Gov. Rick Perryapproved a $4.5 million award from the state's technology fund to a company founded by a major campaign donor despite the company's failure to win the endorsement of a regional screening board, The Dallas Morning News has learned.
The money was awarded in August to Convergen Lifesciences Inc., founded by Perry contributor David G. Nance. Convergen was allowed to bypass a key part of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund's extensive process for vetting applications, and to proceed for approval to a statewide advisory board appointed by Perry.
A spokeswoman for Perry said Tuesday that the money was properly awarded to Convergen because the law establishing the tech fund allows applicants to appeal decisions by regional reviewers.
However, the law makes no mention of such appeals.
The chairman of the regional board in Houston, one of the state's largest, told The News he had never heard of an appeals process. Walter Ulrich, also a former member of the tech fund's statewide advisory committee, said approval by regional boards is mandatory.
"It cannot go to the state without our board's approval," he said. "I've never seen that happen."
Walt Trybula, a nanotechnology expert at Texas State University who reviews tech fund applications for the Austin regional board, said the ability to appeal would undermine the process.
"If you've got a way to go around a review committee," he said, "why do you have a review committee?"
And the chairman of the state House committee that oversees the tech fund said the "extraordinary" process that awarded the money to Nance's firm shows that reforms are needed. "This is the most troubling case that I've seen come through" on the fund, said Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin.
Bill White, taking the gloves off, is hitting back extremely hard. From his statement:
"Rick Perry uses the governor's office to benefit his friends, his contributors and himself. The only way to end Perry's abuses is to elect a new governor. In the meantime the appropriate authorities need to investigate the corruption in the governor's office right away," said Bill White.
"I demanded last week that Perry disclose all personal and state financial ties with Mr. Nance and Perry refused. Now we see why. This is a bombshell," said White.
The campaign released the following video to highlight the corrpution of Perry's political machine:
Overcoming it in the next 25 days will be nothing short of a miracle, but overcoming it, eventually, is nothing short of mandatory for the sake of our state, our system, and our sanity.
I fully endorse KT's post, with the one important caveat that I don't think it will take a miracle to win. I think it will take an extraordinary, unparalleled amount of hard work, but I think his message -- public service vs. political machine -- is compelling enough and versatile enough to adapt to any environment.
And with that, I wanted to officially invite everyone to the Rally to Restore Competence with Bill White on October 19, 2010 on the UT West Mall at 4:30pm. Almost 300 have already RSVP'ed on Facebook -- come join all of us as we try to restore a little bit of competence and a little bit of sanity back to Texas.
In any other state, in any other year, you'd think it would be a sure bet that a politician like Rick Perry would be headed for defeat - he's the perfect example of the type of incumbent that should. Consider the following -
Rick Perry had serious primary challengers from the right and left who spent millions attacking him and forced him to drain his entire bank account.
Rick Perry is the epitome of incumbent - having been in one office or another for a quarter century and having been Governor for a whole decade. This weekend he refused to rule out a bid for a fourth term should be be re-elected.
Rick Perry doesn't have just one legitimate scandal, but multiple ones - shades of bribery, payola, land deals, hidden schedules, and countless cases of using his public office for personal or political desires. It's not like there is a debate on the question of whether Rick Perry has skeletons in the closet - we're just unsure of how many and what size.
How Rick Perry campaigns is the very definition of arrogance. He's willing to ignore the Press, bypass direct mail & yard signs, and stake his campaign on Tweeter as if openly tempting fate - just to prove that he can do it. It's the most frustrating thing in the world - both for the media who want an honest account of how government is run, and for many a Democratic activist. And at the end of the day, there's little that we can do about it - at least, in the next 30 days.
I think this all boils down to Rick Perry's Natural Advantage. I define this in two simple parts.
The Shrinking Media
Blissful Ignorance
I'll start with the Shrinking Media: Multiple writers on this site including Glenn Smith, Matt Glazer, and Phillip Martin have all opined on the decline of the Texas Press - from the decreasing number of political writers, the closing of reporting bureaus, and the sideways to downward trend in circulation. With a state growing as fast as Texas, enough so to receive a whopping 4 new members of Congress in redistricting, even sideways reader growth is not enough to keep our citizenry informed.
