Dave McNeely on Bob Bullock

Bob Bullock, the legendary late Texas lieutenant
governor for whom the Texas State History Museum is
named, was a legend in his own time. He still is,
almost nine years after his death.

He died June 18, 1999, less than five months after his
final term ended as the Senate's powerful presiding
officer. But Bullock stories are still told by the
thousands of people who worked for and around him as
state comptroller and lieutenant governor.

Bullock legacies – besides the museum in Austin,
dedicated in 2001 -- include the refurbished Texas
State Cemetery on East 7th Street, and the Bullock
Collection at Baylor University in Waco.

What many consider one of his biggest legacies is
President George W. Bush, the Republican who Democrat
Bullock endorsed not just for re-election as governor
in 1998, but also for president.

Bullock didn't make Bush president. But he could have
made Bush's gubernatorial record, which was a
cornerstone of Bush's initial run for the presidency,
a shambles had he chosen.

Instead, Bullock became Bush's bipartisan talisman,
which Bush used to show he had reached across party
lines in Austin, and would in Washington.

After Bullock's widow Jan introduced Bush at the
Republican National Convention in 2000, and praised
Bush's bipartisanship, Jim Henderson and I decided to
write a book about Bullock. "Bob Bullock: God Bless
Texas" was published by the University of Texas Press
in February.

It's the unlikely tale of the once hide-bound partisan
Democrat becoming one of the biggest advocates of a
Republican for president.

It's also about how he got in a position to be a Bush
enabler: making it to the state's second-highest
office, after 16 years as Texas tax collector and
overseer of whether the Legislature' s budget could be
met, despite a reputation for boozing, womanizing,
being investigated by state and federal officials, and
delivering to just about anybody tongue-lashings so
blunt, blistering and raw that he could make grown men
cry. Literally.

There are also many stories of Bullock's incredible
generosity, helping people who had no way to ever
repay him.

He and the late former Gov. Ann Richards were
political allies and drinking buddies. Her drinking
stopped in 1980, after she went to what Bullock called
"drunk school." He followed suit a year later.

Bullock was elected lieutenant governor in 1990. In
the same election, Richards won the governorship – a a
job he'd said several times he wanted, to the point of
announcing for it in the early 1980s. Inside a year,
he was treating her with disdain.

The late liberal columnist Molly Ivins, close friends
with both, said Richards had gotten the job he always
wanted.

"Bullock was never fair to Ann, and treated her very
badly, mostly out of intense envy," Ivins said in a
2005 interview. "She could get elected governor and he
couldn't."

In fact, his treatment of her was often so brutal that
she refused to be interviewed for our book -- probably
because it was a no-win situation, even after his
death.

If she told the truth, it would look like sour
grapes. If she gilded things, few who knew them both
would believe the sanitized version.

Bullock demanded information from Richards and her
staff as though they worked for him, not her. His
harsh demands were nasty enough that they refused to
honor them.

By contrast, Bush fed Bullock's hunger for
information, including gossip. The two quickly became
friends, which met a mutual need.

Texas is one of the few states that do not organize
along party lines like Congress. Bush knew that with
Bullock and Democratic House Speaker Pete Laney
overseeing Democratic majorities in the House and
Senate, to get any of his modest programs passed would
require their help.

At the same time, with the Senate steadily trending
Republican, Bullock knew it didn't hurt to have the
arm of the state's number one Republican around his
shoulder.

Yet It was a genuine friendship, and Bullock made no
secret of his belief that Bush could do as much for
Texas as Lyndon Johnson had.

Instead, the Bush presidency quickly evolved into one
of the most divisive, secretive and partisan in
history.

Bush obviously found Washington a rougher, meaner
place, with ingrained partisanship and a Congress with
many members who thought they could do a better job,
and some actively seeking it.

What Bullock might have thought of Bush's tenure as
president – the war in Iraq, tax cuts in the face of
huge budget deficits, the heavy-handed redistricting
in Texas – will have to be argued by Bullock loyalists
and historians.

We've tried to do justice to the biography of the most
controversial and earthy Texas politician since
Bullock's role model LBJ. We hope you like it.

