The Texas Way

...A fi nal note about Bullock: His journey showed that you can come back from horrible personal failures and still make a difference...

...Beyond George W. Bush, Bob Bullock was an interesting fi gure for another important reason, one that others in state governments would do well to remember...

...The book includes one about Bush getting up and kissing Bullock for shock value after Bullock threatened to—how shall we say?—mess with one of Bush’s priorities...

...McNeely and Henderson detail how Bullock, who went to Texas Tech and Baylor Law School, brought a very antiquated comptroller’s offi ce into the 20th century when he fi rst won that post in 1974...

...Sometimes the venting would help...

...Bullock’s most important legacy was the water planning process he launched in 1997, his last session as lieutenant governor...

...But the proud Texan understood his state had the responsibility to govern itself...

...To be sure, some Americans may want to push Texas aside for a while after the Bush years...

...was a recovering alcoholic, and, according to biographers, suffered bouts of deep depression...

...For a small-town son of the raw days of Texas’s past, when good old boys ran the state and rural lawmakers kept a tight grip on the purses, he constantly pushed the state to recognize its future...

...It was in that last position where he became part of American history in a way that neither he nor Bush could have envisioned in 1994...

...The Bush/Bullock relationship wasn’t always pacifi c. Bullock’s moods could turn volcanic—and instantly, as the authors describe in detail...

...But Bullock certainly made it possible for Bush to make one of his strongest selling points in 2000: that he knew how to work with both parties...

...Whether he would have liked the way the Bush presidential years turned out, especially Washington’s partisan divisions, is a guessing game in Texas...

...Before he died in 1999, the Democratic power broker served as a state representative, comptroller of Texas’s public accounts, and lieutenant governor...

...Knowing that, Bullock insisted that locals around the state come up with their own ideas for water supplies...

...In the same way you could hear him ask what’s best for Texas whenever a subject came up, you could hear him argue that legislators shouldn’t duck the state’s challenges...

...What is true is that Bob Bullock put George Bush on the path to becoming president...

...No offense to the people in such drought-stricken states as Georgia, but they would do well to come up with an approach like this...

...There’s been controversy among Bullock loyalists about whether McNeely and Henderson present too dark a picture of their late leader, who notoriously would fi re aides and rehire them the next day...

...Senator Sibley tells of overhearing a profane Bullock outburst at the governor, then watching Bush go cut the legislative deal that Bullock suggested was the right thing to do...

...And given how rich this period was in Texas’s history, and eventually the nation’s history, I’m surprised more Bush/ Bullock stories weren’t included...

...His legacy as a modernizer, though, went far beyond the comptroller’s offi ce...

...One of my favorite Bullock stories, which McNeely and Henderson recount, is how he persuaded the state’s telecom executives to invest more than $1 billion in a fund to wire the unwired parts of the state...

...William McKenzie is a columnist at the Dallas Morning News...

...Like Governor Bush, he knew that the state could only rely so long on property taxes to support schools...

...But it paints the portrait of a complex Democrat who loved his state, and who particularly liked the Republican governor he served alongside...

...The people’s representatives should own up to the problems...

...But he understood that Texas couldn’t fund itself through the tax equivalent of bailing wire...

...The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate, determining which bills survive, making all committee assignments, and sitting on the infl uential Legislative Budget Board...

...He signed onto a property tax cut that he probably didn’t care that much about...

...McNeely, who covered politics for the Austin American-Statesman for 26 years, and Henderson, who wrote for the Dallas Times Herald and the Houston Chronicle, tell their own stories...

...He was a modernizer...

...I remember being surprised at how choked up he was getting, and how interesting it was that this prediction was coming from the state’s most powerful Democrat...

...Bullock also had the audacity to propose a state income tax...

...He hired professional staff, employed new technologies, showed Texans where their money was being spent, and chased down tax cheats...

...And it was...

...The pair had a clandestine get-together at Bullock’s house in Austin, where the inexperienced Bush made it known he wanted to work with the legendary veteran...

...The idea went nowhere in a state where having no income tax is considered sacred...

...But what happens politically in megastates such as Texas, California, New York, and Florida ultimately matters to the rest of the nation...

...And work they did, once Bush became governor and Bullock won a second four-year term for lieutenant governor, which in Texas is arguably the more powerful post...

...But that’s taking things too far...

...David Sibley, a former GOP state senator, describes the Bush/Bullock era as a golden period in Texas politics...

...While the rest of the nation paid attention to the Clintons, Gingriches, Reagans, and Kennedys, he stayed close to home...

...And he didn’t just sign on...

...Readers could have benefi ted from additional reporting about this unique twosome...

...they shouldn’t need a bunch of judges to force them to act responsibly...

...At Bullock’s behest, legislators passed a plan that would look 50 years into the future...

...Before he left offi ce, Bob Bullock came to see the Morning News’s editorial board...

...He had fi ve marriages (twice to the same woman...

...After all, it was one reason Bush could point to his experience in Texas as his reason for being considered presidential material...

...Bullock hated that the state had so poorly funded its schools and mismanaged its prisons that the courts had stepped in to have the fi nal say...

...Given today’s droughts in Texas and around the country, his ideas seem visionary...

...A love of place can get you past a lot of partisanship...

...During the interview, he got tears in his eyes and said George W. Bush could become president...

...Bush later wrote to the Dallas Morning News to suggest the newspaper had given him too much credit: The Democratic leaders deserved it, too...

...Of course, George W. Bush is not without blame for the political divisions of the last eight years...

...During Bush’s fi rst year as governor, the legislature passed all four parts of his agenda: a new education code, revised liability laws, tougher penalties for juveniles, and an overhaul of welfare laws...

...For the record, Governor Bush adamantly opposed an income tax...

...Maybe he was...

...He never embraced national politics...

...Basically, this meant the rural areas of Texas, and the CEOs didn’t blink when Bullock told them that the billion was the price of getting the state to deregulate their industry...

...That’s almost impossible to comprehend in the antiseptic environment of today’s politics...

...As veteran Texas reporters Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson tell it in this biography of the mercurial, profane, Machiavellian, compassionate, devoted son of Texas, Bullock and Bush met up in the summer of 1994 when George W. Bush was trying to unseat Ann Richards as the popular Democratic governor of Texas...

...He loved signing all his letters with “God Bless Texas,” and handing out little bumper stickers that said the same...

...His fallback position was to get the legislature to fund a new business tax to fund schools...

...BY WILLIAM MCKENZIE There’s a side of me that wants to say that George W. Bush never would have become president without Bob Bullock...

...he helped sell it...

...Some Texas Democrats think Bullock was too taken with Bush...

...he would send fundraisers to collect money for him in Washington, he so hated going there...

...Lieutenant Governor Bullock was right there with him, as were Democrats such as House Speaker Pete Laney...

...But he surely misses having Democrats like Bob Bullock with which to whom, putting country above party...

...Bullock was one of those rare pols who liked it that way...

...And politicians like Bob Bullock can have an enormous say without becoming household names...

...Former GOP state senator Bill Ratliff tells of senators being called in to see Bush and Bullock in a room off the governor’s offi ce, where both men pitched for a big cut in the spring of 1997: “It was extraordinary seeing a Republican and Democrat calling in folks,” Ratliff recently remembered, as we talked about that period...

...Texans previously had ignored water plans because the experts in Austin dictated them...

...Bush had to learn to let him vent...

...Those local plans now serve as the guides for 16 different regions of the state...