact is that it's compromise that seems to come most naturally to him-
-especially compromise with the opposition party. Indeed, after a
bitter gubernatorial campaign in 1994 against Democratic incumbent Ann
Richards, who wasn't shy about attacking Bush personally, Bush came to
Austin with anything but revenge on his mind. Before the election, he
paid a quiet visit to Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a Democrat who
arguably has as much constitutional clout as the governor does. "I
went to see him at his house," Bush recalls, "and I just said, `I
don't know if I'm going to win or not, but I think I'm going to win
and I'd like to know you.' It was an ice-breaker."
 What Bush brought to that meeting was more than political savvy; it
was a highly distinctive personal style. A graduate of Yale College
and Harvard Law School, Bush is certainly no Texas good old boy, but
he's not the transparent Yankee that his father is, either. He has
always moved comfortably between the worlds of Old and New Texas--the
cow towns and the gated suburbs, the terse ranchers and the Houston
millionaires. He is, in other words, a hybrid: a little rumpled at the
edges, possessed of a slight drawl, and yet trim and tanned the way a
respectable middle-aged Ivy Leaguer is supposed to look.
 It is a style that has won Bush a lot of fans in Austin, and it is
playing equally well in the rest of the state. In his bid for
reelection, Bush has been out-polling his Democratic opponent, Land
Commissioner Garry Mauro, by 3-to-1 margins. Even Bob Bullock, who is
retiring this year, has endorsed Bush for reelection. And John Sharp,
the Democratic nominee to replace Bullock, talks as if the contest
between Bush and Mauro is already over. "If I was elected lieutenant
governor," says Sharp, "I would expect that the governor and I would
have a very good working relationship."
 Given Bush's popularity in Texas, speculation about him as a
presidential candidate would be inevitable even if he were not the son
of a former president and the beneficiary of universal--if somewhat
confused--name recognition. Bush couldn't suppress national
speculation if he wanted to, and there is no sign that he wants to,
although he is quick to say that he's not sure he's up for a bruising
presidential campaign, or eager to live and work in Washington.
 But for all the intrigue over whether the governor's bipartisan
approach and deft personal touch could work at the national level,
there are other issues that a Bush presidential campaign would have to
address, not the least of which is his half-a-loaf Texas record.
Unlike many of his Republican gubernatorial counterparts in other
states, Bush can't really point to any landmark achievement of his
administration. New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman slashed the
state's income tax. Wisconsin's Tommy G. Thompson is a welfare
innovator. California's Pete Wilson ended affirmative action. New
York's George E. Pataki is taking on the nation's most Byzantine and
entrenched state bureaucracy. Bush has done nothing like that.
 Nor has he really been tested under fire. Unlike the class of
governors that arrived in the deep recession of the late 1980s and
early '90s--Wilson, Michigan's John Engler, Massachusetts' William F.
Weld--Bush took over the reins of state government in a season of
prosperity that has only gotten more prosperous. As one veteran Austin
journalist sums it up: "This is a great time to be governor of Texas."

But that does not mean that governing Texas, even in good times, is
easy. As in most Southern states, the constitution written in 1876
reacted to Reconstruction-era excesses by stripping the governor of
most traditional executive powers and handing them to the legislature.
More than in almost any other state, the 19th-century system remains
in place in Texas. Only a handful of agencies are run by direct
gubernatorial appointees; the rest are run by commissions or boards
whose members stay in office even after the governor who appointed
them is gone. Under the state's constitution, the governor can veto
legislation, call special legislative sessions and submit a budget,
but the budget he submits is treated merely as an advisory message.
The legislature's version is the real budget of Texas.
 If there is a power center in Austin, it is the lieutenant governor's
office. The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate, appoints
committees and committee chairs, controls the flow of bills and co-
chairs the Legislative Budget Board along with the House majority
leader. Governors who don't get along with lieutenant governors in
Texas can find themselves pretty well boxed out of the lawmaking game.
 Bush makes no secret of his position in the Austin pecking order.
"When the legislature is in town," he says, "the legislature is the
powerful body. There's no question about it." In admitting that, he is
saying nothing particularly new. And yet his candor and modesty have
been music to the ears of the legislature's leaders, and have led them
to be magnanimous in return. "The legislative leadership and the
governor have worked together very well," says Democratic House
Speaker James E. "Pete" Laney. "It's amazing what you can do when you
don't care who gets the credit."
