Molly Ivins November 18

AUSTIN — Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro's announcement for governor against the popular George Dubya Bush is meeting with widespread skepticism but no disrespect. Only a fool would write off Mauro, even with the odds against him. He's one of the hardest-working campaigners in the state, and he has the advantage of knowing an awful lot more about state government than Shrub does. In fact, this could be an interesting race.

The chief thing about our guv is that he's an affable fellow — affable out the wazoo, actually. He's been affabling about east, west, north and south for three years now with the happy result that we all like him. It's practically impossible not to. Dubya's a nice guy.

On the other hand, he doesn't know much and hasn't done much. As governor, he has been "disengaged," as we used to say of Ronald Reagan. His numbers look formidable (he's 3-to-1 up on Mauro), but anyone who's been around Texas politics for a few years has seen one "unbeatable" candidate after another go down.

Mauro has two problems, the largest of which is money, lack of. Now, we're not talking stonewall-hopeless, Victor-Morales-style no-money. Mauro is too smart a politician to have announced at all if he didn't have considerable commitments in hand already. But one suspects that the commitments are contingent — either he moves the numbers by a certain date or he gets no more. And Shrub, who's already running for president, is sitting on $10 million right now, for pity's sake, and can raise as much as he wants.

And the Republicans are going to run Mauro mean. Not because they're nasty, evil people but because Mauro has given them the weapons and they'd be fools not to. Mauro went broke in the mid-'80s and took the chapter. Well, so did half of Texas, no disgrace there, but the ads just write themselves: "If he couldn't handle his own finances, why should we trust him with Texas' money?" Plus, Mauro has had an ethical scrape or two. He was once caught using state phones for political purposes; instead of stupidly denying it and getting indicted as Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison did (the judge eventually directed a verdict of "not guilty"), Mauro apologized and paid for another phone line.

Shrub's record is not exactly a thing of beauty. His big cause was tort reform — all those terrible lawsuits that were hurting our "healthy bidness climate." So we got tort reform, and what happened? Everybody's insurance premiums are higher than ever, and insurance company profits are at a 40-year high.

And then he was going to fix this terrible problem with the property taxes driving folk from hearth and home. After much sound and fury, the red-hots in his own party messed up the tax deal, and we end up with a constitutional amendment that gives us — whoopee — a big $140 off on our property taxes.

And then there is the increasingly ugly mess he's making of welfare "reform." While other states have moved to put effective welfare-to-work programs in place, Texas has been late, slow and dumb on the whole issue.

Just to prove once more what a ridiculous optimist I am, suppose that instead of both sides concentrating on the negative, Shrub and Mauro ran against one another concentrating on the positive. Mauro really does have some good ideas, most notably concerning the public schools. He wants to take some of the bond money we're always using to build more prisons and put $2 billion of it into rehabbing old schools and building new ones that would be wired for computers and all that bridge-to-the-21st-century stuff. He thinks we should give a $5,000 pay raise to every teacher who qualifies for certification in a specialty and provide Hope scholarships for college to students who agree to teach. As Mauro points out, if Georgia can do it, so can Texas.

Shrub, on the other hand, favors charter schools and the voucher system, in which you take tax money out of public schools and give it to private schools instead. There, you have the makings of a good debate. Shrub could go around talking about what government should not do and how everything government does could be done better by large corporations (he's the guy who wanted Lockheed to take over the welfare system). Mauro could talk about what he thinks government should do. This would be a nice prep for Bush's presidential run and give us a classy, educational campaign, and it is about as likely as Willie Nelson being named drug czar.

Just FYI: Someday, in our ongoing education debate, some politician is going to stand up and tell the truth, which is that the quality of the education a kid in our public schools gets depends almost entirely on the wealth of the property tax base in the district where the kid lives. Another case of justice depending on geography. And then we'll start talking seriously about what to do about it.

One more item of note: I think Mauro is onto a dandy issue with this HMO stuff. One of Shrub's stupider moves was vetoing the Patients' Protection Act, which would have allowed Texans to choose their own doctors and would have given them a laundry list of rights in the horrible new world of corporate medicine. When even the Texas Legislature is moved to pass a bill like that, vetoing it is not a shrewd move.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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