Republicans around the country appear hell-bent on making Texas Governor George W. Bush their party’s presidential nominee long before annoying anyone to the point of actually having to cast a vote. What’s mystifying is the fact that many of the party’s more prominent leaders, especially the "money men," have latched on to the Bush  bandwagon without, apparently, ever giving a second thought as to the man’s record: a very clear record of not only centrist "Third Way" policies, but outright bashing of his own party’s conservative wing..
So what will the Republican Party’s conservatives get if, as expected, Bush steamrollers to the nomination and barnstorms into the White House with their help?
Frustration, public humiliation and outright enmity, if Bush’s record as Texas Governor is any indication.
Bush enjoys being called "The Education Governor," perhaps picking up on and refining a political strategem initiated by his father as President. He has made education his No.1 issue as Governor, and his candidacy for the White House is banking heavily on his record of success in turning around Texas’ woebegone public school system. Yet a closer examination of Bush’s record as Texas’ "Education Governor" reveals a lot of half-truths, misdirection, manipulation and outright lying – and a ruthlessness in silencing criticism and opposition which eclipses even that of the morally-turgid Clinton Administration.

The Bush agenda – same as Clinton’s
 Liberal Democratic Texas Governor Ann Richards and her Education Commissioner, Skip Meno, in 1992-93 set out to accomplish in Texas the objectives of the Hillary Clinton/Marc Tucker plan to "transform" American public schooling ... the plan itself having been adapted from President George Bush’s Goals:2000 idea, federalizing control over all public schools. Richards and Meno were ousted by the electorate in 1994, but their agenda only suffered a name change.
Campaigning against Richards in 1994, George W. Bush promised to "do away with the power of the Texas Education Agency" and "return local control over our schools" -- as well as pretty much anything else he could say to convince voters he was "conservative." He scored an upset victory over the wildly-popular Richards thanks primarily to the Texas Republican Party’s well-organized, well-financed conservative wing. Once in office, he appointed Lubbock schools superintendent Mike Moses, someone beholden to the power of the education establishment, as his new Education Commissioner.
Then he immediately set about breaking his campaign promises.
The power of the TEA continued to grow;  Moses "cut personnel" by transferring them from the central office in Austin to regional offices around the state, to exercise more direct control. The Bush-Clinton-Richards agenda never missed a beat.
Bush’s ally, State Senator Bill Ratliff, a Republican from Mount Pleasant, pushed Senate Bill 1 – a massive rewrite of the state education code – through the Legislatue in 1995. The bill was hailed as a landmark for returning control to local schools – but instead of giving control to local school boards, Senate Bill 1 instead gave more control to local school district administrators. The result was that local school boards became little more than a rubber-stamp for whatever ideas dribbled down from the TEA, the Texas Association of Secondary Administrators and the National Education Association. Those organizations, of course, took their marching orders from their parent organizations in Washington, D.C.
Bush himself affixed his signature to an Education Commission of the States report, "Bending Without Breaking," which called for the eventual elimination of locally-elected school boards as well as elected state school boards. Appointed bodies of educational administrators, "business leaders" and politicians would replace them.
Bush also applied for a national School-to-Work grant of some $67 million, spelling out in the grant application that "all" students "will" participate in mandatory career training, regardless of their wishes or the wishes of their parents. The Governor reorganized the Texas Employment Commission into the Texas Workforce Commission, and ordered the establishment of 20 regional "workforce development boards" to determine "business employment needs," and to encourage schools in that region to fulfill those needs. In plain English, that means the regional workforce boards are designed to establish employment quotas for each school district, funneling students into careers starting as early as the eighth grade ... a design chillingly reminiscent of the disastrous "polytechnical" schooling system used by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
Dr. Jack Christie, a Bush appointee to chair the State Board of Education, made two trips to Germany to study polytechnical schooling up-close and personal. "Kids don’t need a Shakespearean education any more," he later said.
To complete the Tucker/Clinton three-pronged troika of "cradle-to-grave" control over children, Bush in 1997 signed a bill passed by the Legislature establishing the Texas Healthy Kids Corporation, to provide medical insurance for "at-risk" students, despite heated arguments that the same program had led to unspeakable atrocities in other states, notably Pennsylvania. Two years later, what began as a "Texas" plan was enthusiastically integrated into the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, violating the familial privacy of hundreds of thousands of Texans.

