The campaign lifestyle was a perfect fit for me in my twenties. I enjoyed moving around and meeting new people. I thrived on the intensity and competition of the races. I liked the finality that came on election day, when the voters picked a winner and we all moved on. I hadn’t planned it this way, but by the time Congressman Mahon retired, I was a relatively seasoned political operative.
I started to think about running for the seat. I had the experience to handle the political side of the race. I also felt something stronger pulling me in. I was concerned about the direction of the country. My experiences in business school, China, and the oil business were converging into a set of convictions: The free market provided the fairest way to allocate resources. Lower taxes rewarded hard work and encouraged risk taking, which spurred job creation. Eliminating barriers to trade created new export markets for American producers and more choices for our consumers. Government should respect its constitutional limits and give people the freedom to live their lives.
When I looked at Washington under President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Congress, I saw the opposite. They had plans to raise taxes, tighten government control over the energy sector, and substitute federal spending for private-sector job creation. I worried about America drifting left, toward a version of welfare-state Europe, where central government planning crowded out free enterprise. I wanted to do something about it. I was having my first experience with the political bug, and it was biting hard.
When I told Mother and Dad about my idea, they were surprised. My decision must have seemed like it had come out of nowhere, but they didn’t want to dampen my enthusiasm. Dad asked if I would be willing to listen to advice from a friend of his, former Texas Governor Allan Shivers. “Absolutely,” I said. Shivers was a legend. He had been the longest-serving governor in Texas history. He was a conservative Democrat, and his advice would be valuable in a race against Kent Hance, a right-of-center state senator and the likely Democratic nominee.
When I went to see the old governor, he asked me point-blank if I was running for Mr. Mahon’s seat. I said I was seriously considering the race. He looked me in the eye and said, “Son, you can’t win.” There was no encouragement, no nothing. He told me that the district was drawn perfectly to elect Kent Hance. I mumbled something like “I hope you are wrong if I decide to run,” and thanked him for his time.
I remember wondering why Dad had introduced me to the governor. Looking back on it, it may have been his way of telling me, without smothering my ambition, that I should be prepared to lose.
The first phase of the campaign was the Republican primary. I made it into a runoff against Jim Reese, a smooth-talking former sportscaster and mayor of Odessa. He had run against George Mahon in 1976 and felt entitled to the nomination in 1978. He was very unhappy that I had outpolled him in the first round of the primary.
Reese had a hard edge, and so did some of his supporters. Their strategy was to paint me as a liberal, out-of-touch carpetbagger. They threw out all kinds of conspiracy theories. Dad was part of a trilateral commission campaign to establish a one-world government. I had been sent by the Rockefeller family to buy up farmland. Four days before the election, Reese produced a copy of my birth certificate to prove I had been born back east. How was I supposed to counter that? I responded with a line Dad had once used: “No, I wasn’t born in Texas, because I wanted to be close to my mother that day.”
Reese received an endorsement and campaign contributions from Ronald Reagan, who was seeking an edge on Dad in the 1980 presidential primary. Despite all the innuendos, I was optimistic about my chances. My strategy was to build up a bulkhead in my home county of Midland. Laura and I attended coffees across town, organized the county block by block, and persuaded friends who had never been involved in politics to help us.* On election night, our grassroots effort in Midland produced a massive turnout. I lost every other county in the district, but took Midland by such a huge margin that I won the nomination.
Dad had predicted that Reagan would call to congratulate me if I won the primary. He did, the next day. He was gracious and volunteered to help in the general election. I was grateful for his call and bore no hard feelings. But I was determined to run the race as my own man. I didn’t do any campaigning with Reagan, nor did I do any with Dad.
The race against Reese toughened me as a candidate. I learned I could take a hard punch, keep fighting, and win. My opponent in the general was Kent Hance, the state senator Governor Shivers had warned me about. Hance’s strategy was the same as Reese’s—turn me into an East Coast outsider—but he executed it with more subtlety and charm.
One of my first TV ads showed me jogging, which I thought emphasized my energy and youth. Hance turned it against me with one line: “The only time folks around here go running is when somebody’s chasing ’em.”
He also ran a radio ad: “In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High School in the Nineteenth Congressional District, his opponent, George W. Bush, was attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts. In 1965, when Kent Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And while Kent Hance graduated from University of Texas Law School, his opponent … get this, folks … was attending Harvard. We don’t need someone from the Northeast telling us what our problems are.”
Hance was a great storyteller, and he used his skill to pound away with the outsider theme. His favorite story was about a man in a limo who pulled up to a farm where Hance was working. When the driver asked him for directions to the next town, Hance said, “Turn right just past the cattle guard, then follow the road.” The punch line came when the driver asked, “Excuse me, but what color uniform will that cattle guard be wearing?” The West Texas crowds loved it. Hance would twist the knife by adding, “I couldn’t tell if the limo had Massachusetts or Connecticut license plates.”
Laura and I moved temporarily to Lubbock, the biggest city in the district, about 115 miles north of Midland. An important hub for the cotton business, Lubbock was home to Texas Tech University. We used the city as our base to campaign in the district’s rural counties. Laura and I spent hours in the car together, stumping in towns like Levelland, Plainview, and Brownfield. For someone who didn’t particularly care for politics, Laura was a natural campaigner. Her genuineness made it easy for voters to relate to her. After our wedding, we had taken a short trip to Cozumel, Mexico, but we joked that the campaign was our honeymoon.
On the campaign trail with Laura.
On the Fourth of July, we campaigned in Muleshoe, in the far northern part of the district. In the May primary, I had received 6 of the 230 votes cast in Bailey County. The way I saw it, I had plenty of room for improvement. Laura and I smiled and waved at the spectators from the back of our white pickup truck. Nobody cheered. Nobody even waved. People looked at us like we were aliens. By the end I was convinced the only supporter I had in Muleshoe was the one sitting next to me.
A campaign ad during my run for Congress.
Election night came, and it turned out that old Governor Shivers was right. I won big in Midland County and in the southern part of the district, but not by enough to offset Hance’s margins in Lubbock and elsewhere. The final tally was 53 percent to 47 percent.