Ramrod straight, his hair neatly in place, his suit tailored to his slim figure, Baker stood up to address a crowd of business leaders gathered at the Houston Chamber of Commerce.
He had been instructed to keep his introduction brief, he told the audience. And that reminded him of a story. A little girl named Sarah was at church one Sunday, bored by a long-winded sermon. Her attention drifting, she noticed American flags hanging on the wall with gold plaques underneath each of them.
“Grandma, what are those flags there for?” Baker quoted her asking.
“Why, Sarah, those flags commemorate those who died in service.”
“Oh, really? The 9 o’clock service or the 11 o’clock service?”
As the audience laughed, Baker said, “I hope I’m not going to lose you in my service this afternoon.”
Wry and irreverent if old-school in his humor, Baker in 1978 had decided to put himself on public display for the first time. A backstage operative no more, he would try his hand as a politician himself, running for attorney general of Texas. He was not the most natural candidate in the world. He was earnest in a corporate sort of way, obviously prepared on the issues and a steady, hardworking, reassuring presence. But he was not a born glad-hander like his friend George Bush. He did not rouse an audience to passion. He talked a little too fast and could be too lawyerly. He was impressive, not inspiring.
The idea of running for office had appealed to Baker since before Mary Stuart’s death, when he briefly toyed with seeking Bush’s seat in the House. But now, eight years later, the Miracle Man had been “bitten by the bug,” as he put it, and ready to try. If Bush could do it, why couldn’t he? “He probably saw it as the next logical step,” Doug Baker said.
Susan, however, was anything but enthusiastic. She had hardly seen Baker the entire time they were in Washington and as soon as the Ford campaign was over, she became pregnant with what they called their “reacquainted baby” or “bonus baby.” On September 6, 1977, barely a month before turning thirty-nine, Susan gave birth to Mary-Bonner Baker, named for her two grandmothers. Bush was her godfather. Susan had been so worried about how to break the news of the baby to the rest of the troubled family that she hid the truth until she was already seven months pregnant. Now with a combined eight children, her husband was hitting the road again. Asked years later about her feelings about his decision to run, she told an interviewer, “They’re not printable.” Not that she would try to make him feel guilty. She knew that was a lost cause. “One smart thing about Jim Baker is that he doesn’t waste a lot of time on guilt,” she observed. “In fact, he doesn’t waste any time on it.”
Baker’s political emergence came at a time of transition for both America in general and Texas in particular. In the White House, Jimmy Carter vowed to turn the page on the past, pardoning Vietnam draft dodgers and promising a new era of honest government. But the country remained troubled. The nation’s cities were in deep decline. A twenty-five-hour blackout in New York City in the summer of 1977 touched off looting and resulted in thousands of arrests. Ronald Reagan, shaking off his defeat at the hands of Gerald Ford (and Baker), was finding newfound support as the leader of an emboldened conservative wing of the Republican Party. A television evangelist in Virginia named Jerry Falwell was on his way toward founding a new group called the Moral Majority to promote conservative religious values in American politics.
The Texas of that era was still strongly Democratic, though by tradition more than ideology. No Republican had been elected either governor or attorney general since Reconstruction. Just three of thirty-one state senators and nineteen of 150 members of the Texas House of Representatives were Republicans. But as in much of the South, the historic Democratic grip on courthouses and the statehouse in Texas was beginning to slip. As a fellow Southerner, Carter had won Texas in 1976, but he would be the last Democrat to do so for decades to come. Always conservative, Texans were increasingly disenchanted with the liberalism of national Democrats. That was what Baker, a relatively recent Republican convert himself, was counting on.
Baker was not the only Republican in his circle trying his hand at elective politics for the first time that year. Bush’s eldest son, George W. Bush, newly married but struggling with alcohol and the oil business, was running for Congress in a House district in West Texas, while Dick Cheney was seeking the only House seat in Wyoming. (Bush would lose; Cheney would win.)