Lies, misdirection and half-truths
Work began in earnest on rewriting the state’s education standards in 1992-93, and reached their fruition under Bush. "Real-world forums" took place during Meno’s tenure, during which the Texas Education Agency claimed that hundreds of public meetings took place, attended by thousands of people. One mother and school board member who attended one of those public meetings said later she was a little perturbed by the way the meeting was conducted; later research revealed she had been subjected to the Delphi Technique, a manipulative method which pushes an audience toward foreordained "conclusions." Evidence also indicated that only a few – not "hundreds" – of meetings actually took place, and those meetings were attended by only a handful of the public – not "thousands."
Under Meno, the Texas Education Agency had openly advertised plans to transform Texas into an Outcome-Based Education state; under Moses, it was stressed that Texas would henceforth be a "standards-based" state, following the change in terminology issued by Tucker’s organization, the Washington, D.C.-based National Center on Education and the Economy. When confronted by the evidence via newspaper reports in The Katy Times and by members of the State Board of Education that Texas had – contrary to what Bush’s appointee had maintained – secretly paid more than $2 million to Tucker’s organization to manipulate the development of education standards in the state, Moses complained he had been "ambushed."
   Over the next several months, heated debates continued to erupt every time the State Board of Education met to wrestle with everything from the new curriculum guidelines to textbook adoptions. The battles pitted six conservative Republicans against a coalition of six liberal Democrats and  three "moderate" Republicans, including Christie. The coalition was quite willing to go along with Moses’ contention that the new state guidelines, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) were gold, but the conservative bloc didn’t buy it.
 Moses and the TEA produced testimony from renowned educators across the country calling the TEKS wonderful; unfortunately for the education establishment in Texas, those renowned educators are as persnickety about being misquoted as any political candidate. Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute, one of those said by the Commissioner to have given her stamp of approval, sent a copy of her original letter along to conservative State Board member Bob Offutt – who read the whole text during the Board’s May 7, 1997 meeting. Ravitch called the TEKS "...a miscellaneous collection of unrelated facts, skills and concepts that will prove to be both unteachable and unlearnable."
 "Commissioner of Education Mike Moses was caught red-handed adding a little too much spin to his promotion of the state’s new curriculum standards," The Lone Star Report noted in its May 16, 1997 issue. "His actions have served to vindicate conservative State Board of Education members who have been ridiculed for their ‘unreasonable’ criticism of the document."
 Bush himself, in January 1997, had called the new state standards "mush." Six months later, with only token improvements made in the English/Language Arts portion of the guidelines, he hailed the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills as the definitive example of state curriculum standards, defending Moses and Christie. Christie and his coalition, possibly in an effort to prevent any of the political fallout from tarnishing Bush, eventually squashed the debate in a series of 8-7 and 9-6 votes.
 Conservatives refused to be silenced, however; the battlefield moved from the board room to researchers and the media. In November, 1998, the Taxpayer Research Associates of Houston held a news conference to announce the results of an analysis of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills – the lynchpin in the state’s heralded school-accountability system -- by an independent panel of experts. TRA President George Scott purposely timed the conference after the November election to avoid making the release of the findings appear in any shape, form or fashion to be "political."
 "We’ve got to take tha facade and the public relations out of this," Scott said. "We’re not doing this to embarass or castigate anyone."
 The researchers – three members of California’s Mathematically Correct organization and English/Language Arts specialist Sandra Stotsky of Harvard University – issued a devastating indictment of the TAAS: it wasn’t very difficult to begin with, and it had been getting progressively easier during Bush’s tenure in office. The result: the Texas Education Agency crows each summer about record numbers of students passing the test, Mike Moses looks good and George W. Bush looks like a genius.
 The researchers found that the exit-level math test, given at the tenth grade, tested students on eighth-grade level (and below) skills. The reading portion of the TAAS also showed similar regression. The  end-of-course Algebra I exam, which was not part of the TAAS at the time,  tested sixth- and seventh-grade math skills – very little algebra. Yet less than half of Texas students passed the Algebra test that year.
 And even with an easy test, a sizeable proportion of students still apparently couldn’t pass it. ." A Houston Press investigative piece by Shaila Dewan finally put into print what conservatives had been wondering aloud for years. In 1998 and 1999, news reports revealed that teachers and administrators in schools in Austin, Dallas, Houston and elsewhere might have changed students’ answers on the tests. Some sharp-eyed members of the media also noticed that not all students were being tested; at some Houston ISD schools, 70 percent of students’ scores were not counted. Reports ranged from certain students being told to be "sick" on test day, to a sudden sharp rise in the number of non-countable students classified as "special education."
 The record grows even darker on the subject of school dropout rates. In March, 1999, The Lone Star Report published "Fuzzier math? How Texas Computes School Dropouts" by James A. Cooley. Two months later, the TEA acknowledged that many school districts under-report their dropout rates – some by staggering amounts. A Katy Times piece on July 25, 1999, showed that in the three high schools in the suburban Katy Independent School District – perhaps the best school district in the state – 1,827 freshmen comprused the Class of 1997; yet only 1,435 graduated four years later, even though Katy ISD is one of the fastest-growing school districts in the state. Yet the "dropout rate" in Katy ISD is officially listed near one percent.

