THE NEW TEXAN.(Brief Article)

Lawrence Wright on Dallas and Ross Perot

In the autumn of 1960, the people of Texas were given the chance--legitimately--to vote twice in the same election for Lyndon Johnson, who appeared on the ballot both as John F. Kennedy's running mate and, for insurance, as a candidate for reelection to the United States Senate. When the Kennedy-Johnson team won the White House, Johnson resigned the Senate seat, which he had easily retaken. In a special election, Texans elected a Republican--John Tower--to the Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. It marked an epic turn in Texas politics, one that was accelerated, as Johnson predicted it would be, by the civil-rights programs that Johnson subsequently championed as President. In Texas, and across the South, national Democratic policies cost local Democrats their power. Twenty-three years later, Tower was followed in the Senate by Phil Gramm, a former Democrat who had switched parties, and in 1994 Gramm was joined by another Republican, Kay Bailey Hutchison. Republican dominion in Texas is now nearly complete, with Republicans holding every statewide office, from land commissioner to governor.

And so it is that the Texas Republican occupying the White House might assume that Texans, by whom he is adored, would not behave so uncharacteristically as to elect a Democrat to L.B.J.'s old Senate seat, which became open when Gramm announced that he would retire this year. Such a development would complicate President Bush's life considerably, probably cementing the Democrats' tenuous hold on the Senate, which was brought about by the defection, last year, of Jim Jeffords, of Vermont, from the Republican Party. Faced with that prospect, Texas Republicans put forward the state's Attorney General, John Cornyn, whom, by any detached reckoning, the odds overwhelmingly favor. Cornyn is a typecast candidate, with the bearing and silver-haired looks of a United States senator. More important, he is a friend of the President, and a protege of Karl Rove, the mastermind of Bush's own political rise in Texas (and beyond). Rove's associates are working on the campaign, and Bush has already raised more than a million dollars for Cornyn, and will likely return to Texas to do more.

Yet Texas Democrats, even with the weight of money, history, and George W. Bush against them, are looking forward to the Senate election with an almost giddy optimism, centering on a bald, bespectacled black man named Ron Kirk. Kirk was the mayor of Dallas until he stepped down at the end of 2001 to campaign full-time for the Senate. He brings to the race the one intangible that can trump the advantages of money, connections, even issues--he has a captivating charm. He gives a passable speech, but in and among a crowd he has a way of drawing people to him. The six-foot-two-inch Kirk, a man of boundless amiability, so clearly delights in all the recognition, the hand-grasping, the jokey small talk--the everyday business of politicking--that strangers find themselves being swept up with him. Before a recent no-frills flight from Dallas's Love Field, Kirk showily declined an airline official's offer to pre-board ("No, no, no! Are you kidding me? I'd have ninety-five people voting against me!"), then chatted up the passengers as they filed by, and again as he made his way to his seat, in the rear ("Hey! Could use your help now!"). At the event on the other end of the flight, a political barbecue in Corpus Christi, as mariachis snaked through the convention center and the smell of hot pork and chicken wafted to the rafters, Kirk moved animatedly from group to group, deftly attaching names to dimly remembered faces, patting the men on the back, hugging the wives. He signed autographs, and huddled with a group of Boy Scouts for a private confab that ended with all of them--Kirk, too--bursting into raucous laughter.

Having been a black, big-city mayor is not an obviously useful credential among a conservative general electorate, but, in the cultural code of Texas, Dallas is no ordinary big city. In Corpus Christi, David Perry, a prominent trial lawyer, introduced Kirk to the crowd by saying, "Ron Kirk is from Dallas, Texas. And I know and you know that there is no place in the world that is more backward and reactionary than Dallas, Texas, and yet Ron Kirk was elected by a majority vote."

In fact, Kirk was elected twice, by overwhelming margins, in 1995 and 1999, at a time when conservative Dallas was also voting for George Bush, and for much the same reason: pro-business policies and a personal affability that complemented a powerful instinct for building consensus.

Kirk could not have won the mayoralty or governed in Dallas without the support of white Republicans, some of whom are among his most enthusiastic backers in his run for the Senate. He spent much of his forty-eighth birthday, in late June, in the moneyed white neighborhoods of North Dallas, Turtle Creek, and Preston Hollow, mingling with well-wishers in catered Martha Stewart tableaux in which even the lawns--thick, bouncy swards of green velvet--seemed Republican. Kirk, ...