Library mastermind (and former Austin Chronicle city editor) Mike Clark-Madison is a woolly guy to get a hold of; At the 7 Steps party at Joe’s Bar and Grill, he’s frantically trying to get a handle on the national races. But sometime after the D’s took the House, the bibliophile Karl Rove shared his thoughts on Prop. 6’s victory.
“We did better than I thought. I’m happy to be wrong!” he begins. “We were told early on, to really show support for the library, in a way to keep the thing going, we’d need to get 60%. I laughed. There’s no way.” But no one’s laughing now. “I could take credit for everything and say I did everything right. [But] the citizens of Austin knew what they were talking about. … They trusted us.”
With that trust instilled, he wanted to make one point crystal clear, as the library plots its future at the (soon to be) decommissioned Green Water Treatment Plant downtown. “I don’t want anyone to think of as a incentive for a future developer to build a library in the basement of whatever goes at Green. I think its very important to a lot of people that the library be the focal point of this project. We’ve seen in so many cities where the library is a landmark, in which the whole city takes pride, and we can do the same thing here.”
But the election is far from his most nerve-racking experience. That would be his winning streak on Jeopardy! in the early Nineties. His secret? “I practiced with a buzzer. My dad, the engineer, built me a buzzer. That’s the important part. If you don’t know that shit you don’t belong on Jeopardy!“
This article appears in November 3 • 2006.