Round Top Register - Texas Fun Travel Guide - The Courtjester

Schulenburg - After the next statewide election, odds are good that the guy across the table from me will be the most powerful man in Texas. “Let me tell you the reason government makes you mad” says John Sharp. “It doesn’t act like your business does and it doesn’t act like your family does. When your family runs short of money, you have to figure out how to cut back on stuff. When a business runs short of money, it can’t just raise the price of oil. That family can’t just stand up the next day and give themselves a raise. If that family could give itself a raise, it would. It’s easier than cutting back. If that business could raise the price of oil, it would, but its competitors won’t let it.” When Texas State Comptroller of Public Accounts John Sharp gets to talking about the government wasting the taxpayer’s dollar, he sits up in his chair. It’s clear he is also describing the reason government makes him mad. “The problem is that government can give itself a raise. It has that power. They don’t call it a raise. They call it a tax increase or a fee increase or a tuition increase. What we’re about is making government go the other way. Do the hard stuff. Find the fraud in Medicaid. Find the fraud in food stamps. Find a way to make the universities work better. “Until 1991, Texas government, like any other government, would meet and say ‘Here’s how much money we spent. We want 10% more.’ If the money wasn’t there, they raised the taxes to pay for it. Since 1991, there’s a whole new dynamic in the Texas legislature. They meet and every agency has to fight off... my recommendations and they’re lucky if they get back where they were. In the process, there’s been a really good self-examination to cut spending.” John Sharp is running for Lieutenant Governor. I had come to the Oakridge Smokehouse Restaurant in Schulenburg to interview him before a local fund-raiser and he was running late. His office had called earlier to warn me he was behind schedule and the aide on the phone implied that someone had received the “sharp” edge of the Comptroller’s tongue. “I hope he’s in a better mood by the time he gets there” laughed the aide nervously. Not long afterwards, the Schulenburg Democratic faithful began to show up along with District Judge Dan Beck, Fayette County Judge Ed Janecka and Fayette County D.A. John Wied. Some state legislator from Houston had dropped by to see Mr. Sharp too but the bulk of the folks snacking on sausage and cheese were of home-grown Czech and German extraction. The judges and the D.A. all know John Sharp pretty well. John’s been an elected official since 1978 so he’s been on the stump before. In fact, he comes from Placedo do wn Victoria way so he’s almost a local boy. His home folks sent him to the legislature in 1978, then to the Senate in 1982. In 1986, he won election to the Texas Railroad Commission. Then in 1991, he won the Comptroller’s job with a convincing 62.9% of the vote. At the top of his credentials is the fact that he filled the enviable role of a keynote speaker in the gazebo on the Round Top town square during Round Top’s last Fourth of July celebration. That, of course, bodes well for his campaign. You could tell he was tired but that didn’t seem to slow him down. He was a baby-kissing, glad-handling, political machine. I was awed watching him work. The man is good. He made people feel like they were important without seeming in the least artificial. You believed he was a good old boy. You believed he cared what you were talking about. He was natural and laid-back. I found myself liking him, a dangerous mind set when interviewing a politician. It looked to me like he had the same effect on the rest of the room. It took him a while to figure out who I was but then he apologized very sincerely for being late. This was a sign of class since he and I both knew I wasn’t there to interview him for the Houston Chronicle or the Dallas Morning News. We agreed to visit after the fund-raiser. The two judges introduced him. Judge Beck said John Sharp was perhaps the “best” politician in Texas. That’s high praise from Dan Beck. He’s got the respect of his constituents and a lock on his job. He doesn’t have to say nice things about anybody. It came out in the speech that Dan Beck had worked for Sharp’s opponent in that first legislative race back in `78. Sharp was glad Dan was on his side this time. Judge Beck walked up to me later and talked about how accessible Sharp was to the people of the state. I was impressed again. He made a short but sincere speech then stepped down from the podium and picked up one of his bumper stickers. “I know you’re going to think I’m just a lying politician...” he said “but these bumper stickers really will knock 15% off your car’s gas milage.” The audience was so charmed, and they almost believed him. John Sharp is a hot ticket in a political climate that rewards the financially conservative politician. He’s running against Rick Perry, who turned from conservative Democrat to Republican in 1989 to run against and defeat iconoclastic “populist” Jim Hightower for Texas Agriculture Commissioner. Sharp and Perry were actually classmates and fellow student officers at Texas A&M. Many say the race could have national implications due to the fact that Governor Bush is sitting on a 40+ point lead in the polls over Democrat Gary Mauro and Bush’s name keeps coming up big when the subject is the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Undoubtedly, Bush