Bush’s Texas Traits Don’t Rope In All

The Lone Ranger may have died some weeks back, but in Texas, his legacy still thunders over the landscape. Played by the late Clayton Moore, the TV Texan shot straight, stood tall and never flinched from some hokey promotion. Only in Texas, after all, would a lawman mint his bullets from silver.

That assured, here-I-am attitude goes over famously well in this state, not just with oilmen and cowboys but politicians as well. Less certain, though, is how that brio translates across state lines. Badly scuffed in the New Hampshire primary, Republican front-runner George W. Bush may be mulling the same thing. Will the traits that Texans find charming only backfire in other states?

For Texans themselves, their reputation for boasting and boldness mainly amuses. Hence the Hair Ball, an annual Houston fund-raiser that simultaneously salutes and pokes fun at skyscraper coiffure. And thus the hottest item at the Kansas-based online store Market Vision: a campaign button that says, “Read My Lips . . . NO NEW TEXANS.”

“We really weren’t going to get into negative items at all,” explains store owner Sharon Clemons. But a button that in six words tweaks a Texan president, a Texan candidate and the entire population of Texas could not be denied. Texans, who always relish a laugh, account for half the buyers.

For a state suffused with goodwill for itself, it’s still a surprise that where there are Texans, there’s not always love. But even when they go national, Texan politicians rarely become bland.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, master of the Big Prairie boast, fiercely resented Eastern snobbery about his Texas roots. He also rattled Texas stereotypes shamelessly for effect. Former Gov. Ann Richards, blasting doves with her shotgun and rivals with her Waco drawl, made good-old-girlhood an art form. And Bush, with eelskin boots, authentic accent but some serious Yankee credentials, has peppered his own campaign with judiciously picked Texan references.

But Bush’s ebullient style--naturally occurring, but warmly reinforced by Texan culture--backfired in staid New Hampshire. What Bush may have thought straight-shooting appeared condescension; the confidence many Texans find bracing seemed, in colder climes, simply cocky.

“It is now clear why his handlers wanted to keep Texas Gov. George Bush’s pre-primary appearances in New Hampshire to a minimum,” editorialized Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of the conservative Manchester Union-Leader. “They were rightly concerned that his smug attitude and smart remarks would not do him any good.”

George Christian, an Austin consultant and former press secretary to LBJ, says that Texanness evokes far fewer stereotypes than in Johnson’s days but still has a few drawbacks.

“It can be a blessing and a curse,” Christian says. “One of the pros is that Texas is the second-biggest state in the country. . . . Bush talks constantly about being governor of Texas, about his record in Texas. It’s hard to say that it’s hurt him.”

The downside, he notes, is the disdain with which many people greet the traditional Texan persona. “But that’s just part of being rather overbearing,” he laughs.

Texans’ tendency to dominate has long been visible in national politics, with leaders such as House Speaker and Vice President John Nance Garner, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, House Speaker Jim Wright, presidential aide and former Gov. John B. Connally and former Treasury secretary, vice presidential candidate and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. Texas influence continues in Congress, with House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.

With all that political artillery, it’s notable that the state has sent only two men, Johnson and George Bush, all the way to the White House.

And though bombast and boasting are the first stereotypes that come to mind, more appealing images are also woven into the Texas myth, notes University of Texas historian Bruce Buchanan.

Rayburn, austere and honest, embodied a frontier integrity many Texans think is the core of their state character. A paragon of endurance, he established the longest record of public service ever in the House of Representatives, where he became a congressman in 1913 and served as speaker from 1940 to 1961.

Johnson, a small-town son who attended a teachers college, epitomized the bawdy country boy masking a razor shrewdness. Arriving in office after the trauma of John F. Kennedy’s death, Johnson often complained that the East Coast establishment sneered at him. At the same time, he played the yokel act mercilessly, notoriously conducting interviews from the privy.

“It might have been a reaction to what he perceived to be some anti-Texan sentiment,” says Christian. “I mean, he lived in Washington from 1934 on. He wasn’t exactly a hillbilly.”

Texas’ dimensions--it could encircle both England and France in its borders--explain much of its traditional image. Liz Carpenter, an Austin author who was Lady Bird Johnson’s spokeswoman, says the friendliness that outsiders find goofy comes from the frontier.

