Whenever my friends and family despair about the GOP’s decades-long stranglehold on Texas, I remind them—wistfully—that it hasn’t always been this way. If you’re wincing, I get it. Such optimism in the face of electoral reality is insufferable, especially since I’m frequently bringing this cheerful message from highfalutin New York City, where I moved in 1996, two years after Democratic Governor Ann Richards lost to Republican George W. Bush.
Whenever I make a pilgrimage to the Lone Star State, which I do a couple of times a year, to visit loved ones and emotionally eat enchiladas, I cherish any opportunity to remind liberal Texans that I have faith. All is not lost. I dream of a blue Texas. It is my birthright. Texas hasn’t always been red, I’ll remind them.
I know this because my old man worked for the last duly elected Democratic senator from the great state of Texas.
He was a press secretary, a job I did not understand. I knew he had a small office in the Senate Hart building that he would fill with cigar smoke. I once asked him why people ran for office and became politicians, and he told me some people get into it because they want to help other people—and sometimes the game changes them for the worse—and then he told me other people run for office because someone else corners them at a cocktail party and says, “You know, you should run for office,” and that person says, “Yeah, I should.”
Which of these was the senator that my dad served? The man he was doggedly loyal to for decades? Politics is no place for romantics, but I want to believe the former.
The first time I ever became aware of politics as a force, a kind of social energy rather than the family business, was during Ann Richards’s epic barn burner of a keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. She was the Texas state treasurer then—the first woman elected to that office—and later, in 1991, sworn in as the state’s second woman governor.
Her pugnacious speech electrified me as I watched it in the basement of my house in Northern Virgina with my mother. I was not born in Texas. I was raised inside the Beltway. This is my shame. I didn’t see much of my dad that year, but I knew he was there, somewhere in that roaring convention center.
Her performance was perfectly Texan; polite, spicy, principled. She smirked, but she was not fucking around. The Democrats had suffered a long winter during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office. The party was hungry, and the Texans, especially, were scraping for a fight.
Richards, with her silver hair and confident swagger, mocked Vice President George H.W. Bush, a political aristocrat from Connecticut who had reinvented himself as a Houston oilman. At one point, she had fun with the Bushes’ penchant for gaffes: “Poor George,” she purred. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” I didn’t even really understand the joke, but I hooted and hollered. Here, glowing from my television screen, was a truly great Texan.
It was during this convention that my dad’s boss, Lloyd Bentsen, was chosen as Michael Dukakis’s running mate, an attempt to recreate the fabled Kennedy-LBJ “Austin-to-Boston” axis. My dad spent most of the campaign tending to Bentsen’s Senate campaign—Texas law allowed him to run for both offices.
Weeks later, the vice presidential debate between 41-year-old Indiana Senator Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, a lean, buttoned-up 67, proved to be something vice presidential debates usually aren’t: memorable. I don’t think any of my peers watched the debate except, perhaps, Quayle’s son, Tucker, who went to the same middle school I attended.
It’s quaint how high-stakes the 1988 election felt; it’s also hard to convey how Zeus-like Ronald Reagan seemed, even when it was apparent, at that stage of his presidency, that he was diminished. At the time, I did not have a sophisticated understanding of why he was the enemy, but he was, and now, I understand, especially, that Reagan and his loyalists were intent on reordering society’s priorities, and at the top of their list were the feelings and fortunes of the rich.
I never recall my dad bad-mouthing Republicans, not that he talked shop a lot at home—preferring to decompress while playing Nintendo—but he did warn me to beware of lawyers wearing shiny new cowboy boots. Austin has always crawled with them.
Reagan’s veep, George H.W. Bush, was not a shoo-in, but with the help of his sons, including a cocky George W., and the cynical campaign strategist Lee Atwater, he slowly waged a campaign that validated the prejudices of white voters. It was risky to stir up those dark feelings, but Reagan’s legacy was on the line, and Dukakis, while a decent man, was vulnerable because he, the son of immigrants, suffered from the Democrats’ greatest weakness, which is an inability to be mean as a rattlesnake on command.
Here, Bentsen struck a contrast with the top of the ticket. At one point, during the debate, Quayle dared compare himself to another young, dashing politician: JFK. This prompted Bentsen to coolly retort: “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you, Senator, are no Jack Kennedy.” This was the equivalent of a body blow, a sudden burst of excitement in an otherwise sleepy back-and-forth. All Quayle could do was stutter and respond: “That was really uncalled for, Senator.”
The Democrats would lose the White House in November, but Bentsen would win reelection. In 1992, Bentsen would become President Bill Clinton’s first, and arguably most influential, treasury secretary, and my dad would follow.
But Bentsen’s mostly remembered for delivering the spiciest debate zinger in modern presidential politics.
I met Senator Bentsen a few times. He was always warm. I knew to call him “Senator”—as in “Nice to see you again, Senator” or “Yes, Senator”—and to simply punctuate my sentences with “sir” when in a room with him, and only when addressed. I knew it was important to my father that I perform acts of Texan courtliness for his employer, whose position in the adult world I didn’t quite understand before the ’88 election. I regarded the senator as a sort of Santa Claus figure, a magical authority figure whose favor I craved.
Politics is a spiteful business. Theatrical. Occasionally bloody, which is surprising, since the job tends to attract the squeamish.
But growing up inside the Beltway, politics was a bedtime story. A morality tale starring Texans. Texans who never lied. Who cared about others. One thing that must be understood about Texans is that they are a deeply sentimental people. From the Panhandle to the border, the Hill Country to the Gulf. The state was once nothing but wild country. Rugged individuals don’t survive long out on the frontier. Especially not alone. You need friends. Neighbors. They watch your back and vice versa.