When Baker sat down to talk with George H. W. Bush about his political ambitions at Bush’s house in Houston, his friend urged him to skip the attorney general’s race and aim higher with a run for governor of Texas. Baker was skeptical. It seemed a reach for a novice who, despite his experience running Ford’s campaign, still had relatively little stature outside the Beltway and no personal experience on the campaign trail. Baker was a cold-eyed, calculating man and as he examined the race, he concluded he could not win.
The incumbent governor, Dolph Briscoe, an understated rancher with a reformer’s reputation, was finishing his sixth year in office and seemed in a strong position to win another term. Baker assumed the only way he could win a statewide race would be to run against a more liberal Democrat than Briscoe. Looking down the potential ballot, Baker thought he found such an opportunity with the attorney general’s office. Price Daniel Jr., the former speaker of the Texas House and a well-known liberal, was angling for the Democratic nomination. If Baker could run against Daniel, he figured he would have a chance. And it could be a stepping-stone for a bigger race down the road. “Jim Baker’s election as Attorney General is an investment in the future,” his campaign wrote in a pitch letter to donors that was unusual in its candor about the candidate’s ambitions beyond the job he was actually seeking. “If you want to see Jim Baker as Governor, help elect him Attorney General first.”
Baker figured his biggest challenge was going to be a man who was not even in the race: Ronald Reagan. Texas had gone strongly for Reagan against Ford in the 1976 primary and few were more associated with the former president than Baker, who now needed to reach out to the right. He called Charlie Black, a young Republican operative who had worked for him on the Ford campaign but was well connected to the conservative wing of the party. He explained his plan—first he would run for attorney general and then, if he won, he would set his sights on the governor’s mansion. “He never said, ‘and then I’ll run for president,’ but I think that was kind of what he had in mind,” Black recalled.
One thing at a time. “Down here, Reagan routed us, so I’ve got to make friends with all of the conservatives,” Baker told Black. “Is there a good Reagan guy, a good hand, who could be my campaign manager?” A few days later, Black called back to recommend a political operative named Frank Donatelli.
Donatelli had recently served as head of an advocacy group called Young Americans for Freedom, then one of the bulwarks of the American right, and he would be an important ambassador to conservatives if Baker could convince him to help. When Baker got in touch, Donatelli was “a little suspicious that he was on the other side” of the Republican divide, but he flew to Texas to meet the candidate and ended up impressed. “It’s clear he did not have much of a relationship or understanding of what was then the organized conservative movement,” Donatelli recalled years later. But “he was certainly a conservative on all of the major issues.” Besides, Donatelli was looking for a chance to run a statewide campaign and this seemed like a credible opportunity that would allow him to move up the pecking order in the cutthroat world of political strategists.
He had his work cut out for him with the rookie candidate. “My first impression was very positive as far as his knowledge, his understanding of politics,” Donatelli said. “It wasn’t very good, quite honestly, as a politician. He was a backroom guy.” On his first trip to Texas to meet with Baker, Donatelli accompanied him to a speech. “While it was an okay speech on the facts, you could in no way describe it as inspirational,” Donatelli said. The word that came to mind instead? “Ho-hum.”
Donatelli set to work teaching Baker how to be a candidate. It did not come naturally. “Keep eye contact at end of sentences!” Baker reminded himself in notes scratched in the margins of one speech. On the left side of his announcement address, he wrote in big block letters, “Look at Camera!”
Always clad in the same uniform—boots, tan pants, and a forest green shirt that his staff eventually threatened to burn—Baker drove around the state in the family’s white Chevy Suburban, often accompanied by Susan and sometimes with Mary-Bonner in a portable crib. Baker would joke that he was the “candidate who brings his own baby to kiss.” The older kids were told to behave whenever in public. “I can remember their shooting the family commercials and we were all like, ‘Okay, no fighting on camera,’ ” Doug Baker said years later.
