ustxtxb_obs_1993_08_20_50_00024-00000_000.pdf

Postmaster: If undeliverable, send Form 3579 to The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas 78701 POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE WHAT A DIFFERENCE a spin can make. “Richards on solid ground for re-election, poll finds,” was the headline on a Dallas Morning News report by Sam Attlesey July 26 on the Texas Poll that cited consultants and party officials saying Richards “will be extremely difficult to unseat in her campaign for a second term in 1994,” given that 33 percent said they were likely to vote for her and 42 percent said it depended upon who runs against her. Only George W. Bush, who is reported “seriously considering a race,” was recognized by a majority of adult Texans, the poll found, but many respondents apparently confused the managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball club with his father, the former president. But the Houston Chronicle, citing the same poll, found “Richards no shoo-in,” as Cindy Rugeley reported “although Richards enjoys popularity unmatched by recent governors, most Texans aren’t ready to re-elect her yet.” The poll also found 58 percent of people questioned believed Richards is doing an excellent or good job as governor, but GOP Chairman Fred Meyer predicted that voters will feel differently when the GOP ties her to President Clinton as well as efforts to redistribute public school finances. The Texas Poll also found Sen. Phil Gramm with a 61-percent favorable rating and Sen. Kay B. Hutchison with a favorable rating of 59 percent. The announcement that George W. is poised to announce as a candidate has the national press looking at the Texas Governor’s race, which may be the most interesting election in an off year. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory also wondered where Perot will come down in the Texas gubernatorial race. McGrory wonders how a nice guy like Tom Luce would fare without the backing of Perot. According to some observers, Luce, a Dallas lawyer who handled Perot’s legal affairs for years, angered George H.W. Bush by supporting Perot in the first place, then angered Perot by refusing to return to the campaign when Perot changed his mind about quitting. McGrory asks how Luce, whose campaign debts for his last governor’s race in 1989 were paid off by Perot, will fare without Perot’s money. Not very well, we’re afraid. “Junior,” as George W. is known by some, “is extraordinarily politically oriented different from his father,” Texas Republican Party Chair Fred Meyer told the Post. He is, Meyer told McGrory, “‘a real Texan’ who wears boots, chews tobacco …” Like most of us in this state. GRAMMSTANDING. The fact that Sen. Phil Gramm proved so adept at turning his staff into a personal publicity machine as he first promoted his re-election in 1990 and then focused on his presidential ambitions for 1996, as the Dallas Morning News detailed in a recent series of articles, comes as no particular surprise to Grammwatchers, although some were taken by the breadth of the operation, most of it at public expense. In 198990, Gramm spent $167,000 on taxpayerfinanced trips to Texas, more than $100,000 greater than the second-highest Senate spender. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, by contrast, spent $36,000 during 1987-88, the two years before his last re-election. Readers may remember “Fundraising Phil Gramm,” TO 11/7-13/92, which reported on complaints about his use of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he heads, to promote himself. Gramm was and is unapologetic and the News series reportedly was circulated around at least one Congressional office for staffers to pick up pointers. FAIR FOR WHOM? Who’s bankrolling the latest wave of xenophobia, which now has Congress and the Immigration and Naturalization Service scrambling to provide the mechanism for summary exclusion of immigrants asking for political asylum? FAIR, the New York-based media-watch group, recently took a look at FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and discovered that the immigration group “receives significant funding from a foundation that is explicitly motivated by a racist, eugenicist ideology.” The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 by Wycliffe P. Draper, a textile manufacturer who advocated sending blacks back to Africa. The Fund is one of immigration group FAIR’ s Chief financial backers, according to records the media group FAIR requested from the Internal Revenue Service. Since 1988, immigration activists at FAIR have received $600,000 from the Pioneer Fund, according to the IRS. In 1992, the most recent year for which IRS records are available, Pioneer’s contribution to the immigra tion law reform group was $150,000. The media group cited a 1991 Washington Times report that the Pioneer Fund’s charter states that the group is “committed to the proposition that people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are, on the basis of their heredity, inherently unequal and can never be expected to behave or perform equally.” Also, according to the Times, the charter for a scholarship program established by the Pioneer Fund instructs trustees to give scholarships “only to students who are citizens of the United States … who are deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.” ROSS’ MONEY. Citizens’ Trade Campaign, the nationwide umbrella group opposing NAFTA, is not receiving any funding from free-trade critic Ross Perot, according to the New York Times. The group last year had a budget of only $200,000 plus $130,000 in donated services. Perot seems to prefer to go it alone, having paid for and appeared on his own anti-NAFTA program on Memorial Day. HEALTH CONCERNS. A Canadianstyled single-payer health-care system, in which the government pays providers, would do the best job in holding down costs and providing coverage for all Americans by the end of the decade, the Congresssional Budget Office recently reported. But spending on health care would nearly double by the year 2000, to $1.55 trillion from $830 billion last year, as reported by the Washington Post. If the system continued unchanged, 39 million people would be uninsured and health care spending would increase to $1.7 trillion. If the nation adopted a “managed competition” approach, which the Clinton Administration appears to favor, costs would be $19 billion more in the year 2000 than they would be under the current system, while more than 25 million people would remain uninsured. DRAFT NOTICE. Trial lawyers and their progressive’allies in Southeast Texas are trying to convince Sen. Carl Parker to seek a fourth term in District 4 after the Port Arthur Democrat announced that he was thinking Continued on pg. 23 24 AUGUST 20, 1993