would feel much better leaving the governor’s office if he could put a Republican in the Lieutenant Governor’s seat. However, Texas voters are funny about such things. The current Lieutenant Governor, the legendary Bob Bullock, and his predecessor Bill Hobby easily won re-election while Republican governors were winning the top spot. “One of the big differences between Rick and me,” says Sharp “is that Rick is severely partisan. He really believes the Republican party is the most important thing in the world. I think that the reason Washington, D.C. is screwed up is that half the people up there think to be a Republican or Democrat is more important than being an American citizen. I think the last thing we need in Texas is that kind of partisan politics. That’s what Bullock preached and I think the reason Bush is as popular as he is, is that he is perceived as to be nonpartisan. “Every single business group has endorsed George Bush and every single business group but one has endorsed me over my opponent. Texans are going to vote for the person. If you’re a candidate, Democrat or Republican, counting on being elected just because of your political party, then I think you are going to lose.” On the other side of that coin is the fact that Bob Bullock, who steadfastly supports Mr. Sharp’s bid for Lieutenant Governor, recently jumped ship and endorsed Bush, a Republican, for Governor, a lesson that was not lost on John Sharp. A recent article in the Washington Post put it this way, “Mr. Sharp, perhaps the shrewdest politician the democrats have had here in the past decade, is doing his best to separate his battle from Mr. Mauro’s uphill struggle. Although operatives from the two Democratic campaigns have begun meeting regularly to coordinate voter registration and turnout plans, Mr. Sharp has maintained studied neutrality in his public stance on the Bush-Mauro contest.” That night in Schulenburg he didn’t act like the “shrewdest politician the Democrats have put here in the past decade.” He acted like a guy that likes a Lone Star and snuff. Yep, he dips. I saw it myself. It might have been a campaign prop but I don’t think so. He’s been a big dog too long to pull small-time tricks like that. Besides he didn’t wave it around. I figure his wife must not like it. Anyway, the night wound down and I dragged him off to the Oakridge Smokehouse’s butcher shop and interviewed him in front of the meat counter. The place was closed and the lights were off so I had to read my questions by the light of the glass-front cooler. This was okay with John. He just left a couple of bucks on the counter and pulled a long-neck out of the cooler. A recent Hart-Hanks Texas Poll shows the race for Lieutenant Governor to be a horse race. You’re ahead by five or six points. You’ve been very successful in your statewide role and are known as one of the most successful fiscal conservatives in the nation. It looks like that record would give you quite an edge over Rick Perry. Why do you think the race is close? “When the Texas poll first came out...I was about 2 points behind. I think George Bush does have coattails and I think that’s what Rick is counting on because he doesn’t have issues. It’s just “Vote for George, vote for me.” As the race wore on and people wrote about it and we campaigned more, the next Texas poll came out and I moved up 4 points. The next Texas poll came out and I moved up five points. That’s a movement of 9 points. If you’re Rick and your basing your whole campaign on coattails...George Bush is 45 points ahead right now...and you’re behind, you’re not likely to win. In fact, the only Democrat ahead right now is me. I think it looks fine. “What we’ve discovered is that once people remember that I’m the guy who did the Lone Star card and a million people dropped off the food stamps, did the performance review and kept us, literally I think, from having to have an income tax, then the polls will go ballistic...soon as we can do a little television. Your office won the first Texas Quality Award ever presented to a government agency. Al Gore and Colin Powell have both pointed to programs of yours as models for other states. Does it bother you that the average voter doesn’t know more about your track record? “If you take the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Bob Bullock, and you took a poll right now, he would have between 30% and 40% name recognition. The guy with the highest name recognition in the state of Texas is...Ronald McDonald. People are working. They’ve got other things to do besides know as much about state government as we do. That’s what campaigns are about. Two of your programs, the Texas Tomorrow Fund and Lone Star Scholars, are targeted toward development of human resources. In the speech announcing your candidacy, you said “...the economic empires of the past were built on Texas’ natural resources - from cattle to cotton to crude, but those days are gone. The next economic empire will be built on out human resources...” Speak about that. Oil and gas and cattle and cotton are going to be important to Texas until my children are dead and gone but what’s going to build a huge spike in the Texas economy...is human resources. If you look demographically at the United States, the entire eastern seaboard, virtually all of the upper midwest...all of them except Wisconsin, are losing population. Manufacturers have got to have kids. Their prime targets to manufacture their goods are 18-21 years olds. If you don’t have those kids, you’re not going