Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
62° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

Is Ron Kirk Inevitable?

He’s the anointed candidate of the Dallas establishment, backed by Ray Hunt, Roger Staubach, Zan Holmes-you name it. Will that be enough to give Dallas its first black mayor?
By Jim Schutze |

HERE IS THE MYSTERY. For the last 15 years, all we have heard about the Dallas City Council is that it’s a mess. Racial division. Rancor. Stalemate. People yelling at each other. Nothing getting done.

Now, as if lowered from the sky on a crane, a candidate has appeared. Ron Kirk. For mayor.

Never been elected to anything. Unknown to almost everyone except City Hall insiders and Austin politicos. Not a Dallas native. African-American.

And all of a sudden, the story around town is that Ron Kirk is inevitable. He has tied up the kind of out-front, walking-tall, downtown business support that has not been visible in a mayoral election in Dallas since the Citizens Council got embarrassed and went underground in the mid-1980s.

He has put together an alliance of minority support that appears to unite people who literally have been unable to speak to each other for years. He is the obvious darling of some of the major local media. He has gone, more or less instantly, from nowhere to favorite son.

How can that be?

Well, of course, it can’t. He is not really inevitable, nor will he turn out to be everyone’s favorite son when the tale has been fully told. And it isn’t just a question of Ron Kirk’s personal charm. There are enormous agendas in play-people off-stage with big ideas, for the city but also for themselves.

But the first and most important ingredient in the whole concoction? It does happen to be, as a matter of fact, Ron Kirk. Himself.

Take, if you will, the conversation at this particular cable, at this particular business luncheon today in this large meeting room in a big downtown hotel. If this were all you were ever to know about the Dallas mayoral election on May 6, you would walk out of here believing that Ron Kirk is probably inevitable, whether you agreed with him on the issues or not. (And remember: you would be wrong. But we’ll get to that.)

This today is a table full of.. .no, this is a very large room full of chilly white people. A quick scan indicates Ron Kirk almost certainly is the only person of African-American descent here. Except for him, the people gathered here today are all professionals engaged in a form of real estate trade so arcane that the average person on the street can’t even pronounce it. Of the 100 or so people in the room, there may be 15 women present, and-beautiful, elegant, poised as they may be-they all look as if they could pistol-whip Ivan Boesky.

Kirk puts away a few bites of salad and trades anecdotes with others at the table. First, he tells about an experience he had as the Texas Secretary of State (appointed by Ann Richards in April 1994). At one point, he says, he was called upon to help dedicate a memorial to the black soldiers, called Buffalo soldiers, who fought the Indians in the late 19th century and helped open the Southwest to settlement. On that occasion, he says, he examined the memorial he was about to help unveil and was startled to find the name of one of his own forebears among a long list of Buffalo soldiers.

So far, so good. So he’s bragging a little about his Texas lineage. Most of the people at the table can get behind that. His story is met with indulgent smiles.

But then he says, “I did some more checking on this guy [his distant forebear], and apparently he was a notorious hood-It turned out that he was really a thug. He was the kind of guy who, if he were alive today, instead of being a Buffalo soldier, he probably would be in the federal witness protection program or something like that.”

Now everybody at the table really laughs. It’s that old Texas outback thing: rejoicing in the rascality of your roots. Now everybody seems genuinely warmed to him.

Then, later in the meal, Kirk tells another story, this one about the black church he attended on first coming to Dallas after finishing law school at the University of Texas in 1979. It’s a long, engaging tale, and, in it, he gives his white listeners a fascinating glimpse into the collision that took place during the Sunbelt boom years between newly arrived young black professionals and the very conservative, entrenched black families who had been in Dallas since the late 19th century.

He tells the story nicely, with respect for all of the people involved. People at this table are intent, listening to something they couldn’t know about otherwise.

The after-dinner speech he delivers is personal and charming. Tall, handsome, vigorous at age 40, he ranges around the podium easily, and there is in his speech a thoughtful informality, a one-on-one quality that reminds one of the very best stump speeches of Bill Clinton.

He talks about why he came to Dallas from his native Austin.