No one thought Baker had much of a chance. Bob Bullock, the state comptroller and an emerging Democratic power broker in Texas politics, brushed him off in a television interview in February 1978, faulting the GOP for not concentrating all its effort behind Baker. “If the Republicans had not fielded a group of Republican candidates and concentrated on the office of attorney general, Mr. Baker would’ve had an excellent chance,” Bullock said, already speaking of him in the past tense. “He could’ve probably won it.” Indeed, with all the other contests on the ballot, it was hard for Baker to generate attention. “We were competing with those other races just trying to get a little ink now and then,” said Pete Roussel, a Ford administration veteran who signed on to serve as the campaign’s communications director. Still, Baker had a reasonable plan to beat Price Daniel. What he did not count on was that Price Daniel would not be the only Democrat to enter the race. When Mark White, the Texas secretary of state and an avuncular backslapper with a more moderate reputation, decided to run as well, the contest was no longer what Baker had anticipated.
Daniel, a slender thirty-six-year-old lawyer with surpassing ambition and an aloof manner, hailed from Texas political royalty. His father, Price Daniel Sr., had served three terms as governor and held just about every other major political job in Texas as well, including speaker of the House, attorney general, and senator. As 1978 rolled around, he was on the Texas Supreme Court serving as an associate justice.
The younger Daniel had been elected House speaker after the so-called Sharpstown scandal involving bribery and corruption rocked the legislature and he pushed through a raft of reforms. But at a state convention to write a new Texas constitution, conservatives rebelled against him, dooming the effort. Along the way, Daniel made plenty of enemies. “He’s arrogant, shallow, superficial, overwhelmingly ambitious and deceitful, at least according to conservative establishment Democrats,” Baker’s campaign team said in a memo. Texas Monthly concluded that “Daniel may well be the most widely disliked person in Texas politics.”
Mark White, on the other hand, was a different kind of candidate, folksy but tough as a bull, far harder to paint as an out-of-touch liberal. Where Baker had graduated from the blue-chip University of Texas law school, White had gone to second-tier Baylor University for bachelor’s and law degrees. White styled himself a man of the people. He had been around Texas politics for years and considered Baker an entitled upstart. “I didn’t know who the hell he was,” White recalled later.
Baker first met White in February at a joint appearance before the Southeast Texas Press Club. Both were disappointed that Daniel, the one they were each targeting, did not show, but went ahead and presented their cases anyway. In reality, they were not that different, a conservative Democrat and a moderate Republican. Both advocated stronger open-records laws and more women and minorities on the attorney general’s staff. Both agreed that State Supreme Court judges should be appointed, not elected, a big issue at that time. Given the similarities, Baker tried to carve out his own identity by boasting that he was not part of the ruling Democratic machine.
“There’s not much question about my independence,” he told the press club audience, noting his family heritage dating back to the storied Judge Baker.
“I’ll bet he was a Democratic judge,” White interjected.
In the Democratic primary, a low-turnout contest for a low-profile office, Daniel had the advantage of name recognition but White impressed voters as a fighter and on May 6 he won the nomination 52 percent to 48 percent. Suddenly, Baker’s whole theory of the race was moot and he found himself in the same position that George Bush had been in during his 1970 campaign for Senate, when he thought he would be running against the liberal Ralph Yarborough, only to see the more moderate Lloyd Bentsen win the Democratic nomination.
The next day, Baker’s issues coordinator, Jim Cicconi, sent him an eighteen-page memo, warning that, for all of his down-home affect, White was also a slash-and-burn candidate known as “Switchblade Mark.” “By all rights, he should try to ignore us and run a low-key effort as long as possible,” Cicconi told Baker. “However, I don’t think he’ll do this because I don’t think it’s in his makeup—he’s always been a gut-fighter and gone for the jugular.” Cicconi urged Baker to go after White first, arguing that his record as secretary of state “can be wrapped around his throat.”
