War of the Roses in Texas

Oh, Kay! What have you gotten yourself into?

The simple answer is that Kathryn Ann “Kay” Bailey Hutchison, a Republican and senior U.S. senator from Texas, has entered the race for governor back home, a job she long has yearned to hold. But that’s where the simple part ends.

A more realistic answer, at the moment, is that Hutchison has gotten herself into a mess that imperils her long, largely productive political career.

Until, say, six months ago, Hutchison was, as she had been for many years, arguably the most popular politician in the Lone Star State. In one Senate re-election race she picked up more than 4 million votes, the state’s record for a nonpresidential candidate.

Now, however, Hutchison is at the center of an intra-GOP Armageddon that has the national Republican Party holding its head in its hands and ambulances down home lining up to haul the wounded off the internecine battlefields of a state that the party needs to keep reliably red.

In formally announcing earlier this month a primary challenge to the incumbent Republican governor, James Richard “Rick” Perry, Hutchison finally pulled the trigger on a long-delayed, mano-a-mano contest that could cost $50 million. And that’s just to get to the party primary on March 2.

Anyone hungering for great, grass-roots political theater over the next six months need look no further. The Hutchison-Perry campaign has quickly become a Bloggers Full-Employment Act, and national political reporters are looking for short-term lets in Austin.

If you want a shorthand guide to what sort of race may lie ahead, consider that Karl Rove has advised both candidates in at least one of their previous statewide contests.

And the race, although already testy enough, has not reached the expected state of unconditional warfare

“It’s not bloody yet, it’s just petty,” said a top Republican strategist who refused to be quoted by name, in part because he made the comment leaving the funeral Mass of columnist Robert D. Novak, who would have loved the Hutchison-Perry slugfest.

The Hutchison-Perry race already resembles the plot line of the 1989 vicious-divorce flick “The War of the Roses.” A report by KHOU-TV in Houston on the increasing venom of the contest did a quick cut to Kathleen Turner’s character in the movie screaming, “I simply want to smash your face in.”

This is a strange, uphill landscape for Hutchison, whom many Texans over the last decade had assumed could waltz into Austin about anytime she liked and claim the governorship. Think “coronation”; Hutchison was. Now it seems it will take a miracle. Think “parting the Red Sea.”

Republican angst aside, it will be a great show, if only because you have a former University of Texas cheerleader, Hutchison, challenging a former Texas A&M yell leader, Perry. So, for some Texans, this is serious stuff, verging on blood sport. (The historically minded will recall that the last president from Texas, George W. Bush, who came to the White House from the Governor’s Mansion, had been a cheerleader at both Andover and Yale.)

That leaves, observed Burnt Orange Report, a center-left Texas political blog, two cheerleaders “running against each other to see who can get the right-wing of the Republican Party to shout the loudest.”

That’s not a good spot for Hutchison, who despite her generally conservative votes and substantive legislative record in the Senate has always been somewhat suspect to the hard Right that now rules the Texas GOP.

The focus for many Republicans is Hutchison’s refusal to call for overturning Roe v. Wade. That position favoring fundamental abortion rights cost Hutchison, back in 1982, a Republican primary runoff in a U.S. House race in Dallas. And it has haunted her periodically with the party’s base.

That Hutchison has voted for all manner of abortion restrictions cuts little ice with the staunchest opponents of abortion. Her record “will never be pure enough to satisfy the hard-core conservatives on this issue,” Houston Chronicle political blogger R.G. Ratcliffe wrote last week, as Perry won the endorsement of Texas Right to Life.

Hutchison also has supported legislation to expand research to additional lines of embryonic stem cells.

“Not only does Governor Perry defend the unborn, he has worked to stop destructive research on human embryos and other biotech assaults on human life,” the anti-abortion group’s president, Joseph Graham, said in its endorsement.

That blast was just part of Hutchison’s long, hot summer. In the wake of a state legislative session, which kept the governor in the news and Hutchison on the sidelines, the senator has let Perry run up a lead. She trailed him by 4 percentage points in May, according to a Rasmussen poll. By last month, in the same survey, Perry had jumped in front by 10 points.