“I was like most people who moved to Dallas,” he tells the room. “We all thought this was a pretty nice place to live, but, secondly, we came here because we thought we’d make a whole hunch of money.”

He describes the last 10 years in the city’s life as “a period of well-managed decline.” He talks about “loss of tax base and revenue stream to the suburbs.” He says he thinks there has been a more subtle injury to the city, which he calls, “a loss of pride and a loss of arrogance.”

And now everyone is very intent on what he is saying. He makes quick concise points about the airport, the city’s geographical location on the continent, NAFTA, capitalizing on the city’s racial and ethnic diversity, establishing Dallas as a new center of hemispheric and maybe world trade.

Fine. Sure. So what’s stopping us?

Bickering. He spits the word out: bickering.

Aha. The heads in the room nod.

He leans into the podium. Now he’s going to close the sale.

“Very few of you in this room,” he says very quietly, “need the city to do anything for you.”

You could hear a pin drop.

“What you want is a City Council that will set a more positive tone for the city. What you don’t want and what kills your efforts is when you turn on the 6 p.m. news and see the city portrayed as bitter and divisive.”

If this were an English gentleman’s club, there would be ruddy old blokes jumping up all over the room shouting, “Here-here!” and “Hurrah for that!” But it’s Texas, so people show their extreme enthusiasm by wiggling their eyebrows at each other.

He doesn’t wind up on any big thumping note. He lets it wind down gracefully. The point is made. He has already sold the deal.

Ron Kirk is going to end the bickering.

He’s a straight-up guy with a very North Dallas, business-culture, opportunity-seeking perspective on things, even if he is black. Without ever saying it (which would be crass), he has artfully conveyed the argument that he, Ron Kirk, alone among the candidates tor mayor, will be able to end the bickering because he is a straight-up guy. And because he is a leader. And because he is black.

And then, once he’s elected, he’ll know where to take us.

BUTISIT REALLY CONCEIV-able that Ron Kirk, an African-American, will become the next mayor of a city whose racial history has been, to say the very least, a tangled web?

Dallas is not, for example, Atlanta-a point Royce Hanson wishes more people might keep in mind. Before he became dean of the school of social science at the University of Texas at Dallas, Hanson was, among other things, president of the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies in Washington, D.C., director of the New Community Studies Center at Virginia Tech at Reston, director of the National Academy of Science’s Study on National Urban Policy, Associate Dean of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, not to mention the fact that he has been a candidate tor Congress, chairman of a major metropolitan planning commission,. .and so on.

So, in other words, when he is driving his Ford Explorer through North Dallas on his way to a good Mexican restaurant for lunch, as he is today, Hanson is qualified to offer a few observations:

“People who compare Dallas to Atlanta don’t seem to understand that this is a much bigger city,”he says, “and that Dallas is much more diverse than Atlanta. Basically in Atlanta, the vast majority of the whites have fled the city to the suburbs, making it possible for an Andy Young to be elected.”

In Dallas, in other words, the whites are still in town. And they’re a kettle of fish. (But we’ll get to that.)

All the way across town in Oak Cliff, Dan Weiser is looking at the same numbers Royce Hanson sees. Weiser has been a demographer for local Democrats for years. In an office at one end of his large rambling ranch home, Weiser counts them out: the city’s ethnic makeup is now 48 percent Anglo, 30 percent African-American, and 22 percent Hispanic.

That’s 52 percent minority. But now he counts it a new way: Of all the registered voters in Dallas, Anglos make up 53 percent, African-Americans 38 percent, and Hispanics 9 percent.

And now let’s deal the deck yet a third way: Let’s say a minority candidate for mayor gets virtually all of the black vote and all of the Hispanic vote.

“He only needs 7 to 8 percent of the white vote to win,” Weiser says.

Sure. But. But Ron Kirk is not going to get all of the Hispanic vote, at least not in the general election, because he is going to be opposed by Dallas Mayor Pro Tern Domingo Garcia, who is considered one of the city’s most astute politicians.

What’s more, Kirk may have solid black support on paper, but there is question about the enthusiasm of that support-an important factor in determining just how many African-American voters finally show up at the polls.