To gauge his chances, Baker, no spendthrift, choked hard and shelled out $20,000 for a baseline voter survey in May, hiring the Republican pollster Arthur J. Finkelstein from New York. The results were not encouraging. When respondents were asked about eleven public figures, Baker was the only one with both favorable and unfavorable numbers in the single digits—only 8.6 percent of the more than 1,000 Texans contacted had a positive impression of the candidate while 7.9 percent had a negative impression. “Jim Baker,” Finkelstein concluded, “is unknown to the majority of voters at this time.” When it came to a choice, White led 41 percent to just 12 percent for Baker. “The problem for Baker is obvious,” Finkelstein said. “The voting population is just so overwhelmingly Democrat.”
Baker was exasperated. Twelve percent? “I’ve been busting my ass for six months!” he complained to the pollster.
Against those odds, some close to Baker wondered why he was making the race in the first place. And was he really busting ass? “One had the feeling that he was running for attorney general just to let people know that he was a real politician or something,” said Jonathan Bush, the brother of his friend George. “He didn’t really have his heart in it.”
George W. Bush, by contrast, really was “running his ass off” for Congress and recalled campaigning at a shopping center one day with Baker. As George W. related the story to his uncle Jonathan, “I plunged out of the car and I’m in there thrashing around shaking hands and looked back and Baker is just sitting in the car.” Indeed, Baker seemed to be looking beyond the race to the next one to be waged by George W.’s father. “He was already saying, ‘When I come back, we’ll do this, that and the other,’ ” Jonathan remembered.
VOTERS COULD BE forgiven if they did not know who Baker was—even Baker was not entirely sure who Baker was at that point. As a first-time candidate, he was still formulating his positions on some of the key issues of the day. One of the trickier ones was abortion. Just five years after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, the issue had not yet exploded into the dominant question it would become a few years later with Reagan’s ascension to the White House. Baker had worked for George Bush and Gerald Ford, both of whom were trying to straddle the ideological divide when it came to abortion. Baker would try the same. An issues binder assembled by his staff said he could not disregard a Supreme Court ruling but would oppose allowing state funds to be used to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the health of the mother. If pressed, the issue book recommended he say, “Personally I oppose abortion. However my personal feelings are just that; personal. I won’t impose them on someone else who happens to disagree.”
On a questionnaire for the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, Baker’s aides outlined what they thought was their boss’s position. Question one asked if he would support a constitutional amendment banning abortions. “No,” Baker’s aides wrote for the candidate. “I personally oppose abortion. However, I feel that this is a personal decision and should remain such as long as it is within the limits set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. In somewhat broader terms, I oppose government dictating by law what are essentially matters of conscience.”
Question two asked about government funding. His staff answered that he opposed the use of taxpayer money to pay for abortions, with the usual rape, incest, and health exceptions.
Question three asked if he opposed the use of public hospitals for abortions. “No,” the staff answered, saying that it would not reduce the number of abortions. “While I personally oppose abortion and the use of tax funds to pay for them, I feel we should not endanger the life or health of a mother simply because we disagree with her personal decision that she cannot bear a child.”
The questionnaire was sent to Baker for his signature but he balked. “This doesn’t square w/ what we’ve said before on this subj.,” he told Frank Donatelli in a note. Donatelli ordered the staff to try again. Reflecting the candidate’s instructions, they should say that Baker favored a constitutional amendment “to limit abortion on demand” with exceptions for “rape, incest, or danger to life (not health) of the mother” and did not advocate the use of public hospitals for abortions.
Baker tried to tack to the right of Mark White, supporting the death penalty and the state’s right-to-work law. He opposed gun control and the Equal Rights Amendment. On other hot-button matters, he tried to hedge. On gay rights, at a time when Texas still criminalized “homosexual conduct,” Baker’s issue binder said, “I feel that consenting adults should not be subjected to criminal penalties for actions occurring in the privacy of the home. However, I do not feel that homosexuality should be recognized by the state as socially acceptable conduct.” On immigration, he said, “I would be very concerned that any crackdown on illegal aliens by the Federal government not result in discrimination against Texas citizens of Mexican heritage. (There is no place for racism in Texas.)”