We live in a state of just under 25 million people. The top 5 major daily newspapers have a combined daily circulation of 1.2 million according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations. A rough estimate of the top 50 Texas newspapers by circulation still only gives newspapers a reach of 3.6 million; and many of those don't have dedicated political writers or the depth of coverage the major dailies are still able to produce for the time being. And while Texas has one of the largest political blogospheres of any state, the Texas Tribune is the only entity that appears to have captured any energy onine, with an aurience of 220,000 in July. Otherwise, upstart ventures like Newspaper Tree, the Texas Independent, Texas Watchdog, & The Austin Post, would be lucky if their readership broke 100,000 combined.
I focus on print media because it is the one place where we can have long form articles, multiple part series, and the time to truly inform the public when it comes to political stories which we know are full of nuance, background, and angles. TV reporting is an important part of communicating to the public, but we still use it as a crutch, relied upon to amplify traditional political reporting. Even if you take TV and Print together, we're still talking about a depressingly weak saturation of the public with politically tinged news.
Texas is a big state with dozens of media markets and major cities, the 4th highest illiteracy rate among US States, a younger than average population, and multiple widely spoken languages. We are not a state dominated by one city, one newspaper, or one TV station. Other than "Texan" we are not culturally unified. As a result, we rarely see the "Media" in any of its forms talking about the same story at the same time for a sustained duration, other than maybe faux news like the Governor shooting a coyote. Even major devastating hurricanes don't rise to this level as what's happening to Houston may not be the top story in El Paso or Midland.
So how is this part of Rick Perry's Natural Advantage? When you take all of the components above as they relate to the Shrinking Media you are left with this- Texas has an electorate that is under-informed and near impossible to inform with even the most basic narratives. It's a simple statement, and seemingly obvious I know, but relates to the second component of my argument.
Texas leads in job creation, but it faces a massive budget shortfall. Is anybody else confused? Gov. Rick Perry is ahead of Democratic challenger Bill White in large part because Texans see the state doing better than most others during a national economic nosedive. And yet this newspaper and others frequently print stories that detail the layoffs, spending cuts and accounting tricks that lawmakers will consider next year when they confront a state budget shortfall estimated to be as high as $21 billion.
Multiple polls have shown that Texans who believe the state/economy is on the right track or getting better are overwhelmingly for Rick Perry. Conversely, Texans who believe the state/economy are on the wrong track or getting worse are breaking for Bill White. It's one of the strongest indicators other than political affiliation for predicting which candidate a voter will prefer. It's clear that voters are living in two different realities.
In one reality, Rick Perry's leadership has resulted in Texas doing less worse than most states and day to day life is about the same as it has always been- other than the loss of your BP stock's dividend in your 401k. You acknowledge that there will be a budget shortfall, but every state has one and it will be fixed just like Perry did last time without much fuss. And if the budget has to be cut, all the better, because government is bloated with services that you don't use anyways.
In the other reality, the one that most reporters live in and are tired of writing about, the Texas economy is now feeling the pains of the rest of the nation. The foundation upon which the future economy is based has major cracks. This is due to an education system led by a state board that quibbles about facts, a health care system that leaves 1 out of ever 4 Texans uninsured, and a government that is prepared to cut deep into a social safety net which is threadbare to begin with. The fundamental basics of life for millions of people are just numbers on paper for a Governor who's too busy being a badass to engage in an honest conversation about the reality of his current 'economic success'.
This is Bill White's real challenge: It's not about convincing voters to choose between him and Rick Perry; it's convincing voters to choose between these two realities. He has to educate voters about the truth, the sad truth, and the whole truth that we live in the second depressing reality. The Shrinking Media gets it - they've been writing about reality for a decade. But they are tired, bored, and even as an ally in truth, talking to relatively fewer and fewer voters- voters who don't want to know or believe the truth because it is upsetting, unpleasant, and frankly repetitive. After all, it's far easier, not to mention human nature, to remain Blissfully Ignorant. And that's the terrible truth that I see as Rick Perry's Natural Advantage.