“Events are trending strongly in Perry’s favor,” blogged Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka when the poll came out. “It’s hard to beat an incumbent with 76% favorability and 74% job approval.”

Hutchison, 66, claims Perry, 59, wants to be governor for life, perhaps a touch rich for a person who has been in and out of elective office since before she turned 30.

Perry has hammered Hutchison for being a Washington insider, not the best calling card in the Age of Obama (or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid) for the usual Texas Republican primary electorate, which is strongly influenced by Christian fundamentalists and anti-government conservatives.

The governor is not given to subtlety. Recalling Hutchison’s 16 years in Washington, Perry says: “She may not have a grasp of what all’s going on in the state of Texas. She may not know or understand the progress that we’ve made in the state.”

Hutchison’s status as a Washington player — ranking Republican, for instance, on the Senate military construction appropriations subcommittee — may not be much more appealing to Texans without strong partisan ties. Those are the folks who usually skip the primary but then generally vote Republican in the fall. And it’s these casual, modestly less conservative Republicans and independents, not driven by social issues, whom Hutchison must charm into supporting her in the March election if she is to have any chance of overcoming Perry’s advantage with the religious Right.

Current signs are not good that this key sector can be won over by a veteran Washington-based pol. Last month, a majority of Texas voters polled by Rasmussen said the national economy continued to worsen. That’s hardly something the disillusioned are likely to blame on Perry, in part because the governor will continue to push Hutchison into the spotlight when economic bad news comes along.

Hutchison is trying to get clear of the national capital as quickly as possible. She says she’ll quit her Senate seat this fall, and she is trying to unload her 4,300-square-foot Colonial on a McLean cul-de-sac — for at least $150,000 less than the $1.6 million she and her husband, Ray Hutchison, a Dallas-based bond lawyer, paid for it three years ago. The Dallas Morning News reported recently that the real estate listing for the suburban Virginia property described “a motivated seller” seeking “all offers.”

What troubles some Republicans is the thought that the GOP gubernatorial primary could be so debilitating that it might turn the general election campaign into a real battle — assuming the Democrats ever find a believable alternative, which so far they haven’t. Their likeliest prospect may be ribald raconteur Richard S. “Kinky” Friedman, the erstwhile singer and writer who ran fourth in 2006 as an independent in a fractured gubernatorial field.

The more utilitarian Democratic choice would be John Thomas “Tom” Schieffer, 61, whose main problem for center-Left voters will be his close relationship with George W. Bush. Schieffer is a former business partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team that Bush co-owned and then was ambassador to Australia and Japan while Bush was president. Schieffer is a younger brother of CBS News star Bob Schieffer.

In the establishment (i.e., country club) Republican playbook, Perry was to have served his second four-year term and then moved on to some lobbying sinecure or whatever lucrative job his rugged good looks and pompadour could have gotten him. There’s a reason the late Molly Ivins called Perry “Governor Goodhair.” And Hutchison herself, although lacking the iconically upswept and immovable “do” of Ann Richards, is no slouch in the carefully-coiffed department. When Richards was elected governor in 1990, Hutchison succeeded her as state treasurer.

Perry’s refusal to stick to the expected script is looked on by some as wildly ungrateful. It was, after all, supposedly only by Hutchison’s grace and favor, in deciding not to run against Perry in either 2002 or 2006, that he has made it this far. In his last re-election, Perry managed to hold on to the governorship with an uninspiring 39 percent of the general-election vote against an atomized field that included Friedman as one of the independent candidates.

It’s more or less a given that Hutchison has been plotting this prospective move to the Brazos since before she arrived on the Potomac in 1993. But her plans were put on hold in 1994, when Bush defeated Richards. However, why she wants to be governor is much more of a mystery. The job, a classic appoint-and-veto post left over from Reconstruction, is the weakest of any chief executive of a mega-state.

Despite the inherent limitations of the Texas governorship, some argue that its bully pulpit nature makes it the state’s pinnacle of political power and the worthy cap to any career in public office.

None of the academic weak-governor arguments mattered to Hutchison. She has craved the job and finally is acting on that desire, however despairing the attempt may look now.

Cragg Hines, a sixth-generation Texan and Democrat, wrote about politics from 1972 to 2007 from the Washington bureau of the Houston Chronicle.