Baker did not want to run on any of these topics. He was no culture warrior. Social issues such as abortion made him uncomfortable. Instead, he opted to concentrate on crime and present himself as a law-and-order candidate. It was, he knew, disingenuous. Baker understood perfectly well that the state attorney general had very little to do with criminal justice; the position was more akin to the general counsel for the state, representing Texas in court in disputes over the legality of its laws and regulations. The attorney general prosecuted no one and the office’s only real involvement in criminal justice was defending the state in appeals of capital cases. Of the office’s 14,922 pending cases at the start of 1978, nearly two thirds of them were about defaulted student loans.
But Baker also understood that voters did not want to hear about banking regulations and the like. While crime in Texas was still low by national standards, it was on the rise. Over the previous fifteen years, the number of murders in Texas had more than doubled and there were five times as many reported rapes. Overall, violent crime had tripled. One poll showed that only 5 percent of Texans felt that the problem with crime was improving while 46 percent felt it was worsening and 53 percent felt they would be a victim of crime in the next year. Baker knew good politics when he saw it.
Soon after kicking off his campaign, Baker held a news conference to call for a system of “determinate sentences” for criminals, which would take away some of the flexibility of prosecutors and judges in deciding penalties. Even as he positioned himself as a hard-liner, Baker rejected the type of mandatory sentencing that California had adopted, calling that “much too rigid.” But he said there needed to be more uniformity. “I believe the fundamental problem in our present system of criminal justice is the wide disparity in punishments which all too often makes a mockery of justice by being either too lenient or too severe.”
Baker was so pleased with the event that the next day he told aides he wanted eight to ten “specific instances where innocent victims of crime have suffered at the hands of one who was a repeat offender and either paroled too soon or let off the first time with minor penalty.” Aides came back with the case of Robert Winn, a forty-three-year-old who had just been convicted of his tenth felony and sentenced to life in prison. His previous convictions had resulted in sentences totaling 136 years plus three life terms and yet somehow he had gotten out on parole.
After Labor Day, Baker released a thirty-seven-page position paper detailing five proposals to combat crime, including stiffer sentences for repeat offenders such as Winn, more resources to fight drugs, and a reorganization of juvenile justice. In the campaign’s closing weeks, he went on the air with a television commercial titled “Had Enough” that bet his campaign’s remaining funds on his crime-fighting message. “My opponent, Mark White, says we don’t need to change our criminal justice system,” Baker said into the camera stiffly, as if he were an actor auditioning for a part he did not think he would get. “Here are the facts. A man convicted of murder gets probation—he’s free. A criminal sexually abuses young children—no jail time. A drug pusher sentenced to six years serves one, gets out and repeats the crime. Had enough? I have.” Unable to afford prime time, the campaign placed the ad on soap operas such as The Young and the Restless and game shows such as Family Feud as well as syndicated repeats of older shows like Gilligan’s Island and Gunsmoke.
Baker also made a play for minority voters at a time when the Republican Party was going the opposite direction. At a meeting with the League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC, he argued that Hispanic voters would get more by standing with him than with the Democrats. “If you write me off as a candidate, I owe you nothing,” he told the group. “And Mark White owes you nothing because he already has you sewed up. He will take you for granted. Let’s not take each other for granted.”
Baker’s outreach to minorities concerned Bill Clements, the colorful oil executive and former deputy defense secretary who topped the Republican ticket that year as nominee for governor. “You should be aware that Jim Baker and Bill Clements are developing differences in their policies,” an adviser to Clements wrote in a memo on August 7. “Mr. Clements has come out against a state civil rights act and at the LULAC convention in San Antonio a week ago, Baker came out in favor of it.”
