TX GOP Ready for an Alamo City Wrangle

Austin, TX, American-Statesman ^ | 06-03-04 | McNeely, Dave

[Theodore R.]

GOP ready for an Alamo City wrangle

Thursday, June 3, 2004

The newer, more bare-knuckled Republican Party of Texas that increasingly tends to eat its own opens its biennial convention in San Antonio today.

It was here in 1996 that Republican convention delegates almost denied then-Gov. George W. Bush leadership of the Texas delegation to the national convention in San Diego, and a backstage deal had to be worked out to allow U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who supports abortion rights, to be a delegate at all.

But that passed, and both went. And now Bush is president, and Hutchison is Texas' senior senator — and she might turn her eyes to running for governor in 2006 rather than for re-election to her Senate seat.

Or she might not. There is a Republican already in that spot named Rick Perry, and if he's not planning to run for re-election in 2006, he has yet to share that information very widely.

Someone else with her eyes on that prize is Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who has relentlessly used Perry and the Legislature as rhetorical punching bags.

It is an interesting period, as Texas politics has shifted from one-party Democratic to one-party Republican — at least for the time being. And as was the case with the Democrats back in the 1970s and before, when the general election was an afterthought, the Republicans now fight their ideological and ambition wars in their primary.

The Texas GOP convention will choose delegates to go to New York in late August to reanoint Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as their presidential ticket. Texas convention attendees will also hear speeches from their public officeholders, including Perry, Hutchison, Strayhorn, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick.

And if history is an accurate guide, the Texas Republicans will fashion a platform calling for outlawing all abortions, reinstituting prayer in schools, opposing gambling to raise money for the state, condemning homosexuality and especially same-sex unions, and calling for better public schools but fewer taxes.

A number of the politicians who run under the Republican banner pay the platform lip service while largely ignoring it, or at least parts of it.

That's what Perry did earlier this year when he called for legalizing and taxing slot machines (or the more politically palatable if confusing "video lottery terminals") to help pay for state services such as education.

The other step of this Texas two-step biennial ritual will take place in Houston in two weeks, when the Democrats go through the same drill. They will choose delegates to go to Boston in late July to nod their approval to that state's junior senator, John Kerry, as their leader to try to recapture the White House, and learn who his running mate will be.

Part of the Democrats' mission will be to reassure themselves and the public that, despite going from almost every statewide office a decade ago to none now, pronouncements of their death are premature.

That might be tougher work than the Republicans face in San Antonio.

Get your online political fix at statesman.com/insidetexaspolitics.

Dave McNeely's column appears Thursdays. Contact him at (512) 445-3644 or dmcneely@statesman.com.

[ken5050]

The Dems can put their present congressional delegation under a banner that says "Dead Men Talking"....this is Marty Frost's swan song, eh? He'll miss all tose lunches with Unblinking