PARTING SHOT

Soon-perhaps even before these words see print-Attorney General Jim Mat-tox will do something to get me out of this awful bind. He’ll threaten some law firm or drag up some twenty-year-old dirt on an opponent, and then I’ll be delivered from the strange vision that has haunted me of late. I see myself walking into my precinct to vote. Shuffling like a zombie in a B-picture, I walk to the little booth and stare down at the names on the ballot. “For Governor. . .” it reads. Battling my own mutinous hand, I raise the sharp little what-chamacallit and try to drive it into the wall, or into my arm, anywhere but.. .No! No! Then, drawn by some inexorable force, I bring the pointer down and punch the hole beside the name of… Mattox! Argh! I run screaming into the night.

Thank heavens it’s only December, four months before we have to decide who to support in the March 1990 primaries. That gives me plenty of time to talk myself out of voting for Mattox, whom many of my friends- especially those in business-regard as the Great Satan of Texas politics. Mattox is a mean one, no doubt about it, and his handlers are trying to soften his image with the slogan “Tough for a reason-Because he cares.” But is toughness a liability? If the 1988 presidential campaign was any foretaste, you better be tough to run for office these days. Maybe I’ll have to change friends, because Mattox has also been making eminent good sense in the early going.

Let me ask some of those irritating, self-answering questions that seem to plague our language lately: Do I think that Mattox has made some mistakes in his public life, and If I were advising him, would I urge him to change this tactic and drop that one, and Do I sometimes cringe at certain flights of Mat -toxian rhetoric? Well, now that I ask, the answers are yes, yes, and yes. But every judgment of a candidate is always conditional, always set in a context: Mr. X is not Lincoln or Jefferson, we reason, but they’re not running this time. In this field at this time, Mattox looks pretty good.

I like most of Mattox’s populist positions, a necessary counterbalance in a state too inclined to let Big Business get the upper hand. Granted, his crackdown on fathers delinquent on child support didn’t eradicate the problem, but that’s exactly the sort of issue an AG should use his office to spotlight. More recently, I like Mattox’s damn-the-torpedoes-and-Baptists support of a lottery as a last-ditch attempt to avoid an income tax. The last-ditch stuff is mine, not Mattox’s, but I think that’s what it is. We’ve already gone about as far as possible with hiking the sales tax, and the Texas Supreme Court decision on equalizing school funding is probably the last straw. It’s time for this huge, wealthy state to answer the rude knock of reality at the door.

Mattox says he would use the money raised by a lottery to finance an equitable system of public education. That’s the number one issue every serious candidate must tackle, and the candidate with no plan for the schools is not worth our time. A decent education system for all Texas citizens is good, just, and sensible. It’s the only thing that will keep us from slipping to Third World status, it’s part of the contract among the generations, and whether you’re liberal nothing, you’ve got to admit that the only arguments against equitable funding are selfish, reptile-brained, and dishonorable. If we lived in some Greek Utopia of noble-minded souls, we could all meet in the agora and reason our way through this issue. And if the answer was new taxes, then so be it.

Sadly, we do not live in that Utopia. Instead, we live in a time of demagogues who, in every election, try to rally the haves against the have-nots with the battle cry of No New Taxes. The most shameful legacy of the Reagan-Bush-Clements-Quayle-Hance-Atwater era is what a professor might call the de-legitimizing of government. We now have a whole school of candidates who pander to the most selfish, unenlightened side of our nature, convincing us that any expenditure of taxpayers’ money will go to feather the nests of smug bureaucrats and loafers in the ghettos. In Texas, the latest wrinkle in that strategy is really disgusting: we’re already hearing that, gee, we sure want equal schools and all that, but now we can’t just throw more money into bad schools and bad teachers. Catch-22.

So it is almost impossible for any candidate to tell the truth about our current financial woes. Anyone who breathes the T-word will be a political corpse within days, buried by some drawlin’ Machiavelli who tells voters that lahk his momma always said back in Pheasant Junction, the gummint has got t’live on a budget jist lahk our family done after Odie broke his laig and couldn’t work that year.

Given the circumstances, then, pushing for a lottery may be the safest way to talk about enhancing revenues without being branded another taxing, spending Dixie Dukakis. This is obviously Jim Mattox’s strategy, and it’s a good one. He can’t be Atwatered on the tax issue, but he gets fiscal-responsibility points in that he does have a plan to pay for what he wants to do.

As for the merits of the lottery itself, pure-chance gambling bores me, though I would probably take a flyer now and then with a few hundred thou at stake. What’s fascinating, as usual, is to see how some of the right-wingers who are most rabid about getting Big Bad Government off our backs always want to use government to enforce their moral choices, whether on abortion or gambling.

Yes, gambling is dumb in the sense that most people lose, and it raises false hopes, and some people will spend way too much time and money chasing the big strike. So what else is new? Millions waste far too much time and money now on booze and $70 jeans and television and golf. Come on, Within a year or so we’re going to give more of our money to the state, one way or the other; why not let those so inclined have some fun with it? The voices raised against a lottery plan bring to mind H. L. Mencken’s definition of puritanism: the haunting fear that somewhere, somehow, someone might be enjoying himself. Can’t have that, now can we?