ARCHIVE - MB Talks To The Former Governor Of Texas, Mark White

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Mark White served as the governor of Texas from nineteen
eighty three to nineteen eighty seven. Growing up in a
Democrat household, Mark White was a very Democrat.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
It was a very.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Different Democrat than the Democrat Party today. He had East
Texas values. He was far more conservative than Democrats of today.
This was a period of time when a number of
Democrats in Texas were moving over to the Republican Party,
people like Rick Perry, Phil Graham among them, and at

(00:41):
the time the conservative Democrat was being left out.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
They gravitated to.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
The Republican Party, leaving the Democrats to be dominated by
what called themselves progressive but their left wing nuts. And
it's sort of like what happens when you had white
flight out of the urban core. White flights no longer
white flight. Now it's white flight, black flight, Hispanic flight,

(01:10):
Asian flight, it is blight flight. People don't want to
live in these dangerous big cities any longer. Well as
the people who care the law abiding citizens leave. They
leave people who are apartment dwellers that don't vote, and

(01:30):
they leave these cities to be third world countries. Because
the kind of people that get elected in municipalities, and
that just makes it worse, it exacerbates it. Well, that's
what happened with the Texas Democrat Party. When the Mark
Whites left the party, it was left to the Beto O. Rourkes,

(01:52):
the nut jobs. So anyway, I always had a lot
of respect for Mark White. He was a former Secretary
of State and then governor, one of the last of
the Democrat governors, and he and I sat down for
just over an hour. I have a lot of respect
for Mark White. You'll probably figure that out. Mark White

(02:13):
was very good to me when I was a young
professional and gave me a lot of advice. He would
take my calls. He was at a firm called Keack
my Hand and Kate and I would go down and
visit with him. I really looked up to him. My
parents adored him. Some of his family is buried in
the same cemetery as my mom's people up outside of Tyler,
So we just had a lot of East Texas connections,

(02:35):
and I always admired him. When my wife was sworn
in as Secretary of State, I invited Governor White because
he had been Secretary of State as well. I invited
all the living secretaries of State George Strake. Anyway, So
they were waiting out in the lobby and Governor Perry
had invited me and Nunditta in the kids back so

(02:57):
that we could walk out together. They were waiting out
in the presentation room, the ceremonial room, and they came
in and they said, Governor Perry, Governor White is here.
And he said, what's Governor White doing here? Is he
here for a meeting or no, he's here to support
Nandita for secretary of State. And he said, why didn't
you tell me? And I said, well, I didn't know

(03:17):
I needed to tell you who I was inviting. And
he said, oh my goodness. He said, do you know
that the bible that I'm going to use to swear
your wife in is the bible that was left in
the Governor's office by Mark White, his personal family bible
to be used by his successor.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Do you know that? Which was Bill.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Clements, who he had himself beat four years earlier. And
he goes, what are the chances? So he called out
to his director of Appointments, Teresa, bring me that bible.
She brought it over there. It was from Mark White.
Great story anyway, So This isn't an archive. This is
an interview I did years ago. Mark White passed away sadly,

(03:59):
but he to gil Or, for my money, that the
best Democrat governors, the best Democrat governor and first lady
certainly that we ever had. And I really enjoyed this conversation.
It meant a lot to me, and I hope you
enjoyed it too.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Governor.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Here we sit in twenty seventeen, and I want to
rewind to nineteen eighty two. I'm going to bounce around
on time a little bit with you. Nineteen eighty two,
you're elected to forty six governor state of Texas. That
same year, Anne Richards is elected the Texas state treasurer,
and two years later state representative from Haskell, Texas, Rick

(04:37):
Perry is elected a Democrat as well. You three Democrats
are serving in public life. We fast forward thirty three
years later, and Rick Perry is the Secretary of Energy,
a conservative Republican, having served as governor, and Richards went

(04:57):
on to be, in my opinion, a very different Democrat
than you as governor as well. I think the three
of you make for an interesting contrast of what a Democrat.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Was in the early to mid eighties. How has the
Democrat Party changed, Well, it's changed more by population shifts,
I think, in some political shifts, a couple of them
that are predate my time in office. You have to
almost go back to the Civil War to understand what's

(05:29):
happening even today in Texas because you see the changes.
And this is the sad part too, and there's good
and bad associated with this. The thing that bothers me
the most is to see the racism that still exists
in our country and it shouldn't be. Can you can't

(05:51):
ignore race? I mean, your eyes will tell you someone
is of a different race. Sometimes your ears will tell
you that. But the important thing is is how we
deal with it. And I'm very disappointed we don't deal
with it the way I think we should, and that is,
you know, we all came here from different places, but
we all came here for approximately the same reason today

(06:15):
and the values that we have I found in my
political life, we're pretty much the same as the Hispanic
and the African American and other people that you deal with.
The new immigrants today in Texas. It's a beautiful thing
to see if you don't object to their being here
in the first place, and so how did it change

(06:38):
for me? You go back and look at how we
back then politically, everybody was a Democrat because of what
happened in Reconstruction. They weren't about to be a Republican.
And then you see those shifts that have occurred for
a variety of reasons, going back to Nixon with his
policies and Regging with his policies, and how they they

(07:00):
the Republicans went into the South and tended to pick
up those people who were unwilling to see the shifts
that came with Lennon Johnson and civil rights. They believed
in everybody's civil rights until it turned into, oh, my gosh,
you mean we're going to have to have dinner with them.

(07:20):
And so there was a real reluctance among older Democrats,
and there was also an influx. She should not ignore
the influx of people. Population moves into the South from
the North of Anglos, primarily Republicans who moved south. As

(07:42):
I've said to some of my Democratic friends here the
other day, I said, my god, we've been guarding the
wrong border. It's not the people coming in from the South.
It's costing us our election. Is those that came from
California and New York and they came down here knowing
Republican Democrats in their community, they want to be near them.
But we weren't the same Democrats down here in Texas

(08:04):
that those people that had left those other parts of
the country were. I like to refer to Texas Democrats
today as being common sense Democrats that we don't let
ideology get in the way of what works. And let
me tell you, I wish more Democrats felt that way.
I don't think we have enough of that. I think
we have too many people that are still ethnic play

(08:28):
the ethnic chime as being the first bell they ring
when they ought to be ringing the American bell, and
the way in which you look at this this business
that they're here and they do they revel in the
fact that they're Americans and I'm a citizen is the
first thing that comes from their mouth. And yet they

(08:50):
can be proud of their heritage. I guess proud of
my English heritage. They ran me out of there a
long time ago, before anybody in my lifetime remember, but
we were run off for religious reasons, not for racial reasons.
And many people in the South were we were revolutionaries.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
But let's talk about the change just within the Democrat party.
And I use the examples of you, Ann Richards and
Rick Perry because y'all were in the same party in
nineteen eighty four. Yeah, and yet you went sort of
especially two of them went two different directions. And I
sort of see your career as being a punctuation mark,

