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Governor of Texas
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In 1994 Bush ran for governor against popular Democratic governor Ann Richards. The gubernatorial race was a hard fought, sometimes bitter, contest. Bush’s campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction, and education improvement. Bush worked hard to sell himself as a Texan, vowing not to be defeated by the same outsider perception that had helped derail his 1978 bid for Congress. He crisscrossed the state, accusing his opponent of spending too much time away from Texas. In an upset, he defeated Richards with 53.5 percent of the vote.
Because the Texas constitution limits the authority of the governor’s office, Bush turned his attention to gaining the confidence of powerful Democrats, especially the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house. Bush needed to form alliances with Democrats in order to accomplish his goals. After winning their backing, he successfully pushed plans to cut welfare rosters, lower punitive damages in lawsuits, and return control of schools to local municipalities. Critics said he neglected environmental concerns, children’s health insurance, and rising poverty. Nonetheless, toward the end of his first term, a number of high-ranking elected Democrats in Texas, including several Hispanic politicians, publicly gave their support to Bush.
During his first term, Bush faced glaring national and international exposure when a convicted pick-ax murderer named Karla Faye Tucker was scheduled to be executed in Texas in February 1998. Representatives of the Vatican, evangelist Pat Robertson, and others petitioned Bush to grant Tucker a reprieve. Bush declined, however, and the execution proceeded as scheduled. Tucker was the first woman put to death in Texas since the Civil War (1861-1865). Most studies indicated that voters in Texas supported the death penalty.
Throughout Bush’s first term, national attention increasingly focused on him as a future presidential candidate. He made a well-publicized appearance at an Indianapolis, Indiana, gathering of national Republican leaders in 1997, and speculation about his presidential ambitions began to increase. Bush repeatedly said that his sole focus was being elected to another term as Texas governor. In 1998 the Texas Rangers were sold, and Bush earned an estimated $15 million.
In his 1998 reelection campaign, Bush ran against Texas land commissioner Garry Mauro. Mauro, long affiliated with environmental issues in Texas, continued to focus on those issues while Bush began describing himself as a “compassionate conservative.” Some Texas Democrats felt that Bush was intruding on traditional Democratic turf when he began advocating raising salaries for teachers. Bush aggressively courted the minority vote in Texas, making repeated visits to traditional Hispanic and Democratic strongholds such as the city of El Paso. Bush won his 1998 reelection race with a record 69 percent of the vote, becoming the first governor in Texas history to be elected to consecutive four-year terms. Bush earned 49 percent of the Hispanic vote and 73 percent of the independent vote, both considered records for a Republican candidate. National speculation about Bush’s presidential possibilities soared after his reelection.
Increasing national and international attention to the death penalty marked Bush’s second term as governor because Texas leads the nation in the number of inmate executions. However, Bush enjoyed high approval ratings among Texas voters, and he presided over the state during a time of general prosperity. During his second term as governor, he talked more about his philosophy of using faith-based organizations to do the work traditionally done by government. He urged more freedom for churches, synagogues, and mosques to provide social services and to perform work that state and federal agencies had previously done. Some analysts said his philosophy was a direct outgrowth of his belief that many of society’s problems could be traced to a moral decline and an over-reliance on government that had begun in the 1960s.
Throughout Bush’s second term, his critics contended that his plans to spur private-sector solutions to society’s problems were destroying the safety net that the government provided for poor people in Texas. His critics also said that, under his watch, Texas continued to rank near the bottom of statistical evaluations of the environment, children’s health insurance, and childhood hunger. Bush’s supporters lauded his efforts to raise teacher salaries, and studies indicated that educational test scores had improved under his administration. Throughout his second term, Bush stressed that one of his primary goals was to ensure that every child in Texas would know how to read.
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