Baker may not have had much experience on the stage himself, but his legal training gave him an advantage in debates. After one particularly rough face-off in San Antonio, Mark White called his campaign staff. “Hey, no more debates with Jim Baker,” he recalled telling aides. “This son of a gun knows as much about this business as I do and there’s no need for us exposing ourselves. No more debates.”
White then found himself at a joint appearance with Baker the very next day. Livid, he called his staff to complain, only to be told it had already been on the schedule. “Well, you cancel the schedule,” he replied. “Tell them I’m sick. I don’t want any more debates with him. He’s damn good.”
BAKER ENLISTEDa lot of national star power to help. Bush, of course, was there for him from the start. A host of other Republican luminaries also trekked to Texas to campaign for Baker, including Gerald Ford and Bob Dole. Baker even made a point of flying out to Los Angeles to ask Ronald Reagan to headline a fundraiser for him, which Reagan agreed to do. “That was, sort of, the beginning of the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Jim Baker,” the Reagan adviser Michael Deaver would later say.
The Republican stars were not looking at Baker as a future Texas attorney general, however. They were angling for the services of practically the only living Republican who had run a national presidential campaign at that point without being sent to jail. During their appearances for him, Reagan and former governor John Connally of Texas each asked Baker to run his next presidential campaign in 1980. Baker turned them both down. “George Bush is my friend,” he recalled telling Connally moments before heading into a fundraiser for Baker, “and if he runs I’m going to be with him.” Connally did not hide his pique. “You’re never going to amount to much,” Connally told him, according to an account Baker later gave one of his sons.
White took advantage of the influx of outsiders to paint Baker as a tool of national interests. “Most of the problems for Texas are generated by the Northeast,” White said at one news conference, “and they are supporting my opponent.” At another point, he called Baker a federal bureaucrat looking for work. “He’s come down here from Washington because he’s unemployed,” White said.
Another line of attack got under Baker’s skin. One of the biggest cases being handled by the Texas attorney general’s office involved the massive estate of the eccentric mogul and philanthropist Howard Hughes, who had died in April 1976 while on a flight from Acapulco, Mexico, to Houston for medical treatment. A cousin and aunt who stood to gain from Hughes’s will wanted him declared a resident of Nevada, where there was no inheritance tax, but Hughes had listed Texas as his residence in federal income tax forms for decades. At stake was $100 million or more in taxes.
The problem for Baker was that his law firm represented Hughes, which meant that he would have to recuse himself if he were elected attorney general. While Baker himself was not involved in the case at the firm, as a candidate he had frozen his participation in earnings from the Hughes estate, which ultimately would cost him a lot of money. In his memo analyzing the coming campaign, Baker’s aide, Jim Cicconi, had identified the Hughes case as “our chief vulnerability” and advised the candidate to emphasize that the issue would probably be resolved by the time a new attorney general was sworn in. But White poked his opponent about it, to Baker’s fury. “He went through the roof,” White recalled. “Oh my God.”
Baker had no compunction about going negative against his opponent either. But when it came down to it, he passed on what could have been a devastating attack on White. In Texas, the secretary of state was in charge of extradition of criminals to other states. Cicconi dug up a case where White had refused to extradite a man wanted by New York for a violent felony after being convinced he would not get a fair trial. The man later went on to murder two people in Texas. Cicconi thought it was “a killer issue” against White, but Baker refused to use it. “He was worried about his own personal reputation,” Cicconi said. “It was a very nasty accusation to level against someone, very different than a policy difference—this is like, ‘These guys are dead because you didn’t do your job.’ ”
For Baker, it was a moment of truth. “I think he viewed this as whether you’re going to take the high road or take the low road,” Cicconi said. At this juncture, Baker chose the high road.