(09:34):
sort of like a family that's been separated, because I
see a lot of your former friends that became Republicans
and some of them that stayed back, and you're sort
of in the middle of all this.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Well, I think that's a good analysis. Anne Richards was
always viewed as a liberal Democrat. I was viewed, I
guess overwhelmingly as a conservative Democrat. And that's because you're
kind of paired up by a virtue of who your
opponent was. You get kind of tagged by that. And

(10:05):
so my entry into Texas politics came under an appointment,
sort of like your wife Nandida did. An appointment from
yours being Perry's appointment as governor. Mine was Governor Briscoe's appointment.
So Briscoe was viewed as the conservative Democrat who had

(10:28):
just been elected. He defeated a very powerful and very
close race a Republican and had defeated Ben Barnes and
Cissy Farenthal. So here he is defeated the moderate and
liberal part of the Democratic Party, and he being represented
of the conservative Democratic Party, and he was a rancher,

(10:50):
and he had all those characteristics, and so I'm his appointed,
I get identified with him. We get in a race
with Price Junior. I'm identified is the conservative, he's the liberal.
And Richards, who was elected to the state Treasurer's office
when I was elected governor, she was identified much more
liberal than I. But as those years went from seventy

(11:15):
two three when I was appointed, up until eighty two
when I was running for governor, the Texas Party had
moved significantly by virtue of probably McGovern who just about
sunk the Democratic Party ship here in Texas. Back in
that election, it was hard for Briscoe to survive the

(11:38):
cover that was being flown by mcgovernor. McGovern was terribly
unpopular here and he was put into a difficult posture
of having to be a Democrat running with him as
your presidential nominee. Anyway, he won, and all the other
Democrats won, and the change though that was occurring in

(11:59):
Texas a lot of factors. The Republicans became energized in
trying to reorganize conservative Democrats as Republicans. They did a
marvelous job of going into rural Texas and see, this
is where today's Democrat doesn't understand. And if all you

(12:19):
have to do is look back in the history of
every election in Texas history since eighteen seventy six, no
governor probably before that too, even more so, but for sure,
no governor has ever been elected governor of Texas that
did not carry rural Texas. And I'm talking not South Texas.
I'm talking everything east of I thirty five and now

(12:45):
everything north of Interstate ten. So if a Democrat can't carry,
we carried those counties today. Woo. It has been a
complete flip flop for a variety of reasons. We started
with well, actually it really started back when John Tower,
when we had a break between Stevenson and Eisenhower over

(13:09):
the tidelands of Texas. Is very provincial about don't mess
with Texas. That came up as my mato that was
put out when I was governor, but it predates my governorship.
Don't mess with Texas has been a mato unspoken for
years generations. Nobody don't tell Texans what to do. That

(13:33):
is a big mistake. I don't care which party you're in.
You mentioned John Tower. Nineteen sixty one, Tower.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Becomes Republican Senator of post reconstruction.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
This is a big deal in Texas and you're.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Starting to see this Republican spread across the South that
has continued more or less throughout those years. So Tower
is the US one of the two senators. Nineteen eighty two,
when you're elected, as you know, you are the last
governor Democrat governor to have an all statewide elected officials

(14:09):
be Democrats. Of course the senator was Republican. Since then
only one Democrat, Governor Anne Richards. I want to go back,
and I'm not trying to get you to beat up
on Democrats or betray Democrats. I mean, you can look
at nineteen eighty with Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
And George H. W. Bush.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
The party was looking or forward in Reagan in seventy six.
The party doesn't parties have to we only have two parties.
You have to accommodate a lot of personalities. But when
I go back and look, I see a lot of
guys who you talked about, the conservative Democrats that left.
You were a reformer, but I think you were closer

(14:48):
to a conservative Democrat than you were this new way
progressive and Richards and the Democrat Party didn't hold on
to enough of those folks. And you've seen it statewide.
After Anne Richards and with George W. Bush in ninety four,
the Democrats have just been meeting badly. Don't you think

(15:09):
that is a function of the Democrat Party moving away
from what was anchoring it.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Which was Yeah, exactly. We've seen that trend in place
for a variety of reasons. Some is migration, in some
is attitudes that have been there for years. Conservative Democrats
have said, you know, I'm more comfortable being a Republican

(15:35):
than i am with those liberal Democrats. And that's a
large measure a fault of the Democratic Party to let
this occur. But then again, your nominee gets to be
the face of the party, and if your nominee appears
to be, well, she's a liberal, pro abortion female, then

(15:59):
I don't to be associated with that, and they don't
listen to anything that happens after that. And so that
was a difficulty for Wendy, and it was also something
Ann Richards came along and got elected. And you know,
elections are funny things. Sometimes you win and sometimes the
other side loses. So don't attribute too much to the

(16:23):
current victory as being a great victory for a new
president so much as my God, did you see what
our democratic nominee failed to do? So there's a lot
of that I'd liked. I think I had the best
of both worlds. I worked hard, ran a good campaign,
and then my opponent helped me by saying a few things.

(16:43):
Same thing for Ann Richards, she got some help from
her opponent.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Clayton definitely did her a favorite. Yeah, let me go
back to nineteen eighty two, and as I have warned
gentlemen to bounce around when you were elected, I went
back and looked at the things that you were pushing for.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Education is how I remember you, right.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
I mean, I was twelve years old when you were elected,
and educated I did. I got a great education at
Orangefield High School. I said, you were the forty sixth
you were the forty third goer. Yeah, forty sixth secretary
of state or attorney general. I forget anyway. At one
point earlier today. I knew that, but one of the

(17:23):
big pushes of yours was improving schools. And I looked
and you made note the fact that our SAT scores,
we were underperforming educationally. And I think a lot of
people bought into your vision of here's an area of
reform that everybody can be for, and you were aggressive

(17:44):
about it.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
You brought in Ross Perot, which I'll get to in
a moment.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
He chaired this commission and kind of became the face
of this. But you put all your political capital into
fixing public education in Texas, and that.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Included no pass, no play, and some.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Very aggressive measures, and a lot of people, well, let me,
do you feel that that was a success?

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Oh? Absolutely, you can see an immediate success. And this
is the reason I applaud Governor Abbot for what he's
doing in trying to accent and putting finances along with
the enterprise of early childhood development and education. He's right
on target. I mean that is that's as much a

(18:27):
Mark White program as it is properly so a Governor
Abbot program. And that's something we're totally united on and
we ought to be and what we ought to be doing,
and I'd be willing to go up if it would
help him, and certainly wouldn't go if it didn't to
urge every member of the legislature to support his efforts.

