GOP lieutenant governor candidate David Dewhurst is still fending off charges involving his campaign advertising. Dewhurst’s TV ads that claim that as land commissioner, he cut the General Land Office budget by 25%. Unfortunately, the Legislative Budget Board, which keeps actual track of such things, doesn’t agree with his arithmetic, and says he reduced the GLO budget by about 4%. Dewhurst’s campaign responded that he was comparing his proposed budget with previous commissioner Garry Mauro‘s proposed budget. As the dust settled from that exchange, The Dallas Morning News reported that a Dewhurst radio ad claims he had returned $13 million to the taxpayers — unfortunately, it was a ghostly variation of the same phantom proposed-but-not-allocated dollars, making it difficult to count in the taxpayers’ wallets. For the record, according to the LBB, Mauro’s last biennial budget was $97 million, while Dewhurst’s GLO spent $93.5 million — a drop of 4%.
In the campaign for U.S. Senate, recent polls among likely Democratic voters show the three foremost Democratic contenders — schoolteacher Victor Morales, U.S. Rep. Ken Bentsen, and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk — virtually neck and neck, dividing up between them roughly 60% of the votes, with less than 10% divided between newcomer Ed Cunningham and perennial candidate Gene Kelly, and the remainder undecided. A runoff seems probable — with the likely candidates very much up in the air. Morales, who ran a shoestring campaign for Senate in 1996 (defeating two veteran Democratic politicians in the primary before losing badly to Sen. Phil Gramm), is thus far running well on name recognition alone. It’s unclear whether both Kirk and Bentsen can derail him in the three weeks remaining.
This article appears in February 15 • 2002.
