Karl Rove's Texas

I watched a pretty good piece on PBS about Karl Rove and how he's the architect of not only Bush's administration, but the republican takeover in Texas. To that I say, "bull."

First of all, the republican takeover was already underway in Texas, Clements had been elected twice (not in a row). The increasingly popular Phil Grahm switched to the republican party. All the signs were already written on the wall, Texas was becoming republican.

Like many other people that are given credit, Rove just happened to be in the right place at the right time. You see, people forget about Clayton Williams. Williams was not a Rove guy, he was a Goldwater guy. His campaign stuck to a few issues and took a moral highground. For instance, one of his more shocking ads on TV I mistook for a joke the first time I saw it. As you watch some teen getting arrested and then fading into a boot camp, you hear Clayton say something like... "Juvenille offenders, I'll take away their license and make them do heavy labor at a boot camp," fade in kids busting rocks with picks. Not an exact quote, but it was pretty extreme. However, there was something admirable about him anyway, sorta like, "let's cut the bull and tackle the real problems." Karl Rove obviously took notes because his candidate at the time wasn't even a contender in that election, Clayton Williams was simply steamrolling over any potential Republican candidates. He handily won the nomination and was on his way to defeating Ann Richards. The only person that could defeat him was himself, and that's exactly what happened.

What you may not realize is that it wasn't the rape joke (google him and you'll find it) that killed his campaign. He was already rebounding from that and it was making more controversy outside of Texas than inside. The killer, which was truly unforgivable, was when he voted for something, came out of the building and was asked about what he had just voted for... he knew that he voted for it and what it was called, but didn't know anything about the content of it, and a totally uninformed vote is not what anyone expects from their state representatives. So that was the political suicide of Clayton Williams. If he had simply not been so willing to speak with reporters about it, he would have become governor, no doubt about it whatsoever, tasteless joke and all.

So anyway, at the time you couldn't be involved with Texas politics and not see the tremendous rise of an unknown figure who was on the brink of thrashing Ann Richards in the governor's race. And to someone like Karl Rove who thrives off of being informed, he certainly learned a lot from Clayton, and obviously put it to work on the next election in a major way. Turned out to be a winning strategy not only for Texas, but the entire USA.

So there you go, PBS's credit to Karl Rove's genius of how he orchestrated Texans to vote for republicans was fairly unrealistic. And the program's failure to address the huge, even monumental, impact of the Clayton Williams campaign was just inexcusable. Karl Rove didn't invent his campaign strategy, he got it from Clayton Williams.