Bush's Brain by James Moore & Slater Wayne

Author:James Moore & Slater, Wayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

Ann Richards sat in the confines of her campaign plane, cruising just above the clouds. Below was the tawny patchwork of East Texas, once the rugged heart of yellow-dog Democrat country, now a region very much in play. She knew the place: the small town squares, the deep thickets of loblolly pine, the huge neon sign above the Swinnytown Baptist Church that declared in a blazing blue light: “A Going Church for a Coming Lord.” Richards had won East Texas four years ago, wooing the region’s conservative Democrats. But her appeal was very much in jeopardy this time because a dark whisper campaign was underway, maddeningly decentralized but marvelously effective.

“You have been hearing a very skillfully crafted Republican message,” Richards said. “We confronted it first in East Texas in the spring.”

“What message?” the single reporter on the plane asked.

She hesitated, “I know what it is, but I don’t want to say.”

It was virtually impossible in the summer of 1994 to get a haircut in East Texas or visit a coffee shop or go to church Wednesday nights without hearing about Ann Richards and the lesbians. It was a mean and virulent whisper campaign, born, as such things are, by a small fragment of fact. One of the main powers of a governor is to appoint thousands of people to the boards and commissions that operate government, and Richards had opened that process to record numbers of women, Blacks, and Hispanics. With Richards naming so many women and with her liberal social politics anathema in some quarters of East Texas, word spread that the governor was filling state government with lesbians. The truth was that some of her appointees were gay, including a high-profile appointment to the agency regulating utilities that created a buzz when the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas said the selection of “an ‘out’ lesbian to such a powerful commission gives our community something to celebrate.”

Rove knew that Richards’ appointees were a ripe target for attack. He enlisted business groups and conservative religious organizations to raise questions about their professional experience and qualifications. Bush set the issue in motion a full year before the election, cautioning that his opponent’s appointees “have been people who have had agendas that may have been personal in nature.” The code word was “personal.” Nobody mentioned sexual orientation; they didn’t need to.

“There was clearly an organized Republican movement to keep out there a couple of issues, gays and guns, in the forefront,” said Chuck McDonald, who was Richards’ press secretary. “And I don’t think it’s any secret that the person who really set the Republican agenda was Karl Rove. He drove it.”

Rove’s direct-mail firm produced a campaign brochure for distribution across East Texas attacking Richards for vetoing a bill to allow people to carry concealed handguns. But if Rove was driving the debate on Richards and homosexuality, he left few fingerprints. He professed no involvement whatsoever. Bush, he was quick to remind everyone, was committed to a positive campaign with no personal attacks.

But

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