Texas Monthly on the Governors Race

Texas Monthly will be covering the Governors Race in their July issue. Here's an excerpt:

Yet I knew that the space separating us across the table was symbolic of something more: the unbridgeable divide that puts politicians and their close associates at a distance from the media. We would never agree on what it meant to be a great governor. Perry’s boosters insist that he has proved himself to be a leader with his toll road plan and his deregulation of college tuition. They point to tort reform passed on his watch—the strongest such measure in the country, and the model for others—and now they are touting his tax cuts. Even I would acknowledge that he did Texas proud by opening the Astrodome to Katrina evacuees and sending Department of Public Safety troopers to the border to meet the threat of violence from Mexican drug cartels. But I would also say that being a great governor means principled governance on behalf of everybody, not just slavish obeisance to your biggest campaign contributors. I would say that it means putting policy ahead of ideology, that it means addressing problems by doing what has to be done but not going overboard, that it means giving everybody a place at the table. In short, I believe that if the process is fair, the outcome will be fair, and that is about all that can be asked of politicians. This is not as hard as it sounds. Perry served with people who governed like that—Bill Hobby, Bob Bullock, Pete Laney, Bill Ratliff, and, before he went to Washington, George W. Bush. For that matter, I have seen Perry himself govern that way. But not often.