to get those industries. The cheapest thing you can do if you’re going to build a new Ford plant or a new microchip plant is to go where the workers are...and the workers are in Texas and Utah. Both of those states are receiving huge amounts of growth as a result of industries moving in to take advantage of the workforce. “We’ve got the kids...just like we had the oil, just like we had the cattle, just like we had the cotton. We are going to have more kids than any other state in America in numbers, and only Utah surpasses us by percentage. “If they are uneducated, prepare to look exactly like Mexico twelve years from now because those companies will say, “Well, I can get a whole bunch of kids that are not very well educated in Mexico City. If you can’t give me educated kids, I’ll go down there.” If we have the best educated work force and it is the largest number, we’ll create that fourth boom that makes the other three look like a barn dance.” There seems to be a design to the way you approach problems. You’ve done the same thing over and over. You see an issue you want to do something about and then you come up with an idea. But you don’t stop there. You then go out and market the idea. You’re a big one for initiatives, the Texas Performance Review, the Lone Star Card, the Texas School Performance Review. In your public career, what lead to this method of dealing with bureaucracy? “Here’s why we do that. When I was an examiner at the Legislative Budget Board...I learned how bad government could be. Most people have never heard of the LBB but it is the most powerful group of ten people in the state. It’s chaired by the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker is vice-chair, four members of the Senate and four from the house. They write the whole budget for the state of Texas. The Legislature just adds to it. What they write becomes the budget and neither the Governor nor anybody else has much effect on it. I was an examiner for them and I was seeing how the budget was put together. “My very first day, because I was stupid and didn’t know any better, I recommended abolishing four agencies. (Laughter) Those old Senators looked at me and said “Are you crazy? You don’t abolish agencies!’ “They actually voted for abolishing one of them and they caught hell the rest of the Legislative session because of it. It’s so hard to cut spending. What I learned was, if you have an idea and you know it’s a good one and you know the public will support you...If you never tell the public about it, it’s a dead dog in the Legislature “The welfare card...had the public never known what benefit could come from that, we never would have gotten the waiver to do it because the guy that prints food stamps hired 10 or 15 lobbyists to kill it. He was making 66 million bucks a year printing food stamps! That’s why I went all around the state selling it. The way we finally got Washington to give us a waiver was...I had a press conference. I went to New York and got me a picture of the guy that prints food stamps and made a big, life-size picture of him...I invented this new award called the Silver Snout award and gave him the award for “having his snout buried so deep in the public trough that it’s out of control.” I got a little ceramic pig and painted its nose silver. I sent him a picture of it and asked him to come accept it. He, of course, didn’t respond. “That was the first time the public knew this guy was bilking them for sixty-something million dollars a year printing food stamps. After that, the congressmen from Texas wouldn’t have any part of it. It got me the waiver. What we learned was; if you are going to do something controversial like cutting spending, which is really hard to do, you’ve got to tell the public about it or you don’t stand a chance. There have been a lot of these ideas in the past but my daddy never heard about them and you never heard about them and your readers never heard about them. The forces to spend are much greater than the forces to serve the public...because somebody’s making a killing off the government. You’re a real estate broker by profession. How did you get to be so good at handling money? “I’m Czech. Have you ever seen a Czech spend money? I’ve been a S.P.J.S.T. member since I was two minutes old. Everyone’s tired of welfare. It’s become popular to bash the welfare system because many people consider it self-replicating. Lots of politicians are on the “cut welfare” bandwagon. On the other hand, during the Reagan era, we saw massive and often insensitive cuts to programs designed to support the poor and the disabled. National surveys in recent years have found that the majority of the people in this country are uncomfortable with a system that leaves the poor, the handicapped and the culturally disadvantaged out in the cold. In government, how do you break down the self-fulfilling welfare state and yet still help the citizens of Texas who truly need support? “We took polls back three or four years ago to see what the public thought about it. If you asked them, ‘Do you want to feed poor kids?’ they would go ‘yeah,’ even in `94 back when people were saying there was no more compassion in the country. Now, when you asked them if they think they should get rid of food stamps, half of them would say yes. Government had a program where you pay 7 million for the paper, 66 million to print the stamps, 6.2 million to a courier service to haul them around in armored cars, 900 people in distribution centers to hand them out. They were the number