Books are available at bookstores, by calling UT Press
at (800) 252-3206, or online at
http://www.utexas. edu/utpress/ books/mcnbob. html.

Update: Peggy Fikac has more.

Taking "vote twice" too seriously

A sample of sources on the announcement that over 1100 Harris County residents voted twice. Literally:

Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman told reporters this morning that as many as 1,147 people voted twice in the primary earlier this month. Of course, if voters do that "knowingly," they can be prosecuted, and Kaufman is sending a list of names to the Harris County District Attorney's Office.

KHOU:

Some of them, she says, voted in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. Others, she says, voted twice in the same primary.

And more from the Chron:

The list included two groups: 759 voters like Duran who appear to have voted in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. An additional 389 people appear to have voted during the early voting period, and again on election day.

The intense campaigning in Texas, with slogans telling people to "vote twice" or do the "Texas two-step" may have confused people, Kaufman said.

Two interpretations of the facts. First, Mrs Kaufman: “I’m convinced that there are some instances where people had strong feeling on both sides of the aisle where they wanted to vote for a candidate on both ballots thinking they wouldn’t get caught.”

And Gerry Birnberg, the Harris County Democratic Party chair: “Those people who actually voted in the Republican primary and then tried to mess with Democratic primary committed crimes, and they should be prosecuted.”

Recall that I wrote earlier about speaking with someone who is probably on the list at the DA's office.

More to the point: which group of voters do you suspect would have been motivated to vote in both the Democratic and Republican primaries? Let's see, wasn't it Rush Limbloat who urged his sheep to cross over and vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary? Surely Rush's Houston following wouldn't be so eager to follow their leader as to break the law, would they?

Maybe they thought: since this is Texas, only the "Democrat party" would be investigated for "vote fraud."

The Clinton effect downballot

This has been my axe to grind for quite some time, as regular readers will attest. But there have been protests from some quarters that there is no empirical evidence (i.e., polling) to reflect the accuracy of the postulate that Clinton negatively impacts downballot races.

Let's overlook the assumption that polling is empirical for the moment -- it may be math but it's less science than people claim -- and just consider the history. Chuck Todd (bold emphasis mine):

Simply take a look at Bill Clinton's record from '92 to '00 and you’ll understand why they're having a harder time corralling party activists and elected officials to their side.

Remember, when his name was on the ballot ('92 and '96) the Democratic party lost Senate seats both times. Never mind the beating the party took in '94; a walloping often blamed on both Bill and Hillary.

Even in '98, which was, perhaps, the most successful Congressional election of the Clinton era, the party netted zero Senate seats and gained less than a handful of House seats.

It's not exactly something to brag about.

While there are plenty of unknowns about Obama’s ability to truly expand the base of the Democratic Party, there are plenty of superdelegates who think they know Clinton couldn't rise to that very same challenge.

Nineteen ninety-four was the year Newt Gingrich and hundreds of other Republicans swept into Congress on the wings of "The Contract With America". 1994 was the last year there was a Texas Democrat in a statewide executive office. More about the real differences between an Obama nomination and a Clinton one from my favorite frog:

Provided that Obama receives the nomination after winning the pledged delegate count, there is no reason for 'Latinos, perhaps part of the Jewish and Catholic vote, certain women and working-class Democrats' to lose confidence in the process. Their preferred candidate simply lost. It happens.

But if Obama wins the pledged delegate count and still does not gain the nomination, his supporters (most especially but certainly not limited to African-Americans) will be deeply, deeply disillusioned with the process. Even if Clinton were to catch up in the popular vote (a near pipe-dream, but nonetheless) it would offer some measure of mitigation, but not nearly enough to avoid a gross sense of injustice. ... African-American turnout in the general election will be severely depressed, and the damage will be lasting.

Black turnout is absolutely critical to any Democratic statewide run for office in states like Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Latino turnout can be critical in some states, too, but (there is) no argument for why Latino turnout would be severely depressed by a legitimate Obama nomination.