Overcoming it in the next 25 days will be nothing short of a miracle, but overcoming it, eventually, is nothing short of mandatory for the sake of our state, our system, and our sanity.
5:30pm Update: The Texas Tribune has updated their story -- the Governor's office is now trying to backtrack on their response. They have been caught in a blatant lie and now they are stuck lying even more.
UPDATE 4:19pm: Cesinger clarifies that "the governor, not the governor’s office, maintains two schedules. He maintains the political schedule through his campaign office, and the official schedule through the governor’s office." It's unclear, then, how the state office released a political schedule. We're awaiting the governor's office response.
Remember: Rick Perry has said, on television to WFAA, that "I consider everything I'm doing state business." Yet he keeps a private separate schedule that is somehow exempt from public records laws -- despite the fact that Perry has said, "I consider everything I'm doing state business."
Responding to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White's accusations that Gov. Rick Perry had hidden a "secret schedule" from the public, Perry's office said this afternoon that it mistakenly released a "political schedule" to the White campaign, which obtained a Sept. 15 schedule as part of a public information request.
Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said the office does keep separate schedules for the governor — "an official schedule and a political schedule" — and that the political calendar was "erroneously provided." The office maintains the political schedule is exempt from public records laws.
The Bill White campaign has already released the following video, slamming Perry for his secrecy and pointing out that it is against the law to keep a secret schedule:
It appears Gov. Rick Perry keeps a more detailed schedule than what his office has previously released this year. In what might have been a mistake by the governor’s office, Democrat Bill White’s campaign — through an open records request — received one day of Perry’s schedule that actually shows details not included in other publicly-released governor’s schedules. The Sept. 15 schedule received by White’s campaign on Tuesday stands out for including typically omitted information like drive times to and from meetings, briefings with staff, names of staff members involved with each event and minute-by-minute breakdowns of what is set to happen at various Perry appearances. No other schedules released this year show that level of detail.
Perry's schedules have been the subject of White's attacks for some time -- their campaign has its own website, Part-Time Perry, devoted to chronicling the (non)work that Perry does on a regular basis. White's campaign is hitting Perry hard for hiding his schedule from the public. From their press release:
"Rick Perry must immediately release the schedule he's been hiding from Texas taxpayers," said White.
"Rick Perry's doing Rick Perry's business while taking a full state salary and charging taxpayers for his lavish lifestyle." Perry's own website quotes him saying, "if the taxpayers are picking up the bill, they ought to be able to look at every item on the receipt."
Perry (in)famously said that there's nobody in Texas that works harder than he does. (See the Texas Tribune video, "Perry Says He Works 24/7, Despite Bare Schedule"). I'd agree to say that there's nobody who looks out for Rick Perry more than Rick Perry. As Bill White has said for months: Rick Perry is in it for himself.
Elise Hu of the Texas Tribune wrote about Perry's spare schedule previously, in her piece: "Perry's Spare Schedule Feeds Transparency Concerns." She also goes into extensive detail about another one of Perry's privacy practices -- deleting e-mails after only keeping them for a week:
Case in point: Perry’s office maintains a policy of deleting its e-mails every seven days, a shorter retention period than almost all other state agencies and major cities. It also allows staffers to decide which e-mails involve state business and thus must be retained, leaving open the possibility that individual employees who aren't well-versed in the law are innocently but irrevocably destroying public records. Perry’s aides have defended the retention policy by saying it simply follows that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. But the destruction of documents can make it difficult, if not impossible, to piece together what happens inside the governor's office. In 2007, for example, reporters were unable to determine what Perry knew about systematic abuse inside juvenile jails, and when he might have known it, because his office deleted e-mails long before the scandal broke.
Finally, here's Perry getting extremely defensive about his schedule in his WFAA interview last week, proclaiming at one point that "I consider everything I'm doing state business"
With a month to go before the election, we're finally starting to see Texas get its fair share of polling. As a traditionally underpolled state, our state's media (and bloggers) obsess over each morsel of polling information we get. Campaigns can go months trumpeting (or downplaying) whatever the most recent poll says. As a result campaigns and the media have never really had the opportunity to work an environment where polling is ubiquitous enough that polls get viewed in the aggregate and don't have to picked apart one by one.
