ustxtxb_obs_1985_05_17_50_00005-00000_000.pdf

Kent Hance’s New . lothes program for the legislation. “He wants progress without having to pay for it,” said Helen Ayala, president of San Antonio to Ayala, it is White’s timidity that has caused Lewis to back away from his earlier positions. Now Lewis is telling COPS that there is no consensus on funding and that a reduction in the whole program may be necessary in order to fund it out of general revenue. “The governor made a commitment to the people of the Valley in June of 1983,” Ayala said. “He made a commitment to COPS on April 12 that he would ‘find the money,’ mentioning at that time possibly raising court filing fees or oil-well drilling fees. We said we’d give him all the latitude in the world if he was committed to funding it. “He needs to exert his leadership. The commitment is to do something in terms of where the people of Texas are. You’re saving the state money by taking care of pre-natal and neo-natal care. It’s cost-effective. They [babies receiving such care] are going to require less attention, less medical care. You can spend $4,000 in pre-natal care or spend $10,000 in hospital care. This is a program that the most conservative person in the world would want to buy. We’re not asking the governor to be liberal on this issue or even progressive. We’re asking him to be truly conservative.” G.R. OBSERVATIONS y OU HAVE TO scratch your noggin a goodly time trying to think up a single redeeming feature of Kent Hance’s switch to the Republican Party. You might say that he has given the political innocents among us a cautionary lesson, except for the fact that Phil Gramm had already taught this young generation of Texans all they need to know about party treachery. Gramm and Hance are the most recent in a long line of Texas Democrats-cumRepublicans that began with Governor Allan Shivers in 1952. Shivers, who had been a mildly liberal state senator from the Sabine area, made almost half a million dollars through a highly dubious land option deal just as he was becoming lieutenant governor. Then, as the seated Democratic governor in 1952, he openly and formally led the state Democratic executive committee into an endorsement of Eisenhower for President against the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. Every other Democratic statewide officer-holder, save one, “cross-filed” that year, running as both a Democrat and a Republican. That was the beginning. How are Texas Democrats supposed to feel about these pseudo-Democrats who accept the honors of the party and serve in high office as “Democrats,” but will switch to the other side the instant they decide this will do them, personally, the most good? Take John Connally, Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic governor of Texas during the 1960’s. Always much more conservative than Johnson, Connally solemnly vowed that Texas would never be a two-party state. The one party, Democratic-run state was best for the public welfare, he would intone. But like Shivers before him, Connally so alienated humanist and liberal Democrats, he ruined his own future in the Democratic Tarty, so he simply upped and became a Republican. “I’m here to tell you I’m a Republican,” Kent Hance told a press conference in Washington on May 3. That is, he’s here to tell us this now that he wants to run for governor as a Republican against Mark White. Just a year ago Hance was earnestly pleading with the Democrats to nominate him for the U.S. Senate. His switch, so soon, is shameless. Little wonder that, as Bob Richter reported in the San Antonio Express-News, “the usually ebullient Hance was grim-faced during the announcement he was switching parties.” No doubt he was thinking about what people would say, and correctly, about him. Jim Wright, the House Majority Leader, for instance. Hance, said Wright, “is more responsible than any other single member of Congress for the huge deficits our nation is struggling with today” because he “sponsored the excessive 1981 Hance-Conable tax cut for the wealthy. “Due in part to the Hance-Conable giveaway, 65 of the very largest corporations in America made $50 billion in profits during the past three years and paid no income tax whatsoever. “Kent Hance is a pleasant and entertaining fellow and I find him personally likeable,” Wright said, “but, in my opinion, he has just never had the interests of the average American Kent Hance receiving Rob Mosbacher’s backing. citizen at heart.” Hance complicated the picture for GOP Congressman Tom Loeffler of San Antonio, who wants to run against White, too. Presumably the emergence of two credible Republican candidates will ease the mind of former Governor Bill Clements, who has feared, apparently genuinely, that he might have to be the one to give White a run for it in 1986. What are the chances, then, that within 20 months either Tom Loeffler or Kent Hance will preside over Texas as our Republican governor? Dave McNeely, the political editor of the Austin American-Statesman, has White well cased in the April issue of D Magazine. Per McNeely, the gover Pho to by Alic ia Da n ie l THE TEXAS OBSERVER 5