The GOP's Inaugurama

Gov. Rick Perry tells the crowd at his inauguration Tuesday that his administration will try to tackle the state's problems, after all. (Photo By John Anderson)

As you've probably heard by now, Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst were duly inaugurated Tuesday, just after noon, to the accompaniment of the Texas A&M Fighting Aggie Band ("The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Ballad of the Green Berets," et al.), a deafening squadron of fighter jets, and 19 cannon shots. As the event began, with co-chair Drayton McLane (owner of the Houston Astros) holding court on the dais beside John Whitmire, Henry Bonilla, and Eddie Lucio, for a moment we thought we had been magically transported to the box seats at Enron -- excuse us, Minute Maid -- Field.

After a warm, fog-thick morning, the day turned into a very fine one for an inaugurama, at high noon even a harbinger of summer. Much of the working press hid under the trees instead of sitting in the gallery where they belonged. The Capitol had been transformed into the image of a magnified Texas courthouse on the Fourth of July, and if you squinted from the cheap seats you could almost imagine that the day's theme -- "One Star, One Future, One Texas" -- had some actual meaning beyond the vaguely inspirational.

As it turned out, the policy high point was the invocation of retired Corpus Christi Bishop Rene Gracida. Gracida read Psalm 15, which describes an honorable man as one who, among other things, "does not ask interest on loans." If there were any bankers in the crowd, they didn't visibly flinch at the news that the Perry administration might be putting an end to usury. Indeed, nobody at all seemed to notice.

That was pretty much true of the speeches as well. David Dewhurst reached deep into the sentimental mode, directly addressing his ill and absent mother at some length ("She's watching 'live' this very second in Houston"), and even melodramatically recalling a moment of baby-kissing on the stump for land commissioner. The meat of the speech was stringy -- "We will balance the budget. We will stiff-arm new taxes" -- with obligatory nods to insurance and medical-malpractice reform. Dewhurst also handily won the George Hamilton Award for the best-tan-on-the-dais -- he should retire it before the ozone layer entirely disappears.

Perry echoed similar themes, with the latest mantra of the new GOP Texas: "limited government, unlimited opportunity." Get used to hearing that, and its Texan translation: "We don't need no new taxes -- I got mine, so you get yours." Apparently stung by the reaction to his recent statement that the state's new leadership couldn't be expected to solve the state's problems this session, Perry sternly declared, "Both our tax system and our school finance system must be reformed ... and these issues will be addressed under this administration." And Perry promised to keep taxes low while "building a 21st-century transportation system." In Texas, poured concrete bills -- unlike Medicaid funding -- never come due. The governor also lightly mined the Bible, his text not the Psalms but Isaiah. Perry compared, perhaps just a tad blasphemously, Isaiah's unforgettable call to prophecy -- "Here am I, send me" -- with U.S. soldiers enlisting in the military from San Jacinto to Normandy to Tora Bora. That was part of his peroration on his just-announced OneStar Foundation, the latest thousand-points-of-Texas-light volunteer plan to do all the things the new government will no longer be doing -- or if truth be told, never did.

Isaiah is an old favorite of Naked City as well. At this auspicious moment, the opening of the 78th Texas Legislature, we cheerfully recall Isaiah 10:1-4: "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches? Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain."

They don't make prophets like that any more.

They do, however, make corporate donors, and while many states acknowledged the recession by cutting back or canceling inaugural celebrations, the new Texas leadership simply stashed the statutory $100,000 and stuck its collective hand out. Among the long list of underwriters for this privately funded $1.5 million extravaganza were: ACS Inc. (which operates the state's Medicaid contract), AT&T, SBC, Sprint, Philip Morris, hospital giant HCA Healthcare, Pilgrim's Pride, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, Clear Channel, ExxonMobil, Reliant Energy, TXU, Microsoft, Browning Ferris, and on and on and on. All insist they ask nothing in return.

Why should they stoop to ask?