For an underpolled state like Texas, polls can be an especially powerful narrative weapon. When I was working on the Rick Noriega for US Senate campaign in 2008, there were multiple times where a poll would show a single digit race and the campaign had a good week of fundraising and momentum- all of which would be halted weeks, if not days later by another poll showing a gaping double digit deficit against Cornyn. It's just an example, one which many campaigns in Texas, even Bill White, have had to deal with.
Sure, it's useful to keep up with the polls to glean insight, but there are multiple sites which are aggregating those polls and smoothing out the individual problems in any given poll- the three major of which I've posted below for the Texas Governor's race (though these do not include today's Texas Lyceum poll which would improve all these charts for Bill White).
Point being- we shouldn't get emotionally caught up with each poll that comes out in Texas in the next 30 days. There's not enough time to analyze each for varying degrees of validity, partisanship, or quality though bloggers and the traditional press will do their best to do so.
It's up to each individual activist to decide how much they want to pay attention to polls or how much they are going to let it affect their level of volunteering in the next 30 days.
My advice- stay informed, but stick to your gameplan just the same as if there were no polls at all.
This afternoon the 2010 Texas Lyceum Poll was released. I've embedded the full Lyceum release below the fold and made it available for viewing here. It follows a less thorough WFAA/Belo poll released yesterday showing a Perry-50, White-36 race.
Below are the main numbers of interest from the Lyceum Poll.
General Information: From September 22-30, 725 adult Texans responded to a statewide telephone survey asking about their attitudes towards the current political and economic environment, the 2010 elections, and issues likely to come up in the 2011 Texas state legislative session. Since all numbers reported herein pertain to the upcoming November elections, they are based on a sample of 416 likely voters, with a margin of error of +/- 4.75 percentage points.
Governor 48% Rick Perry (R)
42% Bill White (D)
05% Kathie Glass (L)
01% Deb Shafto (G)
03% Undecided
Lt. Governor
47% David Dewhurst (R)
30% Linda Chavez-Thompson (D)
07% Scott Jameson (L)
04% Herb Gonzalez (G)
12% Undecided
Attorney General
56% Greg Abbott (R)
29% Barbara Radnofsky (D)
04% Jon Roland (L)
11% Undecided
Generic Congressional Ballot
41% Republican candidate
29% Democratic candidate
Generic State House Ballot
38% Republican candidate
31% Democratic candidate
My thoughts-
Besides the incredibly small number of undecided numbers in the Governor's race, but even in the two other statewide races polled, the most interesting number here the 47% that Dewhurst received. In a race with almost no media or attention, Dewhurst is polling below Rick Perry and a full 9 points below Greg Abbott. Not only that, but 11% of the vote is choosing third-party candidates compared to 6% in the Governor's race and 4% in the Attorney General race. The 7% for Libertarian Scott Jameson and 4% for Green Herb Gonzalez is surprising- if I had to explain it, I'd argue that in general 3-party support is higher in downballot races (a fact born out in past Texas elections) and the rest may be due to the Green Party candidate being Hispanic.
Dewhurst has never been particularly popular, having slipped into his current office in 2002 by the narrowest margin of any statewide official. But if this poll is right, it has me wishing that Linda Chavez-Thompson had those millions of dollars to fund the base GOTV operation she's advocated for her entire campaign- a missed opportunity for sure. The silver lining here is that if Dewhurst wants to run for US Senate or Governor down the line we know he's got a weak spot which we should exploit.
As to the Governor's race, closer is aways better and some of the internal fundamentals noted by the poll analysis (posted below) are very good for Bill White. But White is still only at 43% and even if he got all of the undecideds and the Green vote he's short of Perry.
From the poll analysis...
Amongst self-identified independent voters, Bill White has a 16-point advantage (White 50%, Perry 34%) with Glass also garnering a not-insignificant 10% of the independent vote. Moderates also support White over Perry (White 67%, Perry 22%). Perry dominates among Republicans and conservatives, however, and it is this support that fuels his overall edge.