I grew up being told stories about Texans. I was raised to believe the three greatest Americans were Texans: Lyndon Johnson, Jesus, and Tom Landry, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys from 1960 to 1988.
My old man looked up to LBJ, whose flaws he was willing to point out. This was years before bestselling biographer Robert Caro—great New Yorker that he is—canonized him as a twentieth-century icon. My dad would sometimes listen to cassette tapes of LBJ’s phone calls in the car. What he liked about the man was his ability to change and do the right thing, despite his moral flaws and long-standing loyalty to racist Dixie.
The senator had been a protégé of LBJ. He was an oil scion, a blue blood, a World War II combat vet—like George H.W. Bush—and believed in civil rights and social safety nets: old-school noblesse oblige. He also found my father funny.
He was probably more conservative than my memory allows—he once publicly opposed Ice-T’s iconic rap song “Cop Killer,” much to my teenage, free speech–loving chagrin. When I complained about his boss’s opinion in 1992, my father dutifully noted my disapproval, and we never spoke of it again.
Their collaboration was among the longest on Capitol Hill and ended after 23 years, when Bentsen left Clinton’s Cabinet in 1994. Bentsen and my dad were dubbed “the Odd Couple” by the press—an aristocrat and a preacher’s kid—which felt honest enough, but who knows?
The Texas Democratic Party I grew up in resembled my parents’ relationship: racially and religiously mixed. She was a Mexican American Catholic; he was the son of a Southern Baptist pastor who had a congregation in El Paso before moving west and eventually settling in Phoenix. They taught me that Jesus heard you no matter what house you prayed in.
The party at the time was diverse and hopeful. That was the story I was told, anyway. I remember names like Barbara Jordan—the first Black woman elected to the Texas state Senate and then, a few years later, the first Southern Black woman elected to Congress—who spoke from a wheelchair during the 1992 Democratic Convention. She was commanding and principled, and she mesmerized me.
There was Henry González, the first Texas-born Mexican American elected to the House. He was the longest-serving Hispanic member of Congress. And Henry Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio and housing and urban development secretary.
The first openly gay member of the Texas state legislature was Democrat Glen Maxey. He was elected in a 1991 special election. A true trailblazer, he was shunned by many of his conservative colleagues. Some victories are ugly. One of my father’s friends (or, if you prefer, “allies”) was Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking “sumbitch”—a Texanism that, depending on the intonation, could mean “honest and reliable” or “two-faced and greedy.” The lieutenant governor is a powerful position in Texas’s quirky legislature, which meets every two years. Bullock was a prodigious smoker, like my old man, and they both fought cancer around the same time.
My dad was fond of Bullock, a temperamental rabble-rouser in his heyday. I had heard many stories of him over the years that made him sound like a tyrant, but he was the man who called my father in the hospital after risky surgery to remove a tumor-riddled lung and gently reminded him to eat his breakfast.
Here is one story my dad told me back when Texas politics was chummier than it is now. In the late 1990s, Bullock was friendly with George W. Bush, then the governor. Bullock had told Bush that some bill the governor didn’t particularly care for wasn’t going to make it to the floor for a vote. But later, Bullock buckled under pressure from his party. Bush found out that Bullock was going to break his promise, so he stormed into Bullock’s office before he could get a chance to break the news and gave him a smooch on the lips. “I like to get kissed before I get fucked,” said Bush. The message: I understand. We’re good.
Dubya was popular in Texas. That was mainly down to Bush’s frat boy charms. He was the worst president of my lifetime, who visited death and destruction on millions of people all over the world and who changed this country for the worse. But he was never unlikeable. He won two elections, and one of those victories was even fair and square.
But there was something else in Bullock’s story my dad loved—a kind of boys’ club nostalgia.
Great Texans aren’t petty. They may see things differently, but they’re not rude. Or cruel. They respect one another. They work together when they can, and when they can’t, they crack a joke and move on. All of this is naïve, in retrospect. The fantasy of bipartisanism is well intentioned, even if it has led us to where we are now: a flailing democracy in which one party does not believe the other is legitimate.
Years later, in 2002, months before he died at the age of 63, during his last trip to visit me in New York City, my dad and I attended a party for Ann Richards, who was joining the Austin-based P.R. firm he worked for part-time after retiring from government.
The firm was run by friends, and this hootenanny, held at the legendary French restaurant Le Cirque, was a modest display of clout. The restaurant itself, true to its name, was a colorful circus for fat cats and the well connected, and this launch party was meant to introduce Richards to New York’s elite. Everyone was there, including Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton. Richards’s job was to hobnob with Democrats and Republicans and, most of all, her bestie, New York gossip columnist Liz Smith.
I remember feeling out of place. I was too shy to shake Clinton’s hand. My dad stood in the back, weak but happy. Smiling, even. Richards was bright and feisty. Cackling as champagne glasses clinked. There were so many more fights to have. I was starstruck. I adored her, from a distance. Can you imagine the bullshit she must have put up with? She would pass away four years later, at the age of 73.
Sometimes I wonder what my father would think of everything. Of Texas, of me. How it all turned out. His burial flag sits on the dresser in my bedroom in Austin. When I visit, I stare at it before falling asleep and dreaming. When I dream, I dream of a blue Texas. Getting your hopes up is always a risk, but you should do it all the same, from time to time. You’re allowed. It’s a good dream, after all.