One night recently, before he began his regular radio broadcast on KKDA, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was asked whether he would be supporting Kirk. Price threw his head back, grimaced, and gave birth to a long, agonized sigh. Finally he muttered, “Yeah. Yeah, 1 will. We don’t have anybody else to run.”

That’s not exactly Sis-Boom-Bah.

Without a very heavy minority turnout for Kirk, the Weiser scenario that delivers Kirk to City Hall with a 7 to 8 percent slice of the white vote doesn’t work. But there are more ways than that to slice the pie.

Who says, for example, that Ron Kirk can’t land more than 7 to 8 percent of white voters? Many of his supporters and advisors (including Dan Weiser), think it is possible he will draw much better than that from North Dallas.

Nothing may reflect that hope more pointedly than his list of supporters: Barzune, Bayoud, Brinker, Crow, Dunning, Solomon, Harrison, Holmes, Hunt, Norman, Simpson, Staubach, Hall, Marcus, Margolin, McGarr, Robinson, Williams, Ron Kirk’s roster of hackers includes the kind of names you might see together on an invitation list if a Bush married a Strauss.

In fact, the vote that Kirk’s handlers are looking for is what is usually described as the “Annette Vote,” after former mayor Annette Strauss-that is, strongblack support, very good support from the Oak Cliff and East Dallas progressives, and almost all of the moderate North Dallas vote.

It’s that vote-the moderate North Dallas vote-that winds up being one of the two keys to this election. Depending on who’s talking, the moderate North Dallas vote is either a sleeping giant or an opium-induced delusion.

A very important business leader in the city? who is officially supporting Dallas lawyer Darrell Jordan’s hid for mayor, said off the record that he thinks Ron Kirk has a good shot at North Dallas because of the moderate vote:

“1 think there are lots and lots of people in North Dallas,” he said, “who would welcome an opportunity to vote for a minority candidate for mayor, provided it’s the right person, to demonstrate, among other things, that they’re not racists. They just don’t like some of the things they’ve heen seeing coming out of City Hall in recent years.”

Mmmmmmm, yeah. Maaaybe. But that view of white North Dallas is not universally held among seasoned observers of the local scene (not to put too fine a point to the matter).

Another battle-scarred veteran of Dallas politics, who also would agree to talk about the current election only if he were not named, said, “You have to remember that Starke Taylor was only able to defeat Max Goldblatt because of the black vote.”

Translation:

In April, 1985, then-Dallas Mayor A. Starke Taylor Jr., a conservative real estate developer, cotton broker, and veritable icon of white North Dallas Republicanism, came within a whisker of being rejected by the voters of North Dallas in favor of Max Goldblatt, a perennial gadfly, cranky letter-to-the-editor writer, and Jewish Pleasant Grove hardware merchant who had been elected to the council because he was against big things and in favor of many weird things.

The late Mr. Goldblatt was against mass transit, major highway repair or construc-tion, an arts district for the city, and similar public works plots. He was also opposed to neighborhood self-determination, because he didn’t want people from neighborhoods calling him up thinking they could tell him what to do when he was on the council.

He was in favor of a Disney World-style monorail for downtown and the use of remote-control robots in the performance of dangerous police duties.

He was also transparently racist. He took pleasure in baiting the African-American members of the council and any of their constituents who might make the mistake of appearing before him in council session.

This fabric of virtues and sins served to make Max a powerfully charismatic figure among that set of people often described by local politicos as “The North Dallas Aginners.”

Believed by some to be a lost tribe of white people left behind when the John Birch Society folded its tents in the city after the Kennedy assassination, the North Dallas Aginners have proved time and again that they are a rough-and-tumble, unpredictable, very independent lot. They are, in fact, the other key to the upcoming election.

Starke Taylor beat Max Goldblatt in ’85, but barely. Goldblatt came within 500 votes of putting Taylor into a run-off. Taylor achieved his hair’s breadth victory only because Max’s overt racism on the 6 p.m. news every day for the previous two years brought out a massive black vote against him. So Taylor, the white Christian Republican mogul, was rescued by black voters, who disliked him less than they disliked the Jewish Pleasant Grove hardware guy.

Dallas. Go figure.