“The house I was born in, near Salado, was built in 1852 and has something called a stranger’s bedroom,” Carpenter says. “It was right off the porch and didn’t connect with the house. You could unsaddle your horse and go right in and sleep. There are a number of stranger’s bedrooms in old Texas houses. . . . You needed your neighbors.”

Something about Texas also bred an enduring love for a whopper well told. Texas’ true bigness--in space, natural resources, zeal--tends to fuel hyperbole from outsiders too.

When a sportswriter recently negatively compared Kansas State University’s football team to that of the University of Texas, KSU’s president objected publicly. “Outside of Texas,” he fumed, “very few people cheer for the Longhorns because the University of Texas represents in most people’s minds incredible wealth and arrogance.”

Equally irritable last year was Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan. Prompted by Texas sports successes, Nyhan comprehensively detailed all the ways the state vexed him. (He also had some good things to say.)

“What don’t I like about Texas?” he wrote. “Loudmouth right-wingers. Bidness men, as they call ‘em, who think anyone objecting to the rape of the landscape or the oil depletion allowance is a Commie simp.”

To some, Texas excess is epitomized by its governmental record: More executions yearly than any other state, a vast and mushrooming prison system, protection of industries that help create the nation’s dirtiest air. Yes, Houston recently triumphed over Los Angeles for that dingy honor.

At its nadir, the Texas stereotype has included barbarianism. On the Senate floor recently, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) recalled the 1963 day President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. “The door burst open,” Moynihan said. “In rushed Hubert H. Humphrey. ‘What have they done to us?’ he gasped. By ‘they’ we all knew: the Texans, the reactionaries.”

Of course, Texas in recent years has become vastly more nuanced than any stereotype, and a mirror of national trends.

Though its identity is still entwined with oil, prompting visions of roughnecks and florid oilmen, the state diversified nimbly after its oil bust. Today, it produces a quarter of the world’s personal computers, and once-somnolent Austin now houses 12 semiconductor plants and an army of high-tech immigrants squeaking around town in new cowboy boots.

And though city workers may indulge in pioneer garb at rodeo time, Texans can be surprisingly inclusive. In a state where Latinos will outnumber whites in 25 years, leaders show little panic. Courting Latino voters, Gov. Bush also has prioritized good relations with Mexico and praised bilingualism.

Texans don’t seem very worried about losing their Texanness.

“We’re a state that lets you have a sense of possession about it,” says Carpenter. “I don’t think that we try to run people off.” That inclusiveness so far has been useful to Bush, who with stricter accounting might be almost non-Texan. After spending his early years in Midland public schools, he attended boarding school, college and graduate school in the Northeast.

In time-honored fashion, Bush’s Texanness has given opponents some wide-open spaces to attack him. “That’s all hat and no cattle,” scoffed Sen. John McCain of Arizona, debating Bush on Social Security. McCain couldn’t resist one more shot when Bush’s tax-cut proposal came up: “Let’s not do the Texas two-step here.”

At the same time, several New Hampshire voters said they perceived Bush not so much as a Texan, but as an unseemly New Englander.

“He knew he had it in the hand here, and he didn’t have to try that hard,” said Nashua personal trainer Jody Major. “There’s this confidence that bordered on arrogance. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even think of Texas.”

In fact, the Texan-lite aura that surrounds Bush could correspond well to national tastes.

“Given that Texas is essentially a mega-state, in terms of population and economic clout, his Texanness is certainly less a prominent factor in his persona than Lyndon Johnson’s,” historian Buchanan observes.

“We’re looking more and more like California,” he adds. Note to horrified Texans: Some Americans think this is a good thing.

But judging from the dust-up in New Hampshire, a Midland accent and a bombastic knack might not, in the end, be the Texas legacies that serve Bush the best. In the end, he may profit most from knowing a culture in which politicians are expected to be quick, brash and bare-knuckled.

It was Bentsen who hit then-Vice President Dan Quayle with the most dead-on line of the 1988 campaign: “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” And Democrats still chortle at Richards branding Bush’s father as the man born with a silver foot in his mouth.

Says Christian, “As Lloyd Bentsen says, politics here is a contact sport.”