(18:49):
What we did then showed if you will put the
money on the nose of the teachers and the students
and focus on it, give them the right tools, and
hold them to high standards. In other words, we're not
just playing. There's not a playground out here unless it's
going to be used for education in advancement. The initial

(19:10):
reaction to everything we did because of the emphasis on
student performance back then, teacher performance instantly, instantly, within the
period of time that I serve four years and I
was only three full years of test performance, we saw

(19:32):
SAT scores go up dramatically. The other thing we saw,
and you've got to look at all the numbers and
all the factors. We all had more people taking the test.
You know, the smartest kids take the test, and then
you start adding the others to it, which tends to
dilute the scores. But even with a dilution of scores,
by adding thousands of more people to take, the SAT

(19:57):
scores went up. That's what we all want. Nobody should
be against that.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
It's funny you said you'd go up for Abbott or
either way the guy you beat for Attorney General in
seventy eight, James A. Baker the Third famously said, I'll
speak for you against you, whichever one will help you
the most. But you talk about improving public education, and
I think out of a lot of good intentions came testing.

(20:24):
And I don't know if it went too far. I
don't know if people just don't like being measured, but
I think there is almost a unanimous opposition to the
overtesting or teaching to the test.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Where if it all did that go wrong? Well, let
me tell you. In an effort to get the teacher
pay raise, which was everybody admitted teachers were underpaid, but
nobody wants to pay teachers that aren't doing a good job.
That it makes sense either. So the legislature more than
me insisted that teachers pass a test before they qualify

(20:58):
for the pay raise. And so everything that happened in
that reform effort I get credit or blamed for, including
the tax increase to pay for it, which was, by
the way, well, everything that's in the package you get
blamed for. If it works fine if it doesn't too bad.

(21:19):
And everything went well until I had a decision to make,
and I didn't think very law or heart about it. Frankly,
one of my staff said, do you want to give
the teachers their pay raised now or after they take
the test? And I said, give it to them now.
They need the money now. And they did big mistake.

(21:40):
By the time it comes around to taking this test
that was required by the legislature before they would pass
the money to pay the teachers, they've forgotten about it.
And so here the test is essentially a ninth grade
reading comprehension test that teachers were permitted to study for

(22:01):
and take it twice. In other words, you didn't make
it this time, you get to one more try. And
they failed twice. Some seven or eight thousand teachers out
of two hundred thousand we had at the time couldn't
pass a ninth grade reading comprehension test. And I suspect
every one of those who didn't pass were probably voters
of mine, and they probably were disappointed and maybe never

(22:26):
swore never to vote for me again.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Well, in nineteen eighty six, the teachers organized and.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Worked again against me because of the test.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
So here we are twenty seventeen, and I don't know
what you think of Betsy de Vos, a new education secretary,
And we'll get to school choice in time. But she
shows up at a school recently and she was blocked
to get in. And it's a school that was a
failing school in the past. And nobody protested when the

(22:53):
school got a failing grade, but they protest when the
education secretary comes. At some point, we all know of
our teachers, but it seems like to protect a few
bad teachers, we're avoiding good education reform.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Well, let me stress and you hear the problem we
have in our society today we didn't used to have.
Is everything now is nationwide. Everything you hear in New
York is heard in Texas. May be true, maybe not.
They say, oh, the teachers unions they're killing us. Not
in Texas, we don't have teachers unions like you do

(23:28):
in New York or California. You have no right to strike,
you have no right to have collective bargaining. You have
the essentially the only right you have as a teacher
in Texas is in the first three years of your
contract that you can be not fired. But just let

(23:49):
go for no reason. Now after you've been there three years,
they have to give you a reason for your not
being rehired. But that's a big difference in having teachers
unions like you have in the North, so that they
kind of here in Texas get smeared with that. Truth
of the matter is good leaders in any good corporation,

(24:11):
notwithstanding unions, if you're doing your job right, you ought
to be able to persuade those union members if they
are non union members, that this is a good, wise
course of action. I always trying to remind people the
most highly unionized airline in America is called Southwest Airlines,
one of the great consumer oriented airlines. So it's leadership

(24:33):
that's critical. Leadership is everything. I don't care how you
want to how you want to put the chairs on
the deck. If you got the wrong people in the chairs,
it never will get better. So we got to get
the right people in the leadership. That's why I like
what the Habit's done on early childhood education. That's good leadership.

(24:54):
I disagree with him on a significant number of other things,
but that's just because he had had a chin. Sit down.
Let me convince that just come, let us reason together.
So that's what we need to be doing. You mentioned
Jim Baker. Jim Baker is one of the countries really
great public servants. He never won an election. I showed

(25:16):
him about that, but let me tell you, he didn't
let that change his commitment to public service. Thank goodness.
Jim Baker and I get along fine. He's the sort
of fellow that if all Republicans were like that, they
would be very tough for Democrats. Fortunately they aren't all
that way. And basically that's the way this old country
kind of goes like a sail boat. The wind blows

(25:39):
this way, and we go this way until that doesn't
turn out well, and then we come back. And so
when you see the end of the Democratic Party, but
you know, they've just announced the end of the Democratic
Party about three weeks after we had announced the end
of the Republican Party. So don't listen to these the
end of both of them. Well, that's scary enough, No pass,
no play.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
I was twelve years old and that was put into effect,
and I went back and looked at the numbers and
al Dean School, Eisenhower High School here in Houston, lost
ninety of their one hundred and ninety players. Case goes
all the way to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
But let me go back and look, no, what of
those coaches were made.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Fifteen percent of all varsity football players had to sit
during the football season, and forty percent of all JV
and freshman players were benched the first semester the rule
went into effect. High school football is a big deal
in Texas. A tross Perot said, if the people of
Texas want Friday night entertainment instead of education, let's find

(26:44):
out about it. Easy for him to say, people of
Texas want Friday night entertainment instead of education.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah, they did, and let me tell you we can
have both. And that's a mistake I made. I will
have to admit to being a little hard headed. Once
we set a standard of six weeks of sitting out
until you got your grades back up to sea before
you could go back and play, they offered up the

(27:12):
medium ground of three weeks of sitting it out, and
they made their position clear to me. And I've listened
to them and I rejected it. I shouldn't have big
mistake on my part. I was fearful though of this.
I was afraid that if we gave back on any
portion of it. It would be not only a sign
of weakness, but it would be more importantly unraveling of

(27:35):
the reforms, which I didn't want to see. But we've
seen since then they did roll it back. I think
now that three weeks of sitting out works fine. There's
too many ways to get around this rule, which is
too bad. But what I was trying to do in

(27:55):
my mind was to tell the coaches, here's what we
need you to help our kids not only perform on
the athletic field, but to perform in the schoolroom. The
classroom is do exactly what you do to improve their
athletic abilities. It will also, if you adopt those same principles,

(28:16):
will improve their academic abilities. And it's called practice. Go
back and try it again. Hey son, you want to
make that tackle, Here's let me show you how you
do it. And you go back and say, hey son,
you want to pass that math test, here's how you
do it. And if you'll go back and practice properly,
both academically and athletically, it's a two way win, big win.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
You said, Rossbro didn't have to face the voters, and
you did. That's an interesting point because I think as
I truly believe what he did. Later, somebody can like
or not like, but I truly believe that he wanted
to make a mark, and he wanted to make a difference,
and his heart was in the right place him sharing

(29:01):
that commission. Looking back, was that the right decision?