Obama may have a different base than Clinton, but if we are going to do an honest analysis, we have to ask which constituencies are going to stay-home or vote for McCain because Obama won the nomination (in their eyes) illegitimately. The answer is, of course, none. Obama has the conventional and legitimate claim to the nomination. Clinton's claim is based on non-traditional and non-conventional arguments. Her claim is an electability argument, which can wax and wane depending on the day.

Are there some Jewish, Catholic, white working class, and female voters that will vote for Clinton and not for Obama? Certainly. Of course, the opposite is also true. But the operative question is why will they or won't they vote for Obama? If it is not because of the perceived illegitimacy of his nomination then it isn't really relevant, is it?

So, why won't blacks vote for Clinton if she is the nominee? For starters, it is because she will have won unconventionally, and on the argument that Barack Obama is unelectable. Why is he unelectable? Well, currently the Clinton campaign is saying he is unelectable because he has connections to an urban black church and a controversial pastor. That is an argument that, whatever its objective merits, is a straight rebuke of the legitimacy of African-Americans as Americans. To win, Clinton will have had to convince the overwhelmingly white superdelegates that Obama's connections to the black community render him unacceptable to the broader general electorate. They cannot win any other way.

Is there any sense in which Obama's nomination is dependent on convincing the electorate that Clinton's gender renders her unelectable? No. First of all, Obama has already secured the nomination in the traditional sense, and he doesn't need to make extracurricular arguments about electability. But, secondly, his campaign has always (until recently) argued that Clinton is fully qualified to be president and has never to my knowledge raised her gender as a negative in this campaign (either overtly, or covertly).

There are going to be some women that think Clinton was treated unfairly in this process because of her gender, but very few of them will be able to harbor the kind of lingering resentment toward the Obama campaign that would preclude them from supporting him in the fall.

At this point in the process, the legitimacy of Obama's nomination is so established by The Math that the Democratic Party has almost no choice but to nominate him. To fail to do so would destroy the electoral viability of the party not only in the presidential race but in statewide downticket races all across the country.

The electoral disaster of a Clinton nomination -- from the White House to the statehouse to the courthouse -- would be monumental. Every day that she is allowed to continue to caustically divide the party (with her rhetoric, her actions, and especially with those of her surrogates such as Howard Wolfsen and James Carville) worsens the odds of capturing the White House in 2008. It threatens our legislative majoritiess in Congress -- well, perhaps even Hillary can't screw up the House -- and damages the state legislature and county courthouse chances of Democrats coast to coast. It bears repeating: someone must convince her to stand down, and the sooner the better.

There's still a month to go before Pennsylvania. How repulsive do you think it's going to get between now and then if this goes that long? Or longer?

The Audacity of Hopelessness

Don't blame me for that; it belongs to David Brooks (with whom I rarely agree). But there's still hope for Mrs. Clinton, because there remain at least these five ways she still leads Obama.

Then again, she's turning her Mitty Moment into a Macaca one.

But what really disappoints me is this kind of thing from my fellow blog hermanos y hermanas. Inflamed rhetoric from Clinton supporters in their last throes -- maybe Dick "So?" Cheney would call them bitter-enders -- is definitely going to have repercussions in the fall. What those are and how damaging they may be will be determined between now and then, of course.

So perhaps someone ought to offer Hill a Supreme Court slot or something.

You think that would work?

4,000

This morning.

A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000.

Meanwhile John McBush, who can't tell Shi'ite from shinola, "burnishes his foreign policy credentials" -- i.e., polishes a turd -- by traveling overseas for his photo ops, Joe Lieberman (kept close by to help John with his "senior moments") and Lindsey Graham in tow.

Just think: if President Gore was finishing up his second term in office right now, Vice-President Lieberman would be preparing to accept the Democratic nomination for President.

On second thought, maybe that reality is worse than this one. Except for the past seven years.

In local news, Col. Ann Wright will be at Brazos Books this evening to sign hers -- Dissent: Voices of Conscience -- Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq. I'm guessing our conversation will have a bit more focus even than anticipated. Some of us are invited to join her for a light supper afterwards, so I'll probably blog about that (if she lets me).