Independents' fate in Williams' hands - and so is his

In spotlight as ballot gatekeeper, secretary of state keeps future open
12:09 AM CDT on Tuesday, May 9, 2006
By WAYNE SLATER / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN – Roger Williams says he's never been afraid to make decisions – not as a baseball player, a successful car dealer or a big-time Republican fundraiser.
Now as secretary of state, Mr. Williams faces his highest-profile call yet: who gets on the ballot in this year's race for governor.
This week, independent candidates Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman will submit petitions to challenge Republican Gov. Rick Perry in November. Mr. Williams, a Perry appointee with political ambitions of his own, is charged with the task of ruling whether they gathered enough valid voters' signatures.
"As far as being in a hot seat," he said, "I'm in a seat that's required to rule by the election code. And that's what I'm going to do."
He's already come under fire from the candidates, who say the secretary of state is helping his political patron, Mr. Perry, by insisting on a time-consuming process to certify their petition signatures. Mr. Williams says he's just following the rules.
Mr. Williams has abandoned the past practice of conducting a statistical sample and says he intends to check every name, a process that critics say could drag into July. He says it won't take that long.
Strayhorn campaign manager Brad McClellan called Mr. Williams the governor's "hand-picked political appointee" and accused him of playing politics to benefit the GOP and feather his own political future.
"You've got a secretary of state who's looking at higher office instead of being the state's neutral elections officer," said Mr. McClellan.
Mr. Williams says he hasn't talked with Mr. Perry about the petitions or considered how his actions might boost his standing within the GOP.
"To rule by the election code is not partisanship. It's my charge," he said. "And it's what I'm doing."
Already, though, the disputes have landed in federal court and cast the spotlight upon Mr. Williams. So the 56-year-old car dealer and former baseball player, who has no experience with election law, is now the umpire who will decide Mr. Friedman's and Mrs. Strayhorn's political fates.

A salesman's bearing

Tall and telegenic, Mr. Williams has chiseled features and an aggressive bonhomie from years as a successful salesman.
As secretary of state, Mr. Williams traveled the state this year in a three-day, nine-city tour to promote the use of electronic voting machines required under a new federal law.
He established a Web site to promote voting and starred in TV ads developed through a focus group that were part of a $5 million voter-education drive in advance of the March primary.
The Strayhorn campaign has criticized his hiring of political operatives with ties to Mr. Perry to do fundraising for his office account, which pays for travel and gifts to supporters.
Mr. Williams has raised nearly $200,000 in contributions, many from donors with a history of backing Republican political candidates, including Mr. Bush.
Among his donors are businessmen Charles Wiley and Harold Simmons of Dallas, Richard Weekley of Houston, an advocate of limiting lawsuits, and longtime Bush family supporter Sig Rogich of Las Vegas.
As for the possibility he's looking to a candidacy of his own, Mr. Williams left all doors open.
"I love this job," he said. "But I also love public service."
Nationally, two recent secretaries of state – Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio and Katherine Harris of Florida – have followed election-year controversies with races for higher office. In Texas, the office has often been a springboard to higher positions. Past secretaries of state include former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk; U.S. Attorney General Al Gonzales; former Gov. Mark White; and Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
In the political futures market in Texas, Mr. Williams' appointment in 2004 as secretary of state puts him within an increasingly crowded field.
"I view Roger Williams as a future gubernatorial candidate – and one who will be ready the next cycle" in 2010, said Austin political consultant Bill Miller.

Baseball and Bush

It was through Mr. Bush – and baseball – that Mr. Williams got involved in politics.
He grew up as the son of a Fort Worth car dealer and played baseball at Texas Christian University – and briefly in the minor leagues – before an injury sent him back home, where he took over the family business.
In 1989, he was part of a group trying to buy the Texas Rangers. A competing investor group, headed by George W. Bush, had the winning bid.
"It was the best thing that ever happened to me because I got to develop a wonderful friendship with him," said Mr. Williams, who says he persuaded Mr. Bush to hire Tom Schieffer, who rose to president of the Rangers and is now ambassador to Japan.
When Mr. Bush decided to run for governor, he asked Mr. Williams to help.
The car dealer hosted an early fundraiser featuring the Platters in a cow pasture on his ranch west of Fort Worth. The soul group wowed the crowd with "The Great Pretender," and the day raised $180,000 for Mr. Bush's fledgling 1994 gubernatorial campaign.
"We put up a stage in the pasture," Mr. Williams said. "It was about 120 degrees. They were all dressed in their velvet suits. It was great."
Mr. Williams collected more than $388,000 for Mr. Bush's 2000 presidential run and more than $200,000 for the 2004 re-election campaign, making him a top-tier fundraiser for the president. The effort included a pair of fundraisers headlined by Bush political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney.
He keeps close ties to the administration. When a staff attorney in his office was quoted in a newspaper about whether the state's residency requirements affected Mr. Rove's ability to vote in Texas, Mr. Williams fired her, saying she shouldn't have talked to the media.
When Don King, the boxing promoter with gravity-defying hair, was stopped at the door of a major GOP fundraiser, Mr. Williams intervened to smooth the ruffled feelings.
"He and I sort of hit it off," said Mr. Williams. "We're both sort of retail guys who like to sell."
Deal Hudson, a boyhood pal who heads a conservative Catholic foundation in Washington, said he's not surprised that Mr. Williams has seized on his agency's role encouraging economic development.
"His version of public policy was business policy," said Mr. Hudson. "In other words, his entrée into the world of public policy was through what's good for business, particularly small business."
After being appointed secretary of state, Mr. Williams had cufflinks made in the shape of the Texas flag with the words "Let's Do Business" in gold – and matching lapel pins that he and members of his staff wear.
On the agency's official Web site, Mr. Williams greets visitors with a bright tone of boosterism.
"I invite you to do business with the Office of Secretary of State – an agency that carries a pro-active, customer-centric and friendly philosophy," he says in a paragraph next to his picture.
Mr. Williams said that despite the political criticism levied so far, and that yet to come, he has no doubts about the job he's doing.
"I've got two great sets of eyes watching me everyday," he said, pointing to a pair of portraits in his office.
One is of Stephen F. Austin, and the other, on loan from a nearby presidential library, is of former President George Bush.
E-mail wslater@dallasnews.com

