March 19, 2008

Lines of Age

Clinton Adds New Wrinkle to Xerox Rhetoric Debate
with Quote that Rekindles Memories of Dallas TV Ad

By MIKE HAILEY

Hillary Clinton's most memorable sound byte from the Austin debate late last month came when she suggested that Barack Obama had been peddling grandiose rhetoric that he'd lifted from others and photocopied on a Xerox machine. The plagiarism charge was the first in a series of punches that Clinton threw on her way to a victory that she desperately needed in the Texas primary election two weeks ago.

But another line that Clinton used while campaigning in Texas has some Texans wondering if she might have committed the same basic political sin shortly after casting the first stone on the subject. The scene of the possible crime was an Austin rally where Clinton told supporters on the eve of the vote that she'd "earned every wrinkle on my face" while attempting to portray herself as the most experienced candidate in the Democratic presidential primary battle.

Clinton's wrinkles quote conjured up visions of a television ad that Max Wells aired last year in his campaign for Dallas mayor. The Wells spot was designed to stress his edge in experience over 10 other candidates who were running for mayor - and he tried to make it fun and light-hearted by using his grey hair and the lines of age on his face as the prop. "See these wrinkles," Wells says in the ad, pointing to his forehead. "That's from nine years on the Dallas City Council." Wells goes on to say that he had "room for a few more wrinkles" that the job of mayor would bring.

Wells didn't do as well in that race as Clinton did here in her White House bid. But Wells finished a respectable fourth - not too far behind Tom Leppert and the ex-city councilman he went on to beat in a runoff - and the wrinkles ad appeared to give him the boost that he needed to stay close. The Eppstein Group, which handled Wells' direct mail and media in the battle for mayor, was honored this past weekend for its work on the wrinkles ad with a prestigious silver award in the competition for Pollies that are handed out each year by the American Association of Political Consultants. That's the equivalent of an Oscar nomination in that particular business. The Fort Worth firm that Bryan Eppstein runs won a total of five Pollies this year - two silvers, one bronze and two honorable mentions including one for a Wells campaign logo that it designed.

This isn't exactly the spark for a new controversy, but it does raise the question of whether a member of Clinton's talking point team or one of her outside consultants heard about the Wells ad from someone involved in the judging process for the Pollie awards and paraphrased it into a canned quote for her to use on the stump in must-win states like Texas and Ohio. Dozens of major consulting firms are enlisted to be judges for the Pollie competition each year - and it's a safe bet that one or more of them have had some sort of role in the Clinton campaign this year.

Clinton doesn't have time to sweat the small stuff - and even if her campaign did pirate the wrinkles quote from the Wells ad - it wasn't a word-for-word reproduction. Wells probably wasn't the first political candidate in history to try to cash in on his wrinkles - and Clinton surely won't be the last to do that.

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The battle lines in the House leadership battle have come into sharp focus in a GOP primary fight for a West Texas seat - with some of Speaker Tom Craddick's most outspoken foes rallying behind an ailing incumbent that some of his key supporters hope to oust in next month's runoff election.

The battle for the House District 81 seat hadn't been viewed as "speaker's race" race until State Rep. G.E. "Buddy" West of Odessa forced first-round leader Tryon Lewis into a primary runoff that will be settled at the polls on April 8. But it is now.

There'd been speculation that Craddick had been quietly pulling for Lewis in the race against West but not that much evidence of it before the lineup was set for the runoff election. The speaker was clearly an issue by the start of the week, however, when Republican State Reps. Delwin Jones of Lubbock, Jim Keffer of Eastland, Edmund Kuempel of Seguin and Jim Pitts of Waxahachie appeared at a rally for West in Odessa on Monday.

Craddick's long shadow loomed larger on Tuesday when Empower Texans - a conservative group that's been one of the speaker's most vigorous supporters - pitched its support to Lewis for the runoff campaign. Empower Texans is the political action committee for Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, which is led by Austin activist Michael Quinn Sullivan. The group's endorsement proved to be lucrative for some of the Republicans it backed in round one. State Rep. Nathan Macias and Tom Annunziato - for example - both received cash and in-kind contributions worth more than $70,000 apiece from the Empower Texans PAC this year for high-stakes primary fights that were crucial to Craddick's future as speaker.

Craddick sees the challenger in the HD 81 race as a more solid vote of support than an incumbent who turned against him at the start of the session last year before attempting to get back on the team several months later when Democrats and Republicans such as Keffer, Pitts, Kuempel and Jones were trying to overthrow him before it adjourned.

