False Start

Ever dent the fender driving a new car off the lot? The coalition of school boards and school administrators formed to lobby state government to spend more money on public schools is looking, unexpectedly, for professional help. Public Strategies Inc., the Austin-based public affairs firm that had been doing the group’s polling, public relations and marketing – an effort that put them on the wrong side of the governor – dropped out less than a week after the coalition was publicly announced, citing conflicts between the school clients who want more money and clients who hired the firm to work on the tax bill that would fund that and other state spending.

Gov. Rick Perry wants to call a special session on school finance this spring to try to cut property taxes and end the Robin Hood formulas that have rich-district voters in uproar. But he’s leading with “education excellence” instead of finance, adding $500 million to the price and diverting attention from the funding emergency that’s driving the issue. And the lack of consensus over that plan, and over schemes to re-jigger the school finance system, threatens plans to call lawmakers to Austin.

Every election is a new thing. The numbers that flow out of political consultants’ laptop computers share a problem with the stuff flowing out of an investment advisor’s box: Past results do not guarantee future results.

If he didn’t have his hands full already, state Rep. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, got hit with an ad campaign from a conservative third-party group called Americans for Job Security, blasting a proposal he made that would have broadened sales taxes in Texas (while cutting local school property taxes around the state). The ads don’t mention the property tax cut, but say the higher sales taxes would “mean fewer jobs around here.”

The judges who approved the Legislature’s new congressional map acted like health inspectors who don’t like the food in a particular restaurant but still find the kitchen clear of cockroaches and other violations of the health code. The results are a matter of taste; the restaurant’s legal.

In the last presidential election, George W. Bush easily beat the field, at least in Texas. He got 3,799,639 votes while Al Gore was pulling in 2,433,746 votes here. That’s a difference of 1,365,893 – quite a safety buffer when it came to tallying the state’s 32 electoral votes (the state will have two more electoral votes in 2004, because of the two congressional seats added after the last census; state’s get a vote for each person they elect to Congress).

Picture a room with no windows, with three judges and courtroom staff assembled in one corner, 30 attorneys (yes, really) seated and passing notes around a couple of large tables, a couple of dozen reporters squirming on hard wooden pews on one side in the back, and an assembly of officeholders, political hacks and all manner of aides seated on the other side in the back. At the door, a bailiff has been stationed to make sure nobody comes in unless one of the seats is emptied.

Federal judges apparently like theme weeks as much as network television executives do.

Robby Cook III, one of several conservative Democrats living in GOP-targeted statehouse districts, was on the verge of a party switch when he decided late last week not to run for reelection. The Eagle Lake farmer, who’s been a House member since 1997, is clearly conflicted about his partisan affiliations at the moment. He says he’s out of sync with his own party’s liberals, but also didn’t like what the GOP’s congressional redistricting maps do to rural Texas.

Bill Ratliff, a Republican engineer who upset a Democratic incumbent 15 years ago and then became a moderate voice as his party took over the Legislature, is leaving the Senate in the middle of his term to return to Mount Pleasant, his family, and political retirement.