Roger Williams
Born: Sept. 13, 1949, in Evanston, Ill.
Age: 56
Life and career: Grew up in Fort Worth. Graduate of Texas Christian University, where he played baseball and was later head baseball coach. Played in the Atlanta Braves' minor-league system. President of Roger Williams AutoMall in Weatherford; also heads financial and ranching companies. Major fundraiser for President Bush and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. Became Texas' 105th secretary of state in 2005.

Family: Wife, Patty; two daughters

To make the ballot
What it takes for independent candidates for governor to get on the ballot:
At least 45,540 signatures must be collected from registered voters by Thursday.
Signatures are valid only if the voter did not participate in the Republican or Democratic primaries.
A voter may sign only one independent gubernatorial candidate's petition. If a signature appears on more than one candidate's petition, only the first signature provided will count.
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More Kinky in the news here.......

Unfiltered Kinky
As noir novelist Friedman sets sights on statehouse, the plot quickens
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 7, 2006
By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

Amateur sleuth Kinky Friedman, creation of Richard F. "Kinky" Friedman, spent 17 novels traipsing among New York's finest tramps, thieves, murderers, vagabonds and vagaries.
Alas, the budding Texas gubernatorial candidate figured he finally had to let go while the lettin' go was good. So he abruptly killed off "The Kinkster" in last year's Ten Little New Yorkers.
The slowly recovering literary world is still a lesser place. But as Mr. Friedman cryptically wrote way back when: "The road could've ended anywhere, but it didn't. So you keep driving life's lonely DeSoto, looking ahead into the rain and darkness with the windshield wipers coming down like reaper's blades just missing your dreams."
The road to the governor's office, if that's where it leads, is paved with more lucid intentions.
"Writing is a very monastic kind of thing to be doing, and of course, campaigning is the opposite," Mr. Friedman said in a telephone interview from the campaign trail. "I knew I wouldn't have time anymore for the detective novels, and also the characters were starting to irritate me. It has pretty well run its course, I think."
In other previous lives, Mr. Friedman has been a singer of risky, ribald country songs and a columnist for Texas Monthly magazine. His dark-humored, thoroughly adult whodunits– dating to 1986's Greenwich Killing Time – are far crisper and juicier than the self-serving autobiographies and policy tomes churned out by most political candidates.
Imagine Al Gore writing, "He was lying on the floor with a cute little hole right about where his third eye should be."
Mr. Friedman has drawn bipartisan raves from both former President Bill Clinton and President Bush, who invited Mr. Friedman to read some excerpts at a 2001 White House dinner recounted in the author's nonfiction Texas Hold 'Em.
Detective Kinky lives way too hard to have lived for very long. He subsists on a steady diet of Cuban cigars, espresso, Irish whiskey and dark beer. A pet cat named Cuddles thrives on merely being left alone. And Kinky's coterie of Village Irregulars wouldn't know a Hallmark card sentiment if it kissed them full on the lips.
Mr. Friedman, running as an independent, knows that his novels provide ample ammunition for any political attack ads down the road. Simply pick an excerpt, almost any excerpt.
Carousing abounds, as do the lead character's decidedly dim views of Baptists, hunters, marriage and The Eagles, to name a few. True love pretty much rings false to the gumshoe, too, especially if it comes from a woman.
"Nobody really understood women except maybe bisexual hairdressers," detective Kinky philosophizes. "I'd often felt that a man without a woman was like a neck without a pain."
The author anticipates a "Swift Boat kind of thing" if he's seen as a serious political contender later this year. "To which we just respond, 'If you want a politically correct candidate, you've got three good choices, and I'm not one of 'em,' " he said. "It's the enemy of integrity, the enemy of artistic freedom."
His earlier detective novels were "written out of desperation, and that's the best way to write," Mr. Friedman said. "Everybody from Edgar Allen Poe to Kafka to Van Gogh to Hank Williams to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Hemingway – they were all pretty miserable in their personal lives. That's important to great writing. It also helps to be dead."
Mr. Friedman, 61, has a short book of quotes coming out soon and is striving to finish off a "very poignant, sweet story" called A Christmas Pig before the campaign really heats up. He still pecks them out on an electric typewriter, cursing the cursor and the Internet, save for a necessary campaign evil called kinkyfriedman.com.

Now he wants to write an end to it all by becoming governor.
"I suspect when we win this thing, I'll be working full-time for the people of Texas," Mr. Friedman said. "My hope is that literature's loss will be politics' gain."
E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com

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