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, well, let me tell you the reason for that.
The reason for it was was a recognition. If you'll remember,
when I came into office, I'd rolled in with a
pretty good majority of votes, over a quarter of a million,
against an incumbent governor who had defeated the first Republican,
who had been the first Republican to defeat a Democratic

(29:24):
governor in the history of this past one hundred years
or more. And so I, whether it be too full
of myself or what felt like, that's a pretty strong
comment from the people of Texas of what they want.
The legislatory, albeit overwhelmingly democratic, they did not go along
with what I said about teacher pay raise, ignored it.

(29:48):
Then I saw their resistance to change on the issues
of education that we were worried about, and it came
very clear to me that the only way to get
this thing was bringing together the business interest of the
state and legislature in Texas historically has responded positively, both

(30:10):
Democrats and Republicans, to strong business leaders coming in from
the community saying, hey, let's go Pale, let's get the
same done. And that's what we did in the year later,
after our inability to get that passed in nineteen eighty three,
we went back and had a one year study and

(30:31):
let me compliment GiB Lewis, who was speaker then, because
Gibbs said to me and Bill Hobby, we're not going
to pass anything here till we make sure we have
good teachers and we improve the quality of those teachers
in the classroom. Now that was good. I didn't particularly

(30:53):
care for his lack of enthusiasm for my program, but
I couldn't criticize what he was trying to do. Working together,
we got this bill passed. We raised taxes, and it
was then and now the most dramatic single change in
education in the modern history of this country. No other

(31:16):
state attempted to do so much. Everybody else did a
little bit of what we did. We did it all.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
What did you not do that you wanted to get done?
I know one of the big accomplishments of that was
a twenty two pupil limit for elementary schools. Yeah, it
was a big deal. Smaller classes, better education. Everybody knows
that it's hard to do. It's hard to fund it,
it's hard to implement it. What did you not get
done that you wanted.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
To get done got? We got almost I think all
of it done. As far as the reform package was concerned,
I would have, looking back, would have put even more emphasis.
And let me tell you, if we went to full
day kindergarten, that was a big, huge step nationwide. Nobody
did that we did. Now you see, thirty some years later,

(32:01):
the current governor is pushing for early childhood education pre kindergarten. Applause.
It's wonderful. We didn't do it then because my gosh,
we were happy with full day kindergarten. So going back
to do it over again, I don't since that we
did anything that I wouldn't do again. Except the three

(32:25):
weeks on no pass, no play. I would tell the
teachers that yes, we're going to get you your pay
raise as soon as you pass the test, and I'll
help you pass the test. And those were the two
major changes.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Teacher pay raise and keeping taxes low are at odds right,
because that's a big expenditure. At some point, every state
rep has to say, I got homeowners that don't want
to pay more taxes, but everybody sort of generally thinks
our cops and our teachers ought to get paid more.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Do you think at the end of.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
It, the taxpayer was the bigger was the bigger interest
than the teacher.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
I got blamed for raising taxes, but I raised taxes
at least once, if not more times after the education
bill passed. We raised it then, and then I raised
it the taxes again just before the election.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
And Clements raised taxes in early eighty seven, right after
he comes into office.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Well, let me say not only after he came into office,
but after he promised never to do that. And without
talking about someone who can't respond, the fact of the
matter is the biggest If I had one criticism to
make of all the Republican leaders in this state is
too often they go in with the first thing they

(33:45):
do is to say we're going to cut taxes. Well,
let's don't cut taxes. Do we figure out what we
need to spend money on. That's not let me say
that's a bad business principle. If you were to be
given a new business to operate, the first thing you
wouldn't do is to go in and say, let's cut

(34:07):
revenue until you've had a chance to go in and
see what do we need. Can we cut prices and
expand our base and sell more volume and make up
for the revenue reduction if we just stop there? Now, See,
these are all moving parts, and if you just do
one thing, you put the pressure on the balloon to

(34:30):
blow out somewhere else. Here's the pressure. I admire the
Bush family enormously. George W. Bush did what Republicans apparently
have to do. It's kind of like you have to
play this tune of cutting taxes, so you cut taxes. Well,
let's go back and rebuild the model. Let's go back

(34:52):
to when not when I quit, Just go back to
when Clement's quit, and let's see what what the proportions
were in taxes being paid from the state level and
local levels to fund schools. What's happened over time? And
I can speak to my time about half of all

(35:13):
the dollars in state budget when I was there or
spent on education today that numbers down around thirty six percent.
When you start reducing the state contribution to local schools.
Schools still need money. What happens. The only reaction you
can get to that is the local bill goes up.

(35:36):
And the only thing they can raise taxes on you
for in your school district is your property tax. That
to me is a false shift savings. To me, the
governor of taxes, looking here, I cut your taxes, and
then the guy goes over and says, well, look at
my property taxes and don't blame it on the school district.
That's what they do. The point is here again, we

(36:00):
need to start working together. Let's make these schools work,
and then let's figure out how we pay for it.
Let's fix things and then figure what it costs. That's
the way I've always looked at things. I've always my wife,
we better cut this, we better cut that. I said, No,

(36:20):
what we really have to do is make it where
I work harder, become more productive, and we'll have more
of what we need. So what do you do? How
do you go about raising revenues? Well, there's a couple
of ways you can do it. If all you do
is raise taxes, that works, But does it have the

(36:40):
impact of cutting down on people's ability to do business
and generate new jobs and generate new taxes. If I
sell one thing ten to ten people, I get at
a certain level of taxation, I get a lot of
money coming in if I just if I have to

(37:02):
go raise taxes, does that cut down on those ten
people to five people? Well, wait a minute, I've hurt
myself in revenue and I've hurt taxes. So these are
all have to be in balance. They need to be coordinated.
That's the magic of good leadership, and that's where the
people of taxes are blindfolded, not just Texas, nationwide. Democrats

(37:25):
are all too easy to say, let's just raise taxes.
Republicans are all too easy to say, let's just cut taxes.
And neither one of those approaches is the answer to
how we build good schools. So the easy tax to
raise today, and the one you see the state resisting,

(37:45):
is sales tax. Just a little raised in the sales
tax with all this growth of people, means such a
small number of dollars out of any one person's pocket
that it would be hard for you to know you've
ever spent it. Texas is a unique place. We've gotten

(38:06):
people brag it on the Texas Miracle. And I love
Rick Perry and I'm hopeful that he will bring a
lot of good Texas ideas to this Department of Energy.
They need it and he'll do it. But you don't.
You have to not overlook what the price of aill

(38:27):
does on the Texas Miracle. Sure, I know I saw
nine dollars aill. He saw a hundred dollars. All let
me tell you. I'll take his side of that. I
wanted to go to that.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
You take office in nineteen eighty two. Let me one
question before I'll take off. You take aufstin January of
ninety three or eighty three, you defeat Bill Clements for governor,
and then he runs against you again in eighty six
and he beats you. I want to talk politics, not policy.
For a question, how did you not beat him over

