"Stop messing with Texas!" That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed
on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey
Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas'
anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as
well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as
Republicans.
His point was that the big-government policies of the Obama
administration and Democratic congressional leaders are resented and
fiercely opposed not just because of their dire fiscal effects but also as
an intrusion on voters' independence and ability to make decisions for
themselves.
No one would include Perry on a list of serious presidential candidates,
including himself, even in the flush of victory. But in his 10 years as
governor, the longest in the state's history, Texas has been teaching some
lessons to which the rest of the nation should pay heed.
They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the
nation's second most populous state, with the most populous, California.
Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the
1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have
populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.
But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress
-- or lack of it -- over the last decade. California has gone in for big
government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature
largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay
area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.
Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public
employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget
deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to reduce the power of the
Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public
employee unions poured $100 million -- all originally extracted from
taxpayers -- into effective TV ads.
Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the
Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000
people from California -- almost as many as the number of immigrants coming
in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the
first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats
or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census.
Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes -- and no state income
taxes -- and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90
days every two years, compared with California's year-round legislature. Its
fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.
But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid
less than California's. But its test scores -- and with a demographically
similar school population -- are higher. California's once fabled freeways
are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro
Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
In the meantime, Texas' economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have
been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small
and large generate new jobs.
And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to
2009, some 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to
Texas, about the same number as moved in from abroad. That inflow has
continued in 2008-09, in which 143,000 Americans moved into Texas, more than
double the number in any other state, at the same time as 98,000 were moving
out of California. Texas is on the way to gain four additional House seats
and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.
This was not always so. In the two decades after World War II California,
with its pleasant weather, was the Golden State, a promised land, for most
Americans, while Texas seemed a provincial rural backwater. Many saw postwar
California's expansion of universities, freeways and water systems a model
for the nation. Few experts praised Texas' low-tax, low-services government.
Now it is California's ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent
government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas' approach has generated
more creativity and opportunity. So it's not surprising that Texas voters
preferred Perry over an opponent who has spent 16 years in Washington.
What's surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose
policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those that have
proved so successful in Texas.
Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted
at
mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday,
and his stories and blog posts appear on
ExaminerPolitics.com.