Twilight of the Texas Democrats: the 1978 Governor’s Race by Kenneth Bridges (review)

Twilight of the Texas Democrats: the 1978 Governor’s Race. By Kenneth Bridges. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 230. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-60344-009-7. $39.95, cloth.) Twilight of the Texas Democrats is most appropriately titled. Although Republican businessman William Clements’s 1978 defeat of Attorney General John Hill shocked many political observers and brought to an end a century of Democratic monopolization of the governorship, the election marked neither the beginning nor the end of the state’s partisan transformation. It was, nonetheless , a major milepost in the resurgence of Texas Republicans. Building as it did upon the earlier breakthroughs of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential victories in the 1950s and John Tower’s elevation to the U.S. Senate in the 1960s, Clements’s election to the state’s highest executive office represented another giant step in the long road to electoral viability. Dominance, however, lay yet another decade and a half over the horizon. Bridges begins with an introductory review of Texas politics from the New Deal revolution of the 1930s up to the mid-1970s. Stressing the vitriolic ideological factionalism splintering the Democratic Party into warring factions and four decades of Republican efforts to woo disgruntled Texas conservatives across partisan lines, the author provides the background needed to put the events of 1978 into broader perspective. Subsequent chapters examine the nominating primaries of both parties, the general election strategies and campaigns of each candidate , and postmortem explanations of the outcome. The inclusion as appendices of statistical data reflecting the state’s changing voting patterns is particularly useful. Bridges’s work is the product of thorough research of both primary and secondary sources as well as the author’s interviews with Clements, Hill, and other relevant figures in both political parties. Readers are likely to find the chapter identifying and evaluating the causes of Clements’s electoral triumph the most rewarding portion of the publication. Bridges argues convincingly that only the timely conjunction of multiple factors resulted in the perfect storm that swept Democrats from the Governor’s Mansion. Unlike previous Republican gubernatorial candidates of earlier decades, Clements had the persona, the financial resources, the strategy, and the unwavering determination to succeed that both unified and energized the growing Republican base while simultaneously convincing significant numbers of lifelong Democratic conservatives to abandon the party of their forefathers. Timing also worked to Clements’s advantage. Ronald Reagan was leading the New Right’s rise to power and incumbent president Jimmy Carter was becoming more of a liability to Texas Democrats with each passing day. Accordingly, Clements tied Hill to Carter in voters’ eyes, won the support of family members of defeated incumbent Dolph Briscoe, and successfully targeted rural conservatives heretofore yielded by default to Democrats. The largest explanation, as Bridges makes clear, was nonetheless the historic conservatism of Texas voters. In the long haul, ideology trumped partisan affiliation with increasingly bitter Democratic factionalism opening the door for the resurgence of Texas Republicans. 2009 Book Reviews 355 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 355 Twilight of the Texas Democrats is a welcome addition to the historical literature of twentieth-century Texas politics and is must reading for anyone interested in the process by which Texas Republicans marched slowly across the decades from electoral oblivion to viability and on beyond to dominance. Austin Community College L. Patrick Hughes Bob Bullock: God Bless Texas. By David McNeely and Jim Henderson. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Illustrations, notes, index. ISBN 978-0-29271454 -0. $27.00, cloth.) In this first full-length biography of Bob Bullock, the authors have done a great service in assembling all the Bullock stories they could find and weaving them into a coherent narrative. The stories are based on the firsthand experiences of the author-journalists themselves, relevant books, innumerable newspaper clippings, and a host of oral histories. This political trail stretches back to the mid-1950s in revealing the underside of Texas politics—the envelopes stuffed with cash, laundered money from the George Parr machine, office-holders accepting bribes, backroom deals, and feuds among the political elite. There are noble deeds interspersed, of course...