EVERYONE AGREES THAT North Dallas is monumentally important to this election coming up, mainly because it is monumentally important to almost all city elections. Pat Cotton, a professional handler who is working for Darrell Jordan, points to the 1991 vote that put current Mayor Steve Bartlett in office with an overwhelming plurality over Kathryn Cain and other mayoral hopefuls.

“In seven of the 14 council districts, six of them in North Dallas, you saw 79 percent of the votes for Steve Bartlett,” Cotton says.

Look at it another way: In 1991, some of the city’s minority council districts saw-as few as 3,129 voters go to the polls. In District 13 in the heart of North Dallas, approximately 21,000 people voted.

By court order, each council district has roughly the same number of people. But more of the people in the North Dallas districts vote, and they do it more often. Way more. So North Dallas is a huge factor.

The question in this upcoming election, then, is this: Will Ron Kirk win with an Annette vote, even if it takes a runoff, or will somebody else win with a Max vote?

Who else’ Darrell Jordan has taken a very dignified, low-key approach to cam-paigning and certainly is not the type to push the race button. But he may not have to. As one of his backers put it, “You still have the question, Wilt North Dallas step around a white guy [Darrell Jordan] to vote for a black guy [Ron Kirk]?”

Who knows?

Another major element in the race is Domingo Garcia, who is a close student of the city’s political history, knows exactly where the votes are, and is quite determined to line them up for himself. Interestingly enough, Garcia has been coming out against a number of things lately, such as a new basketball arena, and he has been touting the idea of a Disney World-style monorail for downtown.

The person who came closest to fulfilling the Max role, before he opted out of the race for health reasons, was former city councilmember and small businessman Jerry Bartos. A folk legend among Aginners, if Bartos had a cape he could be Aginner Man!

Bartos opposes mass transit and other grand ventures, giving him very strong Aginner credentials. He has a potholes and plane-fare agenda which would have appealed to plain-minded contrarians. And he has none of Max Goldblatt’s failings. In particular, no one who has ever served in office with Jerry Bartos will call him a racist.

Some of Ron Kirk’s big business hackers tried: they used the code-word “divisive” when Bartos indicated he might run against Kirk. In this context, “divisive” means racist.

But Comer Cottrell, the African-American founder and CEO of Pro-Line Companies and a leading Republican, countered angrily that he stands willing to go anywhere and tell anyone willing to listen that Bartos is not a racist.

“If they say he’s a racist, then ask them why Jerry was calling over here all the time a few months ago trying to get me to run for mayor.” (Barms confirms he asked. Cottrell said he wouldn’t run.)

But after keeping everyone hanging for a very long time, Jerry Bartos finally announced at the beginning of March-only three weeks shy of the filing deadline-that he would not run. Citing severe pneumonia and his doctor’s orders, Bartos said he simply did not have the physical strength for a campaign.

That does not mean he will not be a presence in the campaigns of others. Bartos may not be a racist, but he has a strong personal dislike of Ron Kirk. He doesn’t seem to be able to refer to him without using a lot of very unfortunate terms like “water boy” and “lackey.” Especially as his strength returns, Bartos may be strongly tempted to lead his Aginner followers to the camp of one or another of Kirk’s opponents. And, since politics is about winning, it will be hard for anyone to turn the Aginners away.

There are still these two faces of North Dallas: Annette and Max. Which face will dominate in the election? That depends on how much there will be for people to be against.

In 1987, Annette Strauss ran against long-time Republican county chairman Fred Meyer in what may have been the most positive and cerebral campaign in the living memory of the city.

Strauss would have been tough for anyone to beat. She had a we11-developed base, lots of experience, and tons of positive name I.D. (sidebar, page 60). But Meyer’s other downfall, in terms of stampeding Aginners to the polls, was that he wasn’t against much of anything short of depravity.

If you want that North Dallas lost tribe vote, and if you’re not the type to push the race button, then you’ve got to have something or someone emblematic, like DART or a new sports arena, that you can be against.

There has been talk, mainly among the Kirk-types, that maybe people in Dallas are now finally sick of talking about DART and Love Field. They don’t ever want to hear the words “Wright Amendment” again.

Could be. But there is about to he much more on the table for people to be for or against. Before this campaign is out, we will see an issue discussed that will make Love Field and the new basketball arena look dinky.

