The City

Steelman-McKool: What’s the Bottom Line?



The official line from the pundits on the Alan Steelman-Mike McKoolCon-gressional race is running something like this: 35 per cent “Dunno”; 25 per cent “Why’d you have to ask me that?”; 19 per cent “Who cares?”; 21 per cent “all of the above.” At a time in the election year when the armchair analysts are normally beginning to feel their argumentative oats, there is conspicuous silence from the peanut gallery on this one. My attempts to get up a decent discussion on Steelman-McKool in recent weeks have been met variously with shrugs, yawns and whimpers.

Some of this, to be sure, has to do with a boredom and/or bewilderment with politics in general this year. The post-Watergate blues are turning out to be more a matter of apathy than cynicism. But with the Steelman-McKool race, there is more to the soothsayers’ silence. As one normally garrulous, now tight-lipped, pundit said recently: “It’s the con-foundingest, confusingest mess I’ve ever seen.”

It’s true. The reason no one’s talking about Steelman-McKool is that no one really knows what to say. What do you say about a Congressional battle between a one-term incumbent middle-of-the-road Republican who’s returningto a brand new district (sans Republicans) which was gerrymandered for his opponent, a high-profile liberal former Democratic state senator? A race which has no big issue, no identifiable “political climate,” no presidential race on which to take an early reading?

Back a few months, it was much simpler. McKool had only one issue, needed only one issue: Nixon and Watergate. At that point the pundits were in rare form, predicting a McKool landslide from the anti-Nixon, anti-Republican groundswell building at the time. The rest is history. The Nixon resignation and the subsequent Eisenhowerish Ford administration have effectively destroyed McKool’s hopes of riding in on an anti-Republican wave. (Indeed, a sampling of Steelman canvassers shows that one week prior to the Nixon resignation, folks were slamming doors in their faces when asked if they were going to vote for Steelman; one week after the resignation, they were more polite and receptive, remembering Steelman as the “nice-looking young man” they voted for in 1972 rather than simply as a “Republican.”)

Nowadays, McKool is stuttering and stammering for an issue, suddenly doing a lot of vague talking about the economy and the old Republicans – equal – recession theory. Sample: “Republican administrations have never been able to cope with or fight inflation effectively. Under Hoover, we had the biggest depression in history; under Eisenhower we had the biggest recession; under Nixon we had the highest inflation. …” Etc. etc.

Steelman’s response is equally as yawn-inducing: “Inflation is not a partisan issue. Both administrations, Democratic and Republican, have made mistakes that led to it….”

Tight money, inflation, recession etc. could be made into a reasonably good issue, but McKool’s keeping too low a profile to make it work. There’s a method behind this seeming madness: McKool figures, and rightly so, that the more voters get a look at his diminutive stature, his New Jersey-political-boss mug and hear his semi-falsetto, fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice, the worse off he’s going to be, particularly when compared against Steelman’s Greek-god look and sound.



Money is not likely to make much difference either way. Steelman is operating with a campaign budget of about 100 thou. He’s raised a little better than half that already, and as an incumbent, shouldn’t have too much trouble putting the rest of it together. McKool spent over $40,000 in his primary race against three other candidates, and says he expects to spend about the same in the general election against Steelman.

One interesting sidelight about money: McKool apparently made an abortive bid for some big downtown real estate money, trying to capitalize on Steelman’s unpopularity with a lot of real estate folks (his work to defeat the Trinity canalization project didn’t make him real popular, nor has his advocacy of land use planning). McKool reportedly told the big real estate people (including John Stem-mons) that he’d be good to them in return for a little support, preferably of the financial variety. Stemmons may well still be willing to support McKool, but some other key realtors, after much haggling, decided to give some money to Steelman. “I guess they just trusted Alan more,” said one observer, “in spite of their obvious differences of opinion with him on the issues.”

So this election will not be decided on “the issues” or “climate” or money, any of that stuff. Rather, it will all come down to that most primal of all political measures, numbers -which man at the bottom line of the ballot box is able to turn out his folks when the chips are down. Even here, things are less than crystal clear.