(38:58):
the head with a thing that were going on at
SMU where he was part of the group that was
hiding what had happened under the Pony Express and led
to the eventual death penalty for that program. Clements is
a sitting in the committee meetings. It's come out. ESPN
does a great thirty for thirty on this. I don't
know if you've seen it. And Clements says, well, let's

(39:19):
keep this hush hush, because let's just keep paying the
players that are already on a payroll, because we got
a payroll, right, we got a payroll to meet.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
Go get the date of when he said that was
pre election, but when it came out it was post election. Okay,
did you know that at the time, I knew there
were strong rumors of what he had done. The federal
judge that time in Austin kept that from coming out.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
It is surprising that it was as bad as it was. Yeah,
that there were that many players on the payroll, and
that when it came to the committee and the regents
and the president that they continued.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
To allow that.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
But I guess their thought was, will allow a little
to avoid the scandal, we'll cut back on the.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
Worst of it. Well, you've seen a parallel to that
some degree with what happened to SMU then and what
happens to Baylor today, your alma mater. You have a
leadership that's failed and two different schools with two different results.
Methodists have a different program than Baptist. They have a

(40:24):
bishop and they also have a guy who said, all
of y'all are going to resign and we're going to
restart the program that hadn't happened because we don't have
the authority at Baylor to do that. And there were
good people on the board. What needs to be done better? Well,
there were good people in the SMU board. They're good
people at the Baylor board. Let me kind of explain
it this way. As much as you may love your school,

(40:47):
you may not be the best one to serve your
school in the fashion that you might wish. I tell
this story on myself. When I went off to Baylor,
I wanted to play basketball. I was a pretty good
Church league basketball player, at least in my mind. So
I go out for Baylor basketball and I'm thinking I'm

(41:08):
doing okay until coach Metafie comes over. He puts his
arm around me. He said, Mark, I know you love Baylor,
I know you want to play for Baylor. But Son,
you're just not quite tall enough for your speed. And
that pretty well ended my basketball career at Baylor. But

(41:28):
now I still yell just as loud, if not louder,
in the stands and don't love Baylor less. I just
was told by somebody who knew that wasn't where I
can serve Bayla the best. And we have that problem
that everybody would love to be on the border regions
of the University of Texas, but everybody can't be there,
and some are better than others. Same way as true

(41:50):
about Baylor, and how you go about getting those right
ones in there and the ones that aren't supposed to
be there into a better, more productive way is a
tough act to do. You've been involved with Baylor over
the years.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Obviously your passion for the institution is well known.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
What went wrong there, well, it boils down the failure
of leadership. And you know, you saw the old movie,
We have a failure to communicate. My whole life has
been an observing leadership, good and bad. And I don't
care exactly how the chairs are rotated around or how

(42:26):
they're situated. You tell me who's in the chair, and
I can fairly well predict what the result will be.
I can go down a list of people who have
served in this country and I'll pick my leadership and
you pick yours, and I bet you will have a
lot of the same names on that list. I can
look down the list in Texas as Democrats and Republicans,

(42:49):
and I'll have a lot of good people. I don't
agree with every one of them. But then again, my
wife and I don't agree on how good I am
or how beautiful she is. I think he's beautiful, she said,
Oh I'm not. Yes she is. But what the point
I'm trying to say is the beauty of America is

(43:10):
the ability for us to talk, to discuss, to decide
make choices. If we all have the same goal, and
I think we really do. If you'll just scratch down
below the politics of it all, who in this country
doesn't want to have good public schools? Sure, Who in
this country doesn't want to have a strong defense. Who

(43:30):
in this country doesn't want to have unbounded opportunity? We
all agree on that. How do we do it?

Speaker 2 (43:37):
There?

Speaker 1 (43:38):
In lives of difference? But I'll promise you this, If
you'll put Jim Baker sitting down there, and you go
over here on this side, and put any number of
Democrats over here, We're going to work it out and
make it work.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
You mentioned nine dollars a barrel oil nineteen eighty two.
When you get elected, everything that was going great in
Texas for that commodity goes down, and you talk in
your campaign about diversifying the economy and the things we
do to do that, and here we've gone through a
tough time again, what do we ad about fifty five

(44:11):
a barrel today? Do you think Texas succeeded in your
goal to diversify?

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yeah, we did. How was this one different? Let me
tell you what we did. If you go look at
my in order of address, one of the things I
said is that the future of Texas is not at
the bottom of it all. Well, it's education. So we
did that commitment to education, and it's been paying off,
continues to pay off. There have been some dips in

(44:40):
It was because well, if you just keep doing the
right thing, we'll keep getting the right result. I can
promise you that nothing changes. Do the right thing, you
get the right result. Okay, next, how did you diversify
your economy? Went off the same day, Bibles in hand
hand up the same day. We started trying to attract

(45:03):
not just new old business, but new new business to
Texas and to open the door to create new business
in Texas. And much of I don't claim credit for
all the development of the technology in Texas, but with
the leadership of Pike Powers, who was my chief of

(45:27):
staff and also did an enormous amount of work on
getting MCC which was a huge group, a not a conglomerate,
but a team of companies came together to create research
on artificial intelligence under the leadership of Bobby Enman. They

(45:52):
brought companies from all across America to Austin and when
they came, they saw, my gosh, what do we have here?
A great place to live, We have low taxes, we
don't have an income tax. We have Oh, by the way,
this University of Texas is not a cowboy operation. It's
a real school. And that ain't and ibsitting over They're

(46:14):
just not over there, you know, milk and cows. These
people are over here really doing some dramatic things in
research by all science own and on. So when they
saw the assets that we've had here that have been
developed through the years, in generations, and couple that with
the new technology about the internet, even the Internet, just

(46:40):
look what that one thing's done to transform this whole world.
I think al Gore for that. Well, I don't know
who you think for it, but let me tell you
who your first governor in Texas in the first governor
of the US to have an Internet address. Was that
you me, and let me tell you the whole truth. Second,
terry about press secretary came in. Governor, You're the first

(47:05):
governor in America to have an Internet address. I studied
that for a few minutes, and I said, well, you
explain what that is. And she explained it to me.
And then I listened and I said, can you explain
that again? I have an electronic mail, and then she explained.

