Tag: Ann Richards

In 1994, I traveled to Texas to write about George W. Bush’s challenge to incumbent Gov. Rove was happy to talk about the governor’s race, but what he really wanted to show me, a political writer who covered races across the South, was the ad he’d just cut for Perry Hooper, a Republican candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court. They have tough ads in Alabama, but nothing like this had ever been seen in a judicial race. An actor portrayed a lawyer with a thick Southern accent, questioning Democratic incumbent Judge Sonny Hornsby over the phone about a campaign contribution request he’d received while he had a case before the court. This is a long way to get around to talking about what everybody else is talking about, but many threads connect the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle and last week’s Senate hearings with that moment years ago. Bush’s victory over Richards that year was his first long step toward the White House, where Rove and Kavanaugh worked together on a number of issues. Last week, former President Bush was making calls to senators on Kavanaugh’s behalf. The Hooper race and its dramatic aftermath was a brash announcement to the rest of the country that races which until then had been only mildly political could now be intensely political. Last week on Fox News, Rove worried that the politics of the hearings weren’t going Republicans’ way. What seems without question is that the hearings produced as clean a cleavage between red and blue as any news event in memory.