Here’s what we know: The 5th District that Steelman took by storm in 1972 over incumbent Democrat Earle Cabell simply does not exist any more. Court-ordered redistricting has lopped off some 30 of the most rah-rah Republican precincts in the county -the Park Cities east through the White Rock area. That leaves Republican Steelman without a base. To add insult to injury, an additional 10 or so black precincts have been added. These are precincts that will go to McKool. Steelman’s showing in the black community last time out was embarrassingly low-15 per cent at best. And that doesn’t take into account the fact that McKool has always had a much higher profile in the black community than Cabell or most other Democrats.

And while Steelman has employed a black former Democratic precinct chairman, Don Ferguson, to see what he can do “down there,” even those within the Steelman campaign are less than optimistic about any kind of meaningful showing in South Dallas.

But the race will not be won or lost in the ghetto. It will turn on the blue collar suburbs, Mesquite, Pleasant Grove and Garland. Here’s where Steelman will have to create a base to have a chance. There are very mixed feelings about whether he can.

tor one thing, these are areas which, in large part, McKool represented while in the state senate. (A rough tally shows McKool at one time represented some 85 per cent of what is now the 5th Congressional District.) These are by and large conservative Democratic voters; on paper at least, there are only 10 or so precincts in the entire district which could be called Republican. They’re also the closest thing Dallas has to a “labor bloc,” traditionally one of McKool’s strongholds.

They’re also the most fickle voters in the electorate. Many of them are Wallace converts. They have characteristically criss-crossed the ballot in presidential years, going with normally more conservative Republican presidential candidates and Sen. John Tower at the top of the ballot, and straight-lever Democratic from the gubernatorial race on down through the courthouse.

This kind of ballot schizophrenia by conservative Democratics is what helped Steelman beat Cabell so badly in 1972. The Nixon-McGovern presidential race forced conservative Demos to the GOP column in droves, and most stayed there down through the Congressional races before switching. (Steelman doesn’t like to admit the legendary Nixon coattails helped, but they did.)

Just how many of those Democrats were voting against McGovern, not for Steelman in ’72 is the big question. Steelman seems confident they are now “his.” McKool, of course, says they won’t be when given the option of voting for their “old friend,” Mike McKool. All of which puts Steelman in a very odd position: He’s not really an incumbent in this race. He’s more or less a challenger, trying to bust up traditional voting loyalties between the bulk of voters in the district and McKool. He is smart enough to be running his campaign like a challenger. Word from the Steelman camp is the congressman is not hoping for a low turnout, as incumbents normally do, but is trying to drum up a high turnout.

“What we want,” says an operative inside the Steelman campaign,” is to carry heavily the few Republican areas in the district to offset McKool in South Dallas. That leaves the blue collar and low-middle income areas – the bulk of the district – up for grabs.”

“Some of those votes are the set union votes. They’ll all turn out and they’ll all go to McKool. But the rest are what you call your basic unde-cideds. We think we can get most of them. The question is, how many of them can we turn out?”



The Inevitability of John Schoellkopf

Some of us sort of knew all along. I can recall standing and talking with a couple of political reporters a year ago about the 1975 mayor’s race and sensing then that all the talk about Terrell, Allen, Smith, Gilmore, Gil-man, Humann et al was only idle political chatter. John Schoellkopf, I knew in my guts, was the only man independently wealthy enough and well-known enough to take on Wes Wise. And the only man ultimately willing.

When Republic of Texas chairman Jim Aston turned down the Citizen’s Charter Association mayoral draft this past June, the political fate of John Schoellkopf became all the more inexorable: He would wind up carrying the establishment ball against Wise, no matter how many other young turks and old bulls he tried to talk into it, and no matter how mixed his feelings were about it.

Some doubt his feelings are, or ever have been, mixed. Some think Schoellkopf’s aw-shucks-if-no-one-else-will-do-itguess-I’ll-have-to routine is all a cover for a deep and abiding political ambition in his heart. Who knows? Schoellkopf is a complicated man, a rich kid who never really has paid homage to the Dallas rite of “making it.” Maybe this is his surrogate for the company he never built, the payroll he never had to meet, the fortune he never made himself.

