JOHN SILBER
DEMOCRATIC, then
INDEPENDENT
GOVERNOR, 1981-3
Nobody expected John Silber - that was the secret of his success. At the University of Texas he had been a prickly liberal academic who tussled with university administration, avoiding dismissal by the skin of his teeth in 1970 and with some unusual political judo in 1973. Appointed President of UT-Austin by a Board of Regents hoping to capitalize on his liberal image in the face of a new liberal Governorship, Silber took a contrarian turn, in part prompted by student organizing against Department of Defense research on campus that Silber felt obligated to crack down upon.
Constant clashes with state government would not seem, on the face of it, to portend success as Lieutenant Governor. But he was a canny negotiator in general, and his switch from radical anti-death-penalty liberal to anti-student-protester conservative allowed him to build a slightly unusual political coalition. No needle left unthreaded, Silber stood out of a crowded field in the Democratic primary, then monstered former Texas Secretary of State Robert Bullock as a corrupt drunk in the runoff. Pulled across the line on the coattails of Strauss and Wilson, John Silber was now in the hot seat.
It was a heck of a change. State Senators found out how plenty of UT faculty members had felt over the past few years - but at the same time, professors had in their own way more autonomy than Senators, who had to go to the committees they were assigned to. Silber began his tenure determined to run the Senate meritocratically - but in its own way this was a problem, both because it pushed Senators out of committee perches they saw as essentially their homes and because it advantaged Senators Silber personally saw as smart, qualified, and not beholden to special interests.
Moreover, Silber clashed with Strauss on perhaps the main issue of his first legislative session. Strauss, committed both to the public good of widely dispersed higher education and the political advantages of spreading porkbarrel spending through poor neighborhoods and small towns alike, supported expanding Texas's existing second- and third-tier public universities and creating more of them; Silber, an institutionalist and an elitist, believed in bulking up the resources, human and financial, of the flagships, and above all the University of Texas at Austin. In theory, this clash should have tied up the agenda and forced Strauss to the table - in practice, Silber's alienation of most of the Senate made him a non-entity in the fight. Silber contemplated resignation, but stuck around, as much due to an unwillingness to go back to a possibly-less-powerful position in academia as anything else.
His patience was rewarded when Strauss was nominated as Secretary of State. Moreover, the reforms of a few years ago allowed Silber to nominate Ross Perot, a trusted advisor and fellow outsider who could act as a mediator between Silber and the Legislature. After so long frozen out in the darkness, Silber was having his moment in the sun.
His first legislative session was, surprisingly, not a disaster at first. Silber was willing to throw meat to opponents of the Democratic establishment. For the left of the Democratic Party, he stood pat on affirmative action, increased teacher salaries, and went after predatory lenders. But his main initiatives were on behalf of Republicans and increasingly out-of-step 'mossback' Democrats; they included tort and pension reform, property tax caps, cuts to public health, and tacit support for efforts to investigate the ideological leanings of the Texas curriculum. Though the latter was intended less as a sincere campaign than as a way to buy the support of Christian conservatives like Republican rising star Mike Martin, it had its own effects.
On April 13, 1981, hundreds of teachers descended on Austin to protest the bill and the possible chilling effect on censorship. The protests, as well as evangelical counter-protests, heightened tensions between liberals, conservatives, and the legislature's silent majority of vaguely moderate, generally clientelist, small-town Democrats. Between threats of walkout, procedural warfare and pettiness, and local factors, nothing of substance - including the Texas Legislature's constitutional responsibility to pass a budget - could get through in the rest of the session.
Such a development brought out the worst in Silber just as it did in the Legislature. He called four special sessions, one of them timed out by a coalition of legislators who hid out in Las Cruces to keep the Legislature from quorum. Those sessions had extensive agendas, set by the Governor, but the Governor's demands of the Legislature as a whole as well as individual members used up all his goodwill. It didn't help when, ticked-off, Governor Silber called a press conference to announce his withdrawal from the Democratic Party, then lashed out at the reporters who asked follow-up questions.
Naturally, Silber still planned to run for re-election, and very possibly sincerely believed it to be in the cards. His Democratic opponent was Marvin Zindler, the telegenic and charismatic state Attorney General; for the Republicans, Mike Martin triumphed over Kay Bailey Hutchison in a close primary runoff.
The election was mostly sound and fury, but the kind of sound and fury that people tend to remember. Martin withdrew from campaigning for a few weeks in early July after being shot in the arm, he claimed, by a gang of Satanists; it was quickly revealed that his cousin, Charles Goff, had shot him in exchange for a state position after the election. Martin refused to admit to having set the shooting up, but the Republican Party tried to remove him from the ballot anyway; they succeeded, but Texas Secretary of State Chris Semos procedurally ratfucked their attempt to put Kay Bailey Hutchison on the ballot as anything other than a write-in. In the end, all that accomplished was for Silber to become the first Governor to place behind a write-in candidate on running for re-election.
This evidently did not affect his equipoise, as he immediately announced plans to run against President Reid in 1984. That campaign was undermined by, ironically enough, ballot-access issues, but even where he was on the ballot he never achieved more than 1% of the vote.