 Which is why the 1995 Texas legislative session--the governor's
first--delivered a good deal of what both Bush and legislators wanted,
even if it was built on compromise and led to no national headlines
about landmark accomplishment.
 In his 1994 campaign, Bush stumped on a four-theme platform that
proposed changes in welfare, education, juvenile justice and the
state's trial lawyer-friendly civil justice system. After his first
legislative session in 1995, the governor signed what were advertised
as "reform" bills on all those subjects.
 Calling any of this legislation "reform" probably overstated its
sweep in every case. And virtually all of what was accomplished had
already been done in other places. But taken together, the new laws
represented significant achievements for a governor whose main source
of power is the power of persuasion. Under the changes in tort law,
punitive damages were capped at $750,000 (Bush wanted it to be
$500,000, Bullock was pushing $1 million; characteristically, they met
in the middle). The education law pushed more control and
accountability down to local school districts. The welfare changes
included the basics: work requirements and time-limited assistance for
the able-bodied. The juvenile justice law added more prison beds and
lowered the age at which offenders could be tried as adults.
 Some of Bush's critics argued that the governor did little but jump
in front of issues that were already moving--tort, education, welfare
and juvenile justice bills had been percolating in the legislature
since the previous session. But others argued that all this
legislation survived in large part thanks to the governor's focus.
"There is a lot of pressure, particularly on a governor, to expend
political capital on a range of issues," says Republican state Senator
Teel Bivins. "The real challenge as an elected official is to limit
yourself to a few issues and know more about them than anyone else."
In Bivins' view, Bush did that.
 Last year, however, the governor learned that one's own partisan
troops can sometimes be the toughest to lead. In his 1997 state of the
state address, he departed from his previous tactic of hopping aboard
existing legislation and unveiled a sweeping plan to overhaul the
state's tax system.
 Billed as property tax relief, the plan would have eliminated $6
billion in local school property taxes over two years, and replaced $5
billion of the lost revenue by broadening the state's sales tax base
and by moving more business taxes to the service sector. (Texas has no
state income tax; Bush is on record as opposing one.) In many ways,
the proposal simply represented an adjustment to the Texas economy's
gradual shift away from capital- and production-intensive businesses
to more of a white-collar service base.
 But as sensible as the plan might have been from a policy standpoint,
politically it was a disaster. The Texas House, controlled by
Democrats, did pass a much-altered version of Bush's bill. But with
the chairman of the state Republican Party openly criticizing the plan
as anti-business tax reform, it was ultimately killed by the
Republican Senate. It was a loss that by Washington scorekeeping
standards might have been considered akin to President Clinton's
bungling of health care reform.
 But the state chose not to interpret it that way. In a textbook
demonstration of his political style, Bush compromised and cajoled and
came out of the fight with something that he wanted: a $1 billion
school property tax cut--the largest tax cut in the state's history,
as the governor takes pains to point out.
 To some sitting on the sidelines during the tax reform fight, the
whole drive seemed quixotically na•ve. "It was doomed from the start,"
says one veteran Austin lobbyist. But to others who were in the thick
of it, it was a display of guts. "It took a lot of courage to push
that measure," says Democratic Representative Steve Wolens. "He took
an enormous amount of criticism from his own party, and he stuck with
it."

Not that the governor spends a whole lot of time and energy routinely
battling his natural constituencies. He is a pro-business conservative
who believes that the private sector and the free market should be
trusted to carry the freight in maintaining a prosperous and healthy
Texas. The tort bills that he signed are regarded by some consumer
advocates as business-friendly to a fault; it took a Democratic member
of the Texas House to push legislation that would require insurance
companies to pass identified savings from tort reform down to
individual policy holders.
 Bush's stance on the environment is likewise textbook free-market. On
the long-running debate in Texas over whether ranching hurts the
environment, Bush asks, "Who best to worry about the quality of the
land and the quality of the water than people who live off the land?
Owning land, owning private property can lead to good environmental
policy." His centerpiece environmental initiative to date has been to
ask air-polluting industries grandfathered under the state's 1971
clean air law to voluntarily reduce emissions.