That’s because the city is poised just at the brink of a new moment that will be almost exactly parallel to a key period in 1950, when the present design of the city was still only a gleam in the eyes of a few very ambitious men: Then, a huge sum of federal money flowed to Dallas for levee construction along the Trinity River, highway construction, sewers, and so-called “slum clearance.”

It was that money that enabled certain city fathers to erase a large black neighborhood in West Dallas and to create the profitable Trinity River industrial district. On those decisions and with that money, the future shape of the city was determined, both in its physical arrangement and in the basic structuring of wealth and power within the community.

Now, in 1995 and in the years just ahead, Dallas is looking at the distinct possibility of a similar windfall and equally huge repercussions for the shape of the city, In the next five years, as much as a billion dollars in federal money may pour into Dallas for new levees along the river, new channels, new sewer connectors, highways, parks, and lakes. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers already has given its approval to the plans, and the relevant highway officials are thought to be enthusiastic.

It’s a truly monumental possibility. If the plans people are now talking about come to fruition, a newly developed Trinity River corridor could carry roads, residential development, and recreation right into the mainly minority sectors of southern Dallas.

Ron Kirk is a strong champion of the plan. Much of his business support comes from people who typically would be involved in such a mammoth public works undertaking, such as contractors, real estate investors, and service providers,

Jerry Bartos, as spiritual leader of the Aginners, has been guarded in what he has had to say about the plan. But it was clear before he withdrew that Bartos planned to tie Kirk to it. He was already emphatic in stating that he saw Ron Kirk as a tool of the big moguls.

“I think it’s arrogant,1’ Bartos said in an interview. “What we have is several Anglo Park Cities residents selecting a black they can control for mayor.”

Unlike Max Goldblatt, Bartos is smart enough and articulate enough to express his own skepticism as a coherent philosophy, informed by experience. He literally can draw you a picture, and he will.

He goes to a large blackboard at one end of the room and starts scratching out a rough diagram:

“Here you have the City Council,” he says, drawing a box. Then he sketches a bunch of downward arrows from that box. “The council’s attention is almost entirely downward, to requests from the Action Center (’Fix my streetlight,’ ’Give us a stop-sign’ ), or to their own committees, or to these ’fanfare briefings’ they get from the city manager.”

He draws another box above the council. “This is the city manager’s staff.” He sketches arrows pointing up from that box. “This is where all of the leadership and vision in City Hall comes from.”

He points out that, in his drawing, there is no linkage between the council, which looks only downward at minutiae, and the manager, who looks only upward at the big picture.

“But over here,” Bartos says, drawing yet another box, “are the group I call the Big Interests.” Then he angrily scrawls all kinds of arrows going back and forth between the Big Interests and the city manager’s staff.

It’s a brutally simple picture. The Big Interests and the manager speak only to each other, and the council, which is the only repository of elected trust in the city, mumbles to itself.

Even though Battos is no longer a declared candidate, he is still free-perhaps even more free-to stir this particular pot. And he’s good at it.

If, with Bartos as their mentor, the Aginners intend to lay an Aginner-style trap for Ron Kirk in the vicinity of the Trinity River plan or other major public works projects, then it probably will be Kirk’s destiny to walk right into it. Kirk is an unabashed champion of big thinking, progress, top-down decision-making, and the city manager system.

He speaks enthusiastically about the river plan as a means by which the city may recapture the old “swagger”-the snap, crackle, and pop that it had before the punishing era of the late 1980s economic doldrums. He expresses a typically business-centered view of what needs to happen in order for things to get done in Dallas.

The example he gives is the long, agonizing debate over improving Central Expressway, a political and social riddle that consumed much of the city’s energy throughout the 1980s.

“For the past 20 years,1’ Kirk says, “this community debated Central. Meanwhile, the suburbs went to work on it like crazy.”

That’s what Dallas must do, he says. Stop bickering and get to work.

He is unimpressed with the argument that deciding what to do about Central Expressway was a tough problem here because Dallas is a city, not a suburb, and building a consensus in a diverse city requires more painstaking political craftsmanship than it does in the suburbs.