MORE IMPORTANT THAN any specific issue were the political realities of Texas. Campaigning one day, Baker ran across a voter and told him he was running for attorney general.
“May I ask which party?” the man asked.
“Republican,” Baker answered.
“Oh,” the man said.
As a reporter witnessing the exchange wrote, it was “almost as if Baker had just admitted to residing at the state hospital.”
Baker had simply never developed the touch of a candidate. “He was the worst retail politician I’ve ever seen,” Jim Barlow, who covered the campaign for the Houston Chronicle, reflected years later. “It’s not that he was a snob. He didn’t feel right in forcing himself on people.” Baker was so uncomfortable with small talk that when the two of them were alone on long flights around the state in a tiny campaign airplane, Barlow taught him gin rummy to avoid awkward silences.
In many ways, Barlow concluded, Baker’s social background held him back. “We would be walking through a fair or one of these little festivals that every small town in Texas has and he would walk along and there would be people walking toward him and he would smile at them, but he wouldn’t stop them and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jim Baker and I’m running for attorney general and I’d like your vote.’ He’d just slide through the crowd.” By contrast, Barlow said, “He was very good at talking with the county judge or the Republican chairman and seeking their support. He was very good at figuring out what’s going on in the county and what resonates here and that sort of thing. But he just couldn’t take that and put it out in a retail way.”
Probably no one covered the race as intensively as Barlow. The Chronicle at the time was owned by a charitable foundation, the Houston Endowment, and under state law, such organizations were regulated by the attorney general. “The Chronicle was protecting its ass,” Barlow said. “They didn’t want to ignore the race and have the pissed-off guy say, ‘You didn’t cover me when I was running.’ But the Chronicle didn’t push me in one way or the other about the race. We played it straight.”
Still, on the editorial page, the Chronicle placed its bet with the candidate it assumed would win, backing White in an endorsement that did not even mention his Republican opponent. Baker was furious. Unlike White, who was born in northeastern Texas, Baker was a native Houstonian; his family had been key in building the city into the modern metropolis that it had become—including providing the land for the Chronicle’s own headquarters. How could his hometown paper snub him that way? But he never held it against Barlow, who came away an admirer of Baker’s intelligence and integrity. “I’ve always thought Baker was the best backroom politician I ever saw,” he said.
On November 7, Baker cast his ballot in Houston and then settled in to wait for the results. The backroom politician knew what was coming, even if he did not want to admit it. In the end, Baker took 999,431 votes to 1,249,846 for White, a respectable showing in heavily Democratic Texas. For the rest of his life, he would argue that his 44 percent was nothing less than a moral victory for a Republican at that time.
But the truth was, Baker had missed the moment. He was right that Texas was changing—1978 would be the year that Texas really began transforming from a solid Democratic state into a solid Republican one. Bill Clements became the first Republican to win the governorship in more than a century—essentially prevailing with Baker’s strategy. Governor Dolph Briscoe had been toppled in the Democratic primary from the left by the outgoing attorney general, John Hill. Clements squeezed by Hill in the general election by portraying him as too liberal, just as Baker had expected to slip by Price Daniel. Senator John Tower, for years the state’s senior Republican, managed an equally narrow victory for a fourth term and now had company as the party began expanding its hold on the Texas electorate. Tower, however, rued Baker’s loss. “Jimmy is the only one of us who deserved to win,” he confided to an aide on election night.
Baker had tasted the spotlight and found that he liked it. The idea of running again would linger in the back of his mind for years to come. But it had hardly been an auspicious start. “Baker was a great politician except when he had his own name on the ballot,” his friend Dick Cheney would always tease him.
Besides, everyone knew what was coming next. As Barlow wrote in the Chronicle after the election, Baker’s defeat “does not mean his exit from politics, but moves Baker’s aspirations from the state to the national scene.”
In Florida, where Jim and Susan Baker fled to recover from the race, the phone rang three days after the election.
George Bush was on the line.