(47:26):
I finally got it. Embarrassed to ask her again because
I still didn't understand it, because I didn't want to
hear her to know how dumb I was about it,
and she seemed to know what it was. And anyway,
we all know now what the Internet has done to transform,
not just Texas, not just America, with the whole world.
One technological shift has made more financial waves across the world,

(47:53):
maybe than anything else since the Wheel, no doubt. So
what I'm saying is all we need to do is
to give the people of Texas, and for that matter,
the people of America the instruments that they need to
do for themselves. And what's the most important thing they
have is their mind, and the ability to have that

(48:16):
mind be well trained starts off pre school pre K.
So when you want to know about the future of Texas,
you tell me how the governor's managing education. And it
doesn't all happen that year, but you can see the
beginnings of it that year. And we're enjoying the benefits

(48:37):
of what we did back in nineteen eighty three, in
eighty four today, and I don't want to you know,
you can't take credit for all that occurred since then.
But you can also applaud all those other leaders who
joined in and said, hey, don't stop it. Full day
kindergarten like I did, go what Abbot did. Let's go

(49:00):
to preschool. Let's fund that to see what happens. Abbot's
doing the right thing. Applauding. Let's make sure we're all
on the same problem. This is not Democrat Republican. This
is American Texan, and it's our future.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
Nineteen eighty two, you get elected. You've not lost an election.
You've gone from being the Secretary of State to the
appointed obviously to be in the Attorney general where you
beat James Baker. Nineteen eighty two, you beat the sitting
Republican governor, and you're this whirlwind effect of a new
Democrat that's kind of the conservative Democrat but a reformer.

(49:41):
You've got your reelection coming up in eighty six, you
pull off the education reforms you wanted, the economy works
against you, the price of oil which you couldn't control,
and all that happened with that, the savings and loan
problems that occurred, and then, of course I think that
the education reform too, gets told because a lot of
people didn't want those changes nineteen eighty six.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
If you get re.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Elected, everybody I've ever talked to says, if you get
re elected in eighty six, you're running for president in
eighty eight.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Well, was that a conversation that was held? No? Was
it on your radar? Not? Really?

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Were people calling you and saying why you're because I
remember at the time my parents saying that he's our
Governm's gonna be president. I can remember being a kid
and my dad saying.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
That, well, I was pretty happy just being governed to Texas.
That's a big deal, and that's a big job, and
it's something that's probably more fun truth, no doubt about it.
Don't have to worry about nuclear weapons and that sort
of thing. And I even Trump may want to make
a switch, you got a chance. But the point is
I never did envision ever being the governor. So that

(50:53):
was quite accomplishment for me president of the United States.
I've always kind of viewed that as a different place,
a different time. You were being talked about. Yeah, there's
no questions.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
Were their calls coming in from national folks. Was it
a serious discussion, Yeah, there.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Were others that were talking about that. But let me
tell you. My problem was I want this to get
done right. And then things over which I had no
control had a big impact on the outcome of the election.
We went from twenty five dollars all to nine dollars all.
Have to raise taxes. I don't know seventy five days

(51:33):
or less before the election, and I made a speech
before the legislature in which I famously got up and
said that I want you to go raise these taxes,
and you can tell your people that you didn't want
to do it, that I wanted you to do it,
and I made you do it. And sure enough, they
did exactly what I said. They raised the taxes and

(51:55):
blamed it on me, And so that had an impact, surely.
I don't know whether i'd ever run for president or not.
I don't know. I never would have cared to last good.
I can tell you that after what I said about them.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
I ran for mayor in two thousand and three when
I was on council, and I pulled out at the
last minute and went back on council.

Speaker 1 (52:15):
So I didn't lose.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
The race, but I lost the race. When you get
right down to it, it's a very public thing. You know,
when you're on the front page of the newspaper. Everywhere
you go, people either ridicule you or feel sorry for you,
and I'm not sure which one's worse. And it was
very public, it was very painful. And I was a
young man. I was in my early thirties. So here
you were and Bill White just ran a heck of

(52:37):
a campaign. There's nowhere around that, But here you were,
forty five years old, the first failure you've ever had
in public life, to lose an election. You're going to
go back and practice law. But as a man, what
did you learn about yourself? How did you get up
in the morning. Because it's not like just a deal

(52:58):
going bad.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Everybody knows it now, oh yeah, that wasn't fun. I
can tell you that it was one in which you
keep thinking, well, what could I have done differently? And
I've told you that may have made a difference. I'm
not sure for certain I never did think that. Well.

(53:21):
I can tell you this, going into the office of governor,
I pledged to myself that we were going to do
everything we could do to make sure that all our
choices were the right ones. And I'm talking about a
personal pledge to myself. I didn't announce it to anybody,
maybe my wife, that we're not going to hold back.

(53:42):
The worst thing that could happen, the worst thing worse
than being defeated, was to be defeated and look up
and say I wish I had done this, or I
wish I had done that. Why didn't I do this?
I could have done that, and that would have been
the worst thing. I never had to do that.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
How did you get yourself through the disappointment because it's difficult, Well,
it starts back.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
It was one of the things was my pay raise
went up. That was pretty helpful. I didn't know. I would.
Let me say, if you look at the history of
my economic climb in life, every job I had paid
a little bit better than the one before. So I
didn't know anything was wrong with being Secretary of State
making thirty three thousand dollars a year. That seemed pretty

(54:26):
good to me. And so then I became Attorney general,
I got an other little pay raise, and became government
got another little pay raise. And there's nothing wrong with
government housing. And you have somebody there to, you know,
look after everything you might not want to, and even
things you might want to they take care of. It
was pretty nice living. Even rich people like it. So

(54:50):
I never did you know it was I lived better
than I guess I had any reason to expect still
do well. I'd say you live pretty well. How long
have you been married? Well, fifty years and about six months.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
What's the secret to that?

Speaker 1 (55:15):
Having a very forgiving wife, that's a big start put
up with you. Understand that she does her things are
important as well. And I know your wife, Nandina, She's
an accomplished lady. This woman can do anything she chooses
to do, and she has the talent. And I think

(55:36):
my wife as well. To know, my wife is a
very good antique dealer. She knows that business as well
as anybody. She's good at it, and if something happens
to me, she'd go make a real good living doing that.
And yet we balance those too, And let me tell
you how we do it. When we go on a
trip to buy antiques. The first thing she's very smart.

(56:00):
First thing she does is by a chair, and she
puts the chair in an air conditioned shop is we're shopping,
and she says, you can sit there and I'll be
gone and i'll be back in a little bit and
pick you up. That way, she does put up with
me arguing, I'm very happy reading my book, taking a
little nap. Cool, got a good chair. That's a perfect marriage.

(56:24):
It's worked.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
I think that's something to be very proud of.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
I think the longevity of a marriage will hit twenty
five years of marriage and twenty seven that we've been
together juneteenth this year, and I'm very proud of that
because it's not always easy.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Let me tell you there's one thing more important for
your children, Yep, if they turn out. Okay, man, you
talk about a blessing, that's the big blessing. You're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
On.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
In a second, is it level? Okay?