“1 start with the premise already that as a city, we are a corporation,” Kirk says. “What we have to do is try to elect people who understand their role in government.”

That role, he says, is to set broad policy and then get out of the way, so that the professionals on the city manager’s staff (of which he was once one) can get the job done.

When Ron Kirk speaks to this kind of issue, the words coming out could just as easily he those of former City Manager George Schrader or any of the pre-1978 leaders who ran City Hall hefore the advent of single-member council districts and constituent democracy.

Clearly, it is just this kind of talk that Ron Kirk’s supporters hope will help him win that moderate North Dallas vote. For those voters, the Annette voters, Kirk should offer the best of all possible worlds-a bright young mayor with a mentality that is suitably business-style, top-down, and take-charge, who will reflect the city’s diversity and thereby help it overcome the worst of its history.

But it’s also clear that the Max vote, or the Aginners, or whatever you want to call them, are still very much a presence. Lurking just behind them is a new element, sometimes called the “Christian Right.” Although it has always been a mainly suburban outfit, the Christian tight has popped up at various points along the way in this mayoral season in Dallas proper.

A few months ago, most people were saying that the Christian-rightists would not pass the smell-test with Bartos-that he would not publicly align himself with them. His noncandidate status, however, may now allow for some more loosey-goosey arrangements and accommodations. If that happens, this election will be nastier and lower-minded than it might otherwise have been.

If, on the other hand, he avoids dangerous alliances, and if he can possible rein in his personal animosity and vitriol for Ron Kirk, then Jerry Bartos may help one or more of the other candidates come to a very acute and useful criticism of the structure of power in Dallas. That drawing with the boxes is pretty deadly. (But those are some big ifs).

in this election, the issue of race can serve only as a mask: Beneath that mask the real issues on the table will be the arrangement of power and the direction of growth.

If we are lucky, people will understand that those are the issues, and we will see an interesting vote, one way or the other, on the shape of the city’s future. If we are unlucky, everybody will vote instead on the basis of which candidate looks like his forebears came from what continent.

Whichever way it goes, one thing is clear, going in: nobody’s inevitable.

The Long White Line



MAYORAL CANDIDATES RON Kirk and Darrell Jordan have come out of nowhere, politically speaking. With rare exceptions, that’s been the Dallas Way.



Steve Bartlett. 1991-1995: After stint on City Council in 70s, was four-term GOP congressman. The city’s first avowedly partisan mayor, with strong base among North Dallas Republicans.

Annette Strauss, 1987-1991: Mega-fundraiser, volunteer for umpteen causes and charities. Worked in PR, served on Park Board and City Council before becoming mayor. Last of the old-fashioned “nonpartisan” mayors.

A. Starke Taylor, 1982-1987: Cotton broker, real estate investor, served on Park Board. Like his two predecessors, a nonpolitician and favorite son of the business elite (FSBE),

Jack Evans, 1981-1982: FSBE made name as president of Cullum Companies (Tom Thumb, Page Drugs); headed up bond election;

had never held elected office before becoming mayor.



Robert Folsom, 1976-1981:

Majordomo in local real estate development, mainly suburban residential projects. FSBE owned most of Renner, TX, when Dallas annexed it. Served on school board.

Wes Wise, 1971-1976:

Popular sportscaster, TV news reporter for Channel 8, council member. As pro-business as most Dallas mayors, but Citizens Council powers never forgave him for knocking off FSBE’s Avery Mays and John Schoellkopf. -J.S.

Related Articles

Image
Arts & Entertainment

Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: March 28-31

It's going to be a gorgeous weekend. Pencil in some live music in between those egg hunts and brunches.
Image
Arts & Entertainment

Arlington Museum of Art Debuts Two Must-See Nature-Inspired Additions

The chill of the Arctic Circle and a futuristic digital archive mark the grand opening of the Arlington Museum of Art’s new location.
By Brett Grega
Image
Arts & Entertainment

An Award-Winning SXSW Short Gave a Dallas Filmmaker an Outlet for Her Grief

Sara Nimeh balances humor and poignancy in a coming-of-age drama inspired by her childhood memories.
By Todd Jorgenson
Advertisement