one commodity used to buy drugs in the state. You could exchange food stamps for crack cocaine in Houston and Dallas any time you wanted, traded for 50 cents on the dollar. As of yesterday morning, 925,000 people have left the food stamp roles but we are still feeding them a disproportionate amount of food. All this means is that you can’t use the little card on the street corner. You’ve got to use it where there’s a compatible machine and hopefully, that’s in a grocery store. “What the public wants is accountability for their money. What I think happens is that people have things they expect from government, things that perhaps only government can do, but the government screws it up so much that they lose faith in everything. They don’t think government can operate anything well. I think we are beginning to change that perception, at least in Texas. I look at the work that is done by your office. I know you aren’t doing it alone. Anyone who is successful at running a large business or organization has to be good at building and running a team. If you are elected, how many of those people will you be able to take with you? “Not very many because the Lieutenant Governor’s staff is much smaller than the other ... But Bullock and I had a covenant. When he needed research done...I was there to do it. I’m hoping that the next comptroller and I will have the same kind of relationship. I don’t do all the research for this stuff. What I do is have ideas. Ideas just bounce out of my head all the time. I carry a little tape recorder all the time and I call it into a number in Austin and they read it back to me the next day. If it makes sense to me, I get somebody to research it. That’s where the Lone Star card and all this stuff comes from. Hopefully with either Paul Hobby or Carole Rylander (the two candidates for Comptroller), we’ll have the ability to do that kind of research.” Rural areas in Texas have been devastated in the past by what I call the “bypass syndrome.” First communities bypassed by the trains began to wither and die, then when the interstate highway system was being developed, highway bypasses almost destroyed the home-based economic systems of many rural communities. There is a good deal of cautious, small town revitalization going on today but many small Texas communities are still fighting for survival. Many of us are afraid the telecommunications revolution will put rural areas and small towns in a position of economic disadvantage once again. Just like with telephones and electric power, we don’t have the population density to attract the big data pipes that are already being built in the big cities. How can we protect the small and rural communities of Texas from being bypassed one more time? “That’s the reason that we created the TIF (Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund). We began with the presumption that every school, whether it’s in Moulton or in Dallas, that school is going to be on the Internet. Maybe we didn’t fund it enough. We think the first priority is to get it into schools. Once you’ve got it in the schools, you have a pretty good customer base to make it easier for other businesses to come in. “You may have to address it with legislation just like the eventually did with phone companies...because they simply make more money going to Dallas than they do going to Placedo or Shiner. You may have to force it to happen. The reason it’s important is that you are going to have people moving out (of the city) in droves. I think the migration that has just now begun, is going to get very intense over the next five or ten years and is going to force things to happen. “You are going to be moving customers to Schulenburg or La Grange or Round Top ... that are going to be such heavy users of the Internet that it will becomes feasible for them to do it. “You can sit right there in Round Top, Texas and run Land’s End if you want to.” Talk about the job of Lieutenant Governor. In Texas, it’s a very powerful position. If you are elected, what will be your first act after taking office? “The Lieutenant Governor’s office in Texas is the most powerful lieutenant governor in the country because he appoints all the committee chairs. He appoints all the members of the committees. He appoints the members of the Legislative Budget Board. He essentially writes the budget for the State of Texas. He guides all the legislation, all the Governor’s nominations on things. All that stuff passes one way or another through the Lieutenant Governor’s office. “The first thing I would do is ask the members of the Senate to take their Republican and Democratic committee meetings outside of the Capitol. My biggest fear, and I think Bullock’s biggest fear, is the Legislature had will start to become partisan like Washington. Once you do that, nothing works because you’re not voting on bills that are best for Texas. You’re voting on them because some party hack, either Democrat or Republican says you have to. That’s the first thing I want to do...ask them to move that stuff out of the Capitol and tend to only the people’s business in the Capitol. If they want to meet in the Radisson somewhere and plot Democratic or Republican strategy, then they can do that. “There are couple of things we have to do. There are two tax decreases that have to happen early in the next session of the Legislature. One of them has to do with research and development. In 1985, you had 22 states that granted real serious tax credits for research and development. Now there are 39. By