Speaker 2 (56:57):
I absolutely lost what I was gonna say, hold on.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
Well, you know the burdens of all those children, right,
trying to get them raised and everything. And once again
you want to talk about the compliment. My wife and
your wife have done that job. That's the hardest job anywhere.
Going to work for a man every day is a
simple deal with the complications that a mother has and

(57:25):
a wife has to run the household. And I don't
care how much money you have or how little. True,
it's the biggest job. I believe. It's exhausting available. Right
before I came old nine to five, No, right before
I came.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
To talk to you, I was at my kid's school
for lunch, and there we are, and when we leave,
my wife and I both walk.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
How do they do it? Those kids are? They're exhausting.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
I know what I was going to ask you. Nineteen
ninety one, you read a law firm, kack my hand
and Cake, I was student body president University of Houston,
and I came to visit you to ask you questions
about leadership. And you didn't know me from Adam, and
I didn't have a name to drop. I just called
you out of the blue, and you took that meeting

(58:13):
and It's always meant a lot to me. And you
may or may not be amused to know. What I
remember of our conversation is that you had post it
notes all over your office everywhere. Was you know, do
this call this person, return this phone call, write this
work on this case because you were practicing law at

(58:34):
the time, and at we post it notes everywhere, And
that was when they were still kind of new, or
at least new to me. And I remember there have
been people like you who took an interest in me
at an early age that did.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Wonders for my confidence.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
And I came here in eighty nine, and I used
to say that by nineteen ninety one, the end of
that year, being student body president, it was like I
had a rolodex, like I was Ben Love's son, you
know what I mean. I felt like I would as
a member of Jesse Jones's family, who were a couple
of mentors in your life that made a real difference
for you.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Well, at every turn there was always somebody who kind
of stood up and I was able to either ride
on their shoulder or they picked me up by the
back of the pants and lifted me over the hurdle.
And nothing better than your elementary school education. Then in

(59:30):
junior high school I was awful. I didn't do very
well high school. You look at my high school graduation yearbook.
I'm that guy that didn't have anything. We didn't have
any money. My dad had broken his back in the
car wreck. My mother was teaching school. Carl Smith gave
her a job down at the courthouse for the summertime.

(59:51):
I was working at the philling station over on Willowick
and West Tower, and there were two of them, go
station Phillip sixty six and we lived okay. I had
a baby sister. She became a school teacher. I became
a lawyer. Along the way. I had cousins who helped

(01:00:12):
me get in a fraternity at Baylor that I might
not have gotten in, helped me get a job when
my uncle did get a job with his Attorney General's office.
I tried to make sure I did a good job.
Didn't want to embarrass them or myself. If there's not
just one person, if you want to look back, you say, well,

(01:00:33):
how did you get to be governor? Is there any
one thing I can tell you? His name, his name
is Calvin Guest, And how did you get to be governed.
What did he do for you? Well, it all started
in the Battle of ewo Jima and you say, well,
my god, you were four years old. How did that happen? Well,

(01:00:54):
he was in the Battle of Ewojema in a marine
corps with a guy named Joe Reynolds who was became
my senior partner in laws, Alan Cook. And what happened
to Calvin Guests, Well, he met a guy when he
got out of World War Two named Dob Briscoe, and
they he was in the state Auditor's office and Briscoe

(01:01:16):
was a legislator and they got to know each other.
And then one day Briscoe decides to run for governor
and he says, Calvin, will you help me run for governor?
Calvin says, Joe, I need the lawyer up here to
help on some education issues. And so Joe says Mark.
Since the two of us were the only two in
the firm that were from Briscoe, it made a pretty
easy choice. I go up there, get to know Calvin

(01:01:39):
Guests even better. He was a client of the firm,
and next thing you know, Calvin's over saying, you know, Briscoe,
you ought to point that guy White to be your
secretary of state, and so then you've seen that happen
and you were the youngest ever. Yeah, maybe I believe that. Yeah. Anyway,
then I would come and he said, you say, well,

(01:02:00):
how did you get to be governor? I said it
all started at the Battle of Ewell Jima, simple as that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
That rentals Allen Cook group. Every time I meet somebody
that was ever. It was quite the powerhouse firm.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
Little bitty Fern had a lot of good friends around,
a lot of stroke.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
Well, you mentioned secretary of state and later you were
the governor. In nineteen seventy eight, you run for Attorney
General against James A.

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
Baker the third I remember, I had to get past
the primary first, right christ Daniel, Christ Daniel. That was
the race in which they said I couldn't win.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
So John Hill beats Briscoe right in that primary, and
you beat Christ Daniels.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
That's correct.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
And so you're running against Baker. He's come back from
running Ford's campaign for president where they narrow the gap
but can't win. And Peter Russell, who's very close to
Jane to mister Baker, tells me the story because he
worked on that campaign running for attorney General, and they

(01:03:07):
say they think they're winning, and he says, out of nowhere,
Mark White does this ad and he says, I'll be
as your attorney general. I'll be tough on crime. And
he said, you slammed the door on the prison door,
and he said Baker lost his mind because he says
he don't have anything to do with crime. And so
they just sat back and waited and lo and behold,

(01:03:29):
you shoot up in the polls Now, I'm sure there's
more to it, but that's the lower of that story.
And so Baker tells Peter Russel, if I'd been tough
on crime, I probably never would have made it to
the White House, right, But that's got to be kind
of neat Ronald Reagan gets elected in eighty and Baker
ascends to these great positions. He's so well respected and

(01:03:51):
you obviously respect him as well. And you can say
his one race, I beat him. And that was also
the year that a young guy is running for Congress
in Midland and he lost his only race, George W.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
Bush. So seventy eight interesting things happened. Yeah, it was.
It was a good year for me and it didn't
turn out bad for the others. So that was a
fun race. The attorney general's race was important general election race,
but it really points out something that I don't think
anybody has recognized, and that is, if you go look

(01:04:28):
at the election results that night, Jim Baker, this was
the first time a Republican governor is elected in Texas
since eighteen seventy six, and he won by about he
Clement's won by about fifteen thousand votes twelve eleven. The

(01:04:51):
same night, John Tower is getting re elected by about
the same number of votes. And this is not to
demean Jim Baker, but somewhat advanced my claim to victory,
as that same night I'm went in by about two
hundred thousand votes. And how do you account for that? Well,
it wasn't because Jim Baker and Mark White were underqualified

(01:05:15):
candidates one or the other. But I submit to you
it was over the issues that I was involved with,
including utility rate regulation, representing Texas on some big cases
against Howard Hughes for one, and then the crime issue
that and the Attorney General does have a element in

(01:05:38):
criminal enforcement, primarily on a pellet cases. So I kept
the door closed on those people. Yeah, absolutely, by virtue
of we did not let their cases be reversed on appeal,
and so we kept them in the penitentiary. But anyway,

(01:05:58):
we had a very effective campaign. His campaign was much
more similarly situated to the race between Lloyd Benson and
George H. W. Bush. Several years earlier, George H. W.
Bush was running for the US Senate against what he
thought his opponent would be was Ralph Yarborough. Well, lleyd Beholds,

(01:06:23):
some guy from nowhere came out of nowhere and defeated
Ralph Yarborough. His name was Lloyd Benson. Well, then H W.
Bush looks up and said, my gosh, where's Yarboro? He's
not running. He was the liberal I was going to
run against. And then Benson shows up and he's more
of the conservative Democrat with strong business support, and he

(01:06:44):
winds up winning. Rewrite later, Jim Baker's running against everybody
knows price Daniel Junior is going to win. The worst
thing that ever happened politically was the announcement of one
of our co inmentators here in Houston three weeks out saying, well,
he predicted who was going to win in the governor's race,

(01:07:07):
Senate race, and black dam Murray. Murray, I love him,
but he says, the only thing left in the race
for attorney General is how badly will Mark White be
defeated by Price Daniels Junior. Well, that tended to drive
up my campaign contributions Immediately, who wants to give to
a guy that everybody knows I'm going to win. My

(01:07:29):
parents quit contributing, so that was the end of fundraising.
So we just had to get back and just run
the race, and we won by a pretty good number.
But then that he had to look up, he Bush,
just like h. W. Bush. He Baker, like h. W. Bush,
looked up and says, where is my liberal Democratic opponent?

