Machismo Rides High in Texas Gubernatorial Primary Race : Politics: Accused of appealing to the ‘Bubba vote,’ the Republican front-runner was unfazed. ‘I <i> am</i> Bubba,’ he said.

Wearing a broad grin under his pearl gray Stetson, Clayton Williams last week took his high-flying Republican campaign for governor to the GM Steakhouse, a University of Texas hangout where the hired help is renowned for seasoning the hamburger platters with jeers aimed at the paying customers.

Undaunted by the alien surroundings, the multimillionaire candidate posed for photos and seized the initiative. “Get in here!” he called to one particularly long-haired, bearded counterman. “You look like a good Republican!”

Williams’ self-assurance is easy to understand, given the phenomenal progress of his candidacy. Spending nearly $5 million--most of it his own money--in just five months, this 58-year-old tycoon has transformed himself from a political unknown into the far-out front-runner in the March 13 GOP gubernatorial primary race.

What’s more, with the Democratic campaign blurred by bickering and bungling--not to mention unanswered questions about drug use by one of the candidates--Williams is the early favorite to succeed Gov. Bill Clements next November and keep the governor’s office of the third most populous state in Republican control.

“He’s the star of the governor’s race,” conceded Jack Martin, top political operative here for Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.). “Everything else is Pablum.”

Williams promises to restore prosperity to Texas by applying the hard-headed business management skills he demonstrated in ramrodding his ventures in ranching, oil, gas, banking and telecommunications through the dark years of the energy bust.

Williams offers voters his own travails and triumphs in the business world as a paradigm for the state. When oil prices were booming, he says, “I was 6 foot 4. Now I’m only 4 foot 6, but I’m still drilling wells.”

Actually, Claytie Williams, as he likes to be called, stands about 5 feet 8 and, with his jug ears and prominent nose, resembles his hero, movie star John Wayne, less than chicken purveyor Frank Perdue. What counts, Williams claims, is not how he looks, but what he has achieved in the face of adversity.

“I’ve done what it took to do to make it,” he says. “I have a record of survival, and I want to take the survival skills that I have learned in business and make Texas government better, not bigger.”

Before he gets a chance to prove his theory, Williams will be tested on the March 13 ballot against three major rivals--Kent Hance, a railroad commissioner and former congressman who is trying to appeal to conservatives by pledging to push through a ban on a state income tax, Jack Rains, a former secretary of state who boasts of his experience in both government and business, and Tom Luce, lawyer and protege of the legendary entrepreneur H. Ross Perot and the favorite of many upper-income, upper-IQ Republicans.

About the only question for Williams now is whether he can get more than 50% of the votes and avoid a runoff with one of his rivals--who say that such a confrontation will give them the chance to probe for Williams’ so far unexposed vulnerabilities.

“When there are just two of us in the race, he’s going to have to talk about the issues,” Rains said in an interview after last week’s debate. Complaining that he has minimized substance while emphasizing the emotional and values that appeal to “good-old-boy” Texans and their wives, Raines said of Williams: “He’s playing to the ‘Bubba vote.’ ”

Told about that charge, Williams was unfazed. “I am Bubba,” he said.

Williams, who says he was drawn into politics by the discovery that his teen-age son had become dependent on beer and marijuana, has exhibited a flair for appealing to the values that motivate many voters here in Texas, and elsewhere, too, for that matter.

Probably the most notable example of his style is a much-discussed television spot about his plan for the “war on drugs.” The 30-second spot depicts a group of convicts swinging sledge hammers as Williams warns repeat drug offenders that he will “introduce them to the joys of bustin’ rocks.” That phrase, which has caught the imagination of the public, was Williams’ own invention, his aides say.

As the outlines of the Republican race have become clear, the Democratic contest seems to have gotten murkier. One reason, local Democrats concede, is a problem that also clouds their party’s prospects nationally: Democratic candidates are reluctant to stress specific proposals for programs and policies for fear that voters will get the idea they are planning to raise taxes to pay for them. Texans’ resistance to taxes is evidenced by the fact theirs is one of only eight states without an income tax.

Probably the biggest disappointment in the Democratic field is state Treasurer Ann Richards, the early front-runner. She gained national recognition with her quip, during her keynote speech to the 1988 Democratic convention, that George Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

In this campaign, though, Richards appears to have put her own foot in her mouth. When she answered a question on abortion during a televised debate last month, most people thought they heard her say that no government official had any right to decide “whether a white woman has an abortion or not.”

Though even her opponents have absolved Richards on the question of racism, she has spent so much time denying, then rationalizing that slip and another one (that, years ago, she referred to illegal aliens as “wetbacks”) that it seems to have undermined her candidacy. Recent polls show her slipping into a tie with former Gov. Mark White.

Some politicians here expect Richardson’s popularity to drop even further as a result of the Democratic campaign debate that followed the Republicans’ confrontation last week. Richards, who acknowledges that she is a recovering alcoholic, refused to give a yes or no response when a reporter asked her if she had ever used illegal drugs.

In the most dramatic moment of the debate, she said that a direct answer to that question would send “a very sad message to people who need help: That they will forever bear, regardless of what their addiction is, questions about whether or not they are fit to serve and whether they are recovered.”

The third Democrat in the race, Atty. Gen. Jim Mattox, immediately pounced on Richards. Urging her to clear up her stand on the drugs issue, Mattox said: “It has become the biggest question of this campaign.” If Richards should become the party’s gubernatorial nominee, Mattox warned, “the Republicans will not be this gentle. Clayton Williams will do more than bust rocks. He’ll bust our party.”

Meanwhile, both White and Mattox seem to be in a competition mainly for rural voters, in which each is trying to appear tougher than the other, particularly when it comes to crime. First, Mattox aired a commercial in which he boasted that 32 executions have been carried out during his tenure as attorney general.

Then White, the former governor, indignantly protested that “the governor has a lot more to do with the business of executions than the attorney general does.” To dramatize that point, his campaign aired an ad showing White walking down a corridor lined with photos of executed criminals, with White saying: “As governor, I made sure they received the ultimate penalty--death. And Texas is a safer place for it.”

For all the squabbling over who is tougher, the experience of the incumbent, Republican Clements, demonstrates that machismo alone cannot guarantee political success. Clements decided not to seek reelection because many voters are put off by his abrasive style. Many also believe that he lied when he denied knowledge of payments made to Southern Methodist University football players while he was chairman of the university’s board of trustees after his first term as governor ended in 1982.