Down ballot, Dewhurst leads Chavez-Thompson among independents (Dewhurst 35%, Chavez-Thompson 21%), but trails among moderates (Dewhurst 34%, Chavez-Thompson 42%). Abbott leads amongst both independents and moderates, but overwhelmingly among independents (Abbott 45%, Radnofsky 14%) and only slightly among moderates (Abbott 43%, Radnofsky 37%). Independents favor the Republican Party in the Congressional election (Republican Candidate 32%, Democratic Candidate 25%), but moderates favor the Democratic party candidate by 10-points (Democratic candidate 39%, Republican Candidate 29%). As for the State House election, Democrats lead amongst both independents and moderates, by 13-points in the case of independents (Democratic Candidate 24%, Republican Candidate 11%) and 18-points in the case of moderates (Democratic Candidate 39%, Republican Candidate 21%).
Yesterday's money totals showed Rick Perry with a substantial cash-on-hand lead over Bill White -- which would mean something, if Bill White hadn't already put down at least $4 million worth in television advertising, according to the Statesman:
White spokeswoman Katy Bacon, explaining the spending difference, said White spent $4 million during the recent fundraising period to reserve television time for ads that would run in the future.
White's planned ahead for the campaign for months, and now Perry is stuck paying more for television advertising.
Now, I know the latest BELO poll looks terrible for White. I'd be concerned if the BELO poll didn't look so terrible itself:
All respondents were screened to ensure they are registered voters. To filter for likely voters, respondents were also screened to ensure they vote in most or all school, local and primary elections.
That is an extremely unusual screen on a poll. The screen is basically only looking at voters who vote every single time in every single election. I'm not at all surprised Perry is leading this much with that group -- you're talking about predominantly looking at an extremely active voter population or, as one person told me today, "people who drive by the polls every day to see if there is an election."
Four weeks is not a lot of time left, and every day there will be something new so every day that something new will seem like something major. For what it's worth, I am very confident in White's chances at winning. White's upcoming television advertising campaign is very strong. Perry's campaign probably has at least two negative attack ads (sanctuary cities and White's business connections, are my guesses) coming up that will worry everyone at first blush, even though they are likely to be just as big a pile of lies as his first negative ad (the one White has effectively responded to above). It will be a strong race to the finish from both campaigns -- and for the first time in well over a decade, our Democratic candidate is still within striking distance to make it happen.
WIth one month to go, candidates have only 2 major campaign finance reports of consequence- the 8 Day report and the 30 Day reports, the latter of which are now being released. While the full report is not yet available on the TEC (which doesn't post the PDFs until all candidats have filed) we have the following numbers via press release.
Bill White reported raising more than $4.68 million in the last fundraising period between July 1 and September 23. More than 80 percent of contributions that period were of $100 or less, and about 97 percent of individual contributions came from Texans.The campaign ended the period with $2.75 million on hand.
Online donations made up 65% of individual contributions for this reporting period.To date, the White campaign has raised over $21.3 million from over 25,000 donors since launching his gubernatorial campaign.
For comparison purposes, here are White's numbers from the mid-summer semi-annual report.
Bill White Report
Raised
Spent
Cash on Hand
Semi-Annual
$7,470,895
$3,276,607
$9,045,425
30 Day Out
$4,680,000
$10,975,425*
$2,750,000
*estimated spending based upon previous CoH+Raised to arrive at current CoH
Now, the drop in Cash on Hand is to be expected, especially if it includes media buys that have yet to run; we'll know more once the full reports are out. Otherwise Team White has spent nearly $11 million to move the polls about a point.
Update 1: Libertarian Kathie Glass reported raising $61,000 of which $35,000 is self-made loans. She's spend $39,000 and has $22,000 on hand.
Update 2: Republican Rick Perry reported raising $8.2 millin with $10 million cash on hand. It appears from reports that White's cash on hand is lower because of TV time already reserved and paid for, which Perry's number may not fully include resulting in the seemingly lopsided numbers. Phil will have more later on this point.