On the other hand, why should John Schoellkopf be concerned with some dumb political race when he could have remained fat and happy as kingmaker of the CCA and still had plenty of time to play golf? No, I think Schoellkopf’s feelings are mixed. I think he very much wants to prove himself, and city politics happens to be the most accessible means right now. But I also think he wonders inside whether it’s all worth it -whether, indeed, he’s got what it takes to cut it.

Which is precisely where Schoell-kopf’s problems with this race start. There are those in political circles who share Schoellkopf’s ambivalence about his ability to a) beat Wes Wise, and b) run the city any better than Wise. “I think he’s as big a joke as Wise,” a veteran reporter sneered the day after Schoellkopf’s announcement.

Even the CCA hierarchy is less than unanimous on young John. Certain members of the Old Guard bloc of the CCA, particularly Erik Jonsson, don’t think Schoellkopf is the right man because he lacks “executive-level management experience.” Not that he’s in any danger of having his downtown establishment support crater on him. He may not be Mr. Right to some of them, but at least they have a presentable candidate to run at their nemesis Wise next spring.

So John Schoellkopf has John Stemmons backing him. Is that still a big deal? We’re not sure, but we can say that it will take more than downtown support to beat Wise.

Joke all you will about Wes Wise, he’s hell at the ballot box. To make anything other than an embarrassing showing, Schoellkopf needs an organization and an issue.

On the latter, he already has problems. “This sounds strange, but the real issue here is leadership,” he says. “Wise simply has not done anything in a period when the city desperately needs strong leadership. But how do you translate something like that to the voters?” Indeed. Mounting a meaningful rhetorical attack against Wise is somewhat like trying to bad-mouth Dolph Briscoe. The man looks like a pushover on paper, but when you get down to the matter of actually convincing voters not to vote for him, you tend to come up empty handed.

Building an organization is perhaps more crucial than finding an issue. Schoellkopf says he knows this. (Give him one point.) But what kind of organization? “A broad-based network of key people in all sectors of the city- the black community, East Dallas, Oak Cliff, North Dallas.” (Subtract one point.)

Political “organizations,” of their nature, are not “broad-based.” They are built on and marketed to a particular geographic, partisan, social or ethnic segment of the voting populace. Schoellkopf doesn’t need a “broad-based” organization; indeed, trying to build one and counting on it next April would surely be a kiss of death.

What Schoellkopf needs, to put it bluntly, is an organization in North Dallas. The old cliche in city politics, “As goes North Dallas, so goes the city” is no pipe dream. Take a look at the returns on the Trinity Canalization bond election. It wasn’t crushed by a broad-based vote. North Dallas beat it.

Let’s say Schoellkopf does decide to build an organization in North Dallas. It will be sticky. Those are Republicans up there who’ve been chomping at the bit for years to get a hand into the CCA and City Hall. Organized commitment to Schoellkopf won’t come cheap. There will have to be some deals made regarding the Republicans and City Hall and the CCA council slate. Whether or not Schoellkopf is in a position to or willing to make them is the big question.

Not only does Schoellkopf need an identifiable constituency on which to base his campaign, he needs to de-velop some kind of coherent philosophy. Schoellkopf strongly believes his best bet is the liberal today, conservative tomorrow non-ideology he’s made famous since getting into the political scene. But that’s fighting Wise on his own ground, and if Schoellkopf expects to have a chance he’s going to have to provide a clear-cut alternative to the mayor’s nebulous politics. “He’s going to have to tell us what he stands for and give us a reason to vote against the mayor,” says one longtime Democratic precinct chairman.

Errata

In our October issue, we incorrectly listed the prices of several wines in two Dallas restaurants, the Beefeater Inn and Brennan’s. The correct prices for the Beefeater are: Lancer’s $8; Mateus $7; Liebfraumilch $7.50; Beaujolais $7.50; Chateauneuf-du-Pape $9; Regional Bordeaux $7.50; For Brennan’s: Lancer’s $9.50; Mateus $6.25; Liebfraumilch $7.50; Beaujolais $6; Chateauneuf-du-Pape $12.50; Regional Bordeaux $6.

Also, Chablis no longer regularly serves halibut steak, as we indicated.

Finally, the fine photographs used in last month’s story on the dart phenomena were the work of Bob Shaw.