A knife in the back of conservatives
 While Bush managed to come through the curriculum war relatively unscathed, he realized that the conservatives could do him big political harm should he try to run for President. Republican State Senator Bill Ratliff began working legislatively to curb the power of the State Board, succeeding with Senate Bill 1 in 1995 and augmenting those restrictions in 1997 and 1999. Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, a Democrat, ruled in late 1996  the State Board had very little control over state textbook selections – they would only be allowed to determine whether or not textbooks met a narrow range of general guidelines, such as wearability. Conservative SBOE member David Bradley, in frustration, tore the cover off one algebra book in an effort to show it was unfit for students, since he couldn’t reject it for teaching the notorious "fuzzy math."
To make sure the conservatives were stilled, just before hitting the campaign trail to run for re-election as Governor in 1998, Bush turned his personal axe-man, Karl Rove, loose on them. The idea that Republicans never attack Republicans is, apparently, out of favor in the Bush camp; Rove and the Governor borrowed a page from Cecile Richards – yes, Ann’s daughter – the Texas coordinator from the ill-named People for the American Way: let the "free press" do your political dirty work for you.
 In October, 1998, Rove convinced the New York Times to run a scathing piece on the conservative State Board members – Donna Ballard, Richard Neill, Richard Watson, David Bradley, Bob Offutt and Randy Stevenson. Rove, Christie, Moses and Ratliff all took pot-shots at the conservatives in the article, with Rove himself saying "... in the carnival of life, they are in a very distant booth." The Times, of course, neglected to point out that the board’s conservatives were merely doing their job as elected representatives of the people.
A short time later, left-wing Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Molly Ivins did the same, singling out Ballard, Watson, and three new conservative candidates, Don McLeroy, Shirley Piggott and Judy Strickland, prior to the 1998 elections.  The state’s three most influential newspapers – the Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News and Austin American-Statesman – didn’t even need Rove’s intervention; their reporters had been equating the words "conservative" with "kook" in every education story they had run for months. It’s apparently all right to label a conservative politician as "backed by the religious right" without equally labeling liberals as "backed by the National Education Association."
 Ballard and Piggott were defeated by Democrats backed by Bush; conservative Terri Leo had been undermined in the same fashion in 1996, when she’d campaigned against Christie.
 The State Board members and candidates, of course, weren’t the only victims of Bush’s political back-stabbing: during his gubernatorial campaign in 1998, he traveled the state swapping endorsements with any Democrat running against a conservative Republican. The Republican Party’s top elected official didn’t even endorse his own party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, Rick Perry – who would succeed him if he’s elected president. His tendency to submarine fellow Republicans is apparently recognized by the party’s other elected officials: all but one of the state’s Congressmen have endorsed Bush’s presidential bid, the lone holdout being strict constitutionalist Ron Paul. State GOP chairman Tom Pauken was forced out .
 Nor, apparently, is the Bush camp content merely to squash dissent within the ranks of the party. One San Antonio radio journalist reported being arrested by Texas Rangers after he asked Bush a question about the Bush family’s connections to the secretive Council on Foreign Relations.  Other journalists report intimidation not only by Bush insiders, but by their own corporate bosses. Protesters atthe Governor’s mansion report they’ve been rousted by Rangers, while even Internet sites critical of Bush have drawn fire; the Bush campaign has filed complaints with the FCC about some sites critical of the Governor, and is rapidly buying up domain names to keep others from appearing.
 Mussolini would have been proud.

"Bushwhacked" conservatism
 Many Republican leaders nationally are flocking to Bush because they believe he’s "electable," perhaps with the notion that once he’s in the White House, he’ll be more amenable to party politics. Conservatives in Texas made the same mistake in 1994 and 1998, on a wide range of issues besides education.
 The state Republican Party platform, for example, calls for renewed emphasis on states’ rights, an end to government by Executive Order, more restrictions on abortion, an end to federal control over Texas prisons and a wide array of other conservative issues. During his term as Governor, Bush signed a law requiring parental notification before abortions can be performed on minors – but didn’t lend it his support until it was clear the bill would pass the Legislature overwhelmingly. The Governor has made no move to aid two Republican legislators – J.E. "Buster" Brown and John Culberson – trying to take Texas prisons back from federal Judge William Wayne Justice. In short, Bush has pretty much ignored his own party’s platform.
 What’s clear is that, if winning the White House is all that’s important, Republican conservatives can’t lose with George W. Bush. If principle is more important than pragmatism and power, however, Republican conservatives can’t win with him.
 

Dave Mundy is the Managing Editor of The Katy Times newspaper, the winner of the 1998 National Newspaper Association award for Best Coverage of Education and the author of DUH! Texas: A Case Study in Educational Takeover. The opinions expressed in this article are his own, and not that of The Katy Times or Hartman Newspapers, Inc.