 And when questioned about the state's continually high poverty rates
among school-age children, he responds in a similarly Republican way:
"How do we make people more wealthy? You expand the economy. You teach
people to read, write and subtract. You reduce the number of babies
born out of wedlock."
 What Bush is not, though, is rabidly doctrinaire in his conservatism.
While he lines up on most issues with the politically powerful
Christian Coalition in Texas, the relationship is arm's length. Bush
will fight for local control of schools, but he won't stump the state
arguing that those schools ought to be teaching creationism. When the
Texas State Education Agency, under Bush's guidance, developed a
curriculum to teach values in schools, it was launched with all the
typical rhetoric about helping youngsters find their moral compass.
What it didn't come with was a state mandate requiring that local
schools actually adopt it.
 In fact, if Bush is doctrinaire about anything, it's that the state
should restrain itself from telling localities how to conduct their
public business. The job of state government, he says, is to set
goals, provide some resources and monitor performance, but otherwise
try to stay out of the way. "In Texas," he argues, "the state has been
deciding which textbooks to use and there've been big fights over
whether a particular textbook is worthwhile or not. My position is
that schools should have a range of books from which to choose, and
which book a school ultimately decides to use should be a local
decision."
 It is a devolutionary approach to governing that, not surprisingly,
Bush would also like to apply to state and federal relations. He
sounds disappointed, even annoyed, at the tendency of the current
Republican Congress to impose new legal requirements on states that
receive federal money. "Mandates are mandates," he says, "regardless
of the philosophical bent of the person doing the mandating." But then
he throws in a jab at President Clinton: "It starts at the White
House."
 Bush is still miffed about the manhandling that Texas took from the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over its request for a
waiver of federal law allowing it to privatize welfare eligibility
determination. The request was denied in part because social services
advocates feared that private corporations would try to save money by
cutting back on the number of people receiving benefits. But another
part of the problem was a heavy lobbying effort by labor unions
battling to avoid the loss of unionized state jobs. State-federal
relations are not likely to improve, Bush charges, "when you play
special-interest politics" and "have the AFL-CIO setting waiver
policy."
 In fact, if the governor has a quarrel going with anyone in Texas
right now, it is organized labor. The Texas AFL-CIO has distributed
buttons caricaturing Bush as Pinocchio, claiming that the governor
reneged on key appointments. They also claim that he has gone out of
his way to veto labor-friendly legislation. Last fall, an editorial in
the Austin American-Statesman lambasted Bush for allowing the feud to
hinder the work of the Texas Workforce Commission, a labor-management
cooperative dedicated to overseeing the state's employment and
training efforts (including its welfare-to-work effort). At the time
of the editorial, commissioners had been shuffling on and off the
panel, and fewer than half of the 28 regional development boards that
the commission was supposed to help organize and oversee were in
place.
 Bush has other less-than-enthusiastic constituents. Environmental
activists regard his laissez-faire approach as naive at best,
pandering at worst. The governor's joint appearance at a press
conference earlier this year with Texas Utilities, touting the success
of his voluntary emissions effort, had environmentalists shaking their
heads. In their opinion, the fact that the utility had cut its 210,000
tons of annual grandfathered air pollution emissions by a paltry 1.4
percent wasn't very newsworthy (Bush counters that overall, the
program has been effective).
 But Texas is a conservative state, and the opinions of
environmentalists and labor unions are not likely to have a huge
impact on the governor as he turns his attention to the 76th Texas
Legislature next year.
 What might have an effect on him is the climate of national politics.
If Bush does have real presidential aspirations, then the 76th
Legislature will be his big chance to make a mark nationally, as his
colleagues in such places as Wisconsin and New Jersey have done. And
this leads some to wonder whether he might be tempted to alter his
style a bit, take a little more partisan stance, bend a little less
when it comes to negotiating on high-profile bills such as his
education reform proposal.
 For anyone interested in a presidential nomination, the advantages of
a shift in that direction are obvious. Whether Bush would feel
comfortable doing it, however, is a different question. As he himself
might say, compromise isn't the stuff of compelling campaign rhetoric.
It's merely the stuff of effective governing.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 1998, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form
without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited.
Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of
Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
http://governing.com