War of the Roses in Texas

By: Cragg Hines
Kay Bailey Hutchison had sweet dreams of the governor’s mansion. She’ll have to play smash-mouth politics to get there.

Oh, Kay! What have you gotten yourself into?

The simple answer is that Kathryn Ann “Kay” Bailey Hutchison, a Republican and senior U.S. senator from Texas, has entered the race for governor back home, a job she long has yearned to hold. But that’s where the simple part ends.

A more realistic answer, at the moment, is that Hutchison has gotten herself into a mess that imperils her long, largely productive political career.

Until, say, six months ago, Hutchison was, as she had been for many years, arguably the most popular politician in the Lone Star State. In one Senate re-election race she picked up more than 4 million votes, the state’s record for a nonpresidential candidate.

Now, however, Hutchison is at the center of an intra-GOP Armageddon that has the national Republican Party holding its head in its hands and ambulances down home lining up to haul the wounded off the internecine battlefields of a state that the party needs to keep reliably red.

In formally announcing earlier this month a primary challenge to the incumbent Republican governor, James Richard “Rick” Perry, Hutchison finally pulled the trigger on a long-delayed, mano-a-mano contest that could cost $50 million. And that’s just to get to the party primary on March 2.

Anyone hungering for great, grass-roots political theater over the next six months need look no further. The Hutchison-Perry campaign has quickly become a Bloggers Full-Employment Act, and national political reporters are looking for short-term lets in Austin.

If you want a shorthand guide to what sort of race may lie ahead, consider that Karl Rove has advised both candidates in at least one of their previous statewide contests.

And the race, although already testy enough, has not reached the expected state of unconditional warfare

“It’s not bloody yet, it’s just petty,” said a top Republican strategist who refused to be quoted by name, in part because he made the comment leaving the funeral Mass of columnist Robert D. Novak, who would have loved the Hutchison-Perry slugfest.

The Hutchison-Perry race already resembles the plot line of the 1989 vicious-divorce flick “The War of the Roses.” A report by KHOU-TV in Houston on the increasing venom of the contest did a quick cut to Kathleen Turner’s character in the movie screaming, “I simply want to smash your face in.”

This is a strange, uphill landscape for Hutchison, whom many Texans over the last decade had assumed could waltz into Austin about anytime she liked and claim the governorship. Think “coronation”; Hutchison was. Now it seems it will take a miracle. Think “parting the Red Sea.”

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