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Chapter 7 THE ONCE AND FUTURE GOVERNOR “THIS WAS A CAMPAIGN never to be repeated,” said David Dean.1 Praise and blame circulated around the state almost immediately to answer the question of why the election ended with a Republican victory. The drive and resources of the Bill Clements campaign had taken the state by storm, stunning observers with his victory. Some Democrats questioned whether Dolph Briscoe and his family had undermined John Hill’s campaign, either by the governor’s inaction or the open condemnation of Hill by members of his family. The outgoing governor defended himself at a speech in Austin. “I campaigned to help those who asked. Hill did not ask.”2 He dismissed charges that Janey Briscoe’s support of Clements cost Hill the election. “There were many other factors,” claimed Briscoe and turned his attention to the immediate problem of convincing voters to support the Democratic Party again, “The problem is to bring back to the Democratic Party those who left it in the recent election. We are going to have to get the independent voters back by presenting them a party and a platform they can support.”3 Liberal commentator and lobbyist Jim Hightower blasted what he saw as the complacency of the Hill campaign. “It is a misconception to think that the GOP’s win was strictly the result of slick advertising. . . . In the end, Hill’s campaign was not a botched-up campaign at all; it was a carefully calculated loss. Hill’s deliberate, don’t-rock-the-boat, we’ll-win-if-we-just-hold-on general election campaign is the same formula that has won for Democratic nominees before.”4 Hill campaign manager John Rogers admitted that the campaign had miscalculated in the general election. “We did a lot of things right in the primary and we did a lot of things wrong in the general election.”5 Hill in particular blamed the late wave of advertising by the Republicans with his loss. “I think it was the result of that TV,” he noted, “It was completely unexpected.”6 The television ads portrayed Hill in the worst manner possible. Hill lamented that The Once and Future Governor 125 Clements had managed to cast the race in terms of Hill’s character and what the Republican derided as radical liberal politics. “The race never developed into as much about issues. It was always personal attacks—what kind of a person I was—the perception of me as a city-slicker, big-spending liberal. But it worked.”7 When the opponent becomes able to determine the issues of the debate, it places the other candidate in a dangerous position of having to wage a campaign based on that candidate’s weaknesses, real or perceived, which the opposition can exploit without mercy. Clements seized that opportunity. With the bottomless well of finances available, Clements did not falter in the late stages of the campaign and had the resources available for a late surge of advertising and get-out-the-vote activities. To employ the expression used at that time, Clements did not run out of gas, which allowed him to continue to charge forward to victory. The victory proved the theories Clements espoused about the Texas electorate throughout the election, although his totals remained shy of the 53-percent victory total he had predicted. John Hill had waged a traditional campaign in the general election, but Bill Clements spent the 1978 election season rewriting the rules for Texas campaigns . But Hill’s strategy for winning the election nearly worked, faltering by some 16,900 votes. Despite Clements’s intensity, mobilization, careful attention to detail, and millions of dollars spent, the Republican’s campaign nearly failed. A failure would likely have set back Republican efforts in the state by years, and a Republican governor may not have emerged until the late 1980s or 1990s. All of the ingredients needed for a Republican breakthrough in 1978 occurred. The end of the Democratic lock on the governorship could almost as easily have happened with Dolph Briscoe as the nominee. Briscoe had nearly lost the 1972 election, which would have made Hank Grover the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Comparatively, in Arkansas, a series of unpopular policy and tax decisions cost then-Gov. Bill Clinton his bid for re-election in 1980 against the relatively unknown conservative Frank White. White became the first modern conservative Republican elected in Arkansas, but lost in a rematch to...

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