(01:07:50):
And here's Mark White? So similar results, similar race. No
I have thought that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
I will tell you one of the guys that sparked
my passion for Texas politics was Dick Murray.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
And he was my professor.

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
In nineteen let's see nineteen ninety when you're looking at
running for governor again, and he tells the story about
a conversation he'd had with you just before that, and
he's not sure if you're going to run or you're not.
And then you did in the primary, in that brutal primary,
between Maddox and Richards, right, what were you thinking coming back?

(01:08:32):
Did you think that those two would split and there might.

Speaker 1 (01:08:34):
Be a Well, first of all, I didn't think it
was going to lose the reelection effort, which I did
back the number I had won by four years earlier,
but then the comeback was a tougher deal. But I
thought I would have the you know, we should have

(01:08:56):
had him last time, let's have him next time kind of.
I was thinking maybe there'd be bygones, be bygones in
some regrets to get some support. In any event, we
got down to this is the importance of television and
the message that comes, and that's partly I get credit
for her some days, and I get the demerits on

(01:09:18):
the other. Here's what happened. The three of us are
in this tight race, Maddox, Richard's and White, and we
were running all about thirty thirty one, thirty two, one up,
one down, side by side, and so the question was
pretty apparent two of you will be in the runoff,
which two? And so Ann Richards put out a TV

(01:09:43):
ad that did a couple of things. She attacked both
of us in the same ad. I don't remember what
she said about Maddox, But she said about him first
in the thirty second ad. Then she attacks me, he saying,
and I think it was along the lines of Mark

(01:10:03):
White left office, bought them lined his pockets with tax dollars,
which was just where did that come from?

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
And what matches with tax dollars? Why would you line
your pockets?

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
Well that was kind of a mystery statement. But you
say it, and they sit and hear it. And then
they said, and bought a million dollar house?

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Was that the one on Remington?

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
Yeah? I did, but I did it the old fashioned way.
I signed a note. He was the best financed million
dollar house you've ever seen. It was called nothing Down
Interest Only University. It was that beautiful, beautiful. It's now
worth a whole lot more. I paid for it, too bad,
I don't still own it. But in any event, she

(01:10:50):
lays those two premises out, and boy, people heard that.
Who wants to vote for that rat? And so not
only whatever bad she said about was either forgotten what
she said about Maddox or accumulated to me. But any event,
within a week we went from thirty three to thirty

(01:11:12):
three whatever. Together they stated about the same numbers and
I went down to twenty. I mean, it was a
brutal shot below the waterline and no recovery. There was
no way you could come back within that period of time.
She refused to take the ad down even though it

(01:11:33):
was not only untrue, but it was factually untrue and
left an impression that was untrue. So anyway, she won
game over then I didn't you know, Maddix wanted to
me endorse him, which I didn't do. But any event,
she won the election. As we talked and know about,
is that her opponent said some things. It probably made

(01:11:58):
the difference in the race. Yeah, he was about halfway
around with a lap ahead, and then he you know,
some say if he'd gone to Mexico, he'd probably gotten elected,
but he didn't. But in any event, she won, and
she did whatever she planned to do, and I think
she was well thought I was a governor. Then she

(01:12:20):
turns up and gets defeated by George Bush w and
fairly easily. But what I think you're seeing there, let's
take the personalities out, is a beginning of a co
leasing of all of those principles you talked about of

(01:12:41):
the change that happened in Texas. Democrat to Republican, and
it was happening through a long twenty some odd period
year period of time. Nobody realizes that John kindly barely
got elected governor against a Republican first race, barely got elected.

(01:13:04):
And then we've seen Doc Prescoe barely got elected governor
against the Republican. So this has been happening for a
long time. And then John Hill barely lost the governor's
race to a Republican. Then I beat the pretty good
incumbent republic Then he turns around and beats me for

(01:13:27):
things that happened that I did and changing conditions. You know,
all prices down, unemployment up, I mean it was bad
economy plus ed I raised taxing, I mean I had
about eight I'm just glad I didn't shoot me so
any event, then you see Anne Richards gets in for
real personal reasons in the she probably wouldn't have gotten elected.

(01:13:49):
I think she would even say if he hadn't talked
the way he did, let me say, it might have
been a close victory for her, but it made a difference.
So then here comes a normal Republican, good well thought
of Republican nominee to run for governor in Texas and

(01:14:10):
against an incumbent Democratic governor, and he won by pretty
substantial number. But let me give you a couple of things,
not only the shifting demography and their political alignments, but
also nobody seems to think about this, or you don't
hear any political scientists tell you. I'm about to the

(01:14:33):
incumbent has the advantage in a race against party. I
said it wrong. The challenger has the advantage against an
incumbent does they have no record, because he comes in
and gets the chance of being able to attack what
the incumbent's done that he doesn't like and the public
agrees with him. Now, the main deficiency, the main disadvantage

(01:14:58):
of it in a the challenger of defeating an incumbent
is historically the challenger doesn't have any money and can't
raise money. Clemmet's tried to kill my money two or
three different ways and two or three times and came close,
but didn't do it. Had he killed my money the

(01:15:20):
last month, he would have won, because I would have
been off the air for four weeks and it would
have been over. Now today, what you're seeing happening in
the national level, billionaires just self fund themselves and said well,
I believe I'd like to be the president or I'd
like to be the governor and don't have to ask
a soul for anything to start buying a TV and

(01:15:43):
thinks he's going to buy that election. People sometimes have
a little bore to say about it, and they might
like for them too. And so we still have the ability,
even with the unlimited ability to raise money today from
corporations and other people that you never get to know
their names. Still the people can sniff through some of that.

(01:16:05):
I don't believe I want that one and I do
want this one. So we're still a democracy, still got
a bright future. I would like to make it a
little more people involved and people oriented. Corporations to me,
where I go to church, they don't have a soul.

(01:16:28):
They do have a legal existence, but that doesn't mean
that they should have the right to vote. And so anyway,
there's some differences. You just campaigned on me, governor. Yeah,
you enjoyed to visit. Thank you appreciate you got me
to think about things I hadn't thought about in a while.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
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(01:17:07):
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(01:17:31):
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(01:17:54):
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