the time we meet again, it may be 45. That includes California, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and Utah and a whole bunch of our competitors. We have to pass a bill granting 10% credit on franchise tax for research and development. If we don’t, research and development for high-tech and other companies is going to be done in Oregon. If you get too much of that done there, they’ll just start moving their manufacturing there. “The second thing is that we have to acknowledge where our jobs come from in Texas. In the last several years, nearly 80% of the jobs created in the State of Texas were not created by the Samsungs and the Intels. They were created by businesses with 50 or fewer employees. If you want to target a tax break that will create a whole bunch of jobs in Texas, then you exempt from the franchise tax all businesses that have gross revenues of $250,000 or less. That will cost the state 58 million dollars in tax cuts. But, if you save just 4% of the businesses that might have gone in the tank without that, you will triple that 58 million dollars. Let them spend that money on growing. Oil and gas was our golden goose in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We had the oil depletion allowance. Our golden goose right now is small business. If you want to have a lot more jobs, keep them away from the tax man until they are big enough to stretch their wings and get out on their own.” I’ve heard that you are good friends with Bob Bullock. He is a man who has had an enormous impact on Texas. Talk about him and how it feels to be filling his shoes. “I’ve already been through that. I had to fill Bullock’s shoes when I ran for Comptroller of Public Accounts and it is a scary deal. Everyone in Texas acknowledged that he was the most influential Comptroller of Public Accounts in history. I have to confess to you that my first years were driven by ‘I don’t want to be left in Bullock’s shadow.’ That legacy that he left made me wake up every morning and think of new stuff and make it work. That’s what drove a lot of it, just sheer competition of having to compete with his legacy. “The same thing will happen again. He’s been a great Lieutenant Governor, perhaps the greatest. He’s gotten more stuff done that anybody else. I have to go through it again. It’s not a pleasant deal ...” ...but it’s good for the state ... “Yeah. He’s a really good friend. He’s the honorary chairman of my campaign, and he has never hesitated to chew me out when I deserved it, sometimes he did it two or three times a day. (Laughter) Mr. Bullock has a reputation for being nonpartisan. He’s a Democrat but he seems to have worked well with Republican governors. The state’s business took priority no matter who was in the Governor’s office. How do you see yourself filling that role? “Same way. I’ll work with whomever the people of Texas put in office. I think the most important thing is Texas. “Let’s get our priorities right. You’ve got God. You’ve got family. You’ve got Texas. Uhhh... you’ve got huntin’ dogs. Somewhere down below that you’ve got political parties. Political parties are important but they are not more important than the State of Texas. If the people of Texas choose George Bush, I’m going to work with George Bush. I’m going to be with him when he’s right and I’m going to be against him when he’s wrong and I’m always going to do it with respect. Let’s look into the future. Imagine, you are elected Lieutenant Governor. You stay in office an undetermined amount of time. You are getting ready to retire. What are the most important things you will have accomplished? “You’ll be able to take a poll in Texas and the people will acknowledge generally that we have the most efficient government in the United States of America. People will wish that their federal government would operated even half as efficiently as ours did. Every child will come out of high school and that diploma will actually mean something. Employers will interview those children and be impressed with how well educated those children are instead of worrying about whether they can read well enough to fill out the job application. “Our community colleges will become one of the single most important government institutions in the state in that they will provide the work force and technical skill for the huge influx of manufacturing industries that have moved into Texas. “We will have a huge population of young people who are trained better than anybody in the nation. If we were a country unto ourselves, we would be the most prosperous one on the planet. If you could get everybody in Texas to understand one thing about John sharp, what would it be? “He’s an average guy, who for whatever reason, has uncommon ideas and can get things done. I think I’m a really good father with a really good family. Good kids...great hunting dog. (Laughter) I really do have a great Labrador Retriever. I don’t know...just kind of a common guy that has on occasion done some uncommon things...plain spoken...what you see is what you get. “Sometimes, I worry that I’ve been around government too long...but I don’t think that I have ever lost my mistrust for government. When you get in trouble is when you have a person who has been in government a long time and believes government will do the right thing. “It won’t. It almost always does the wrong thing. You have to kick it and prod it to make it do the right thing.” Scalding hot related story about Lt. Governor Bob Bullock here

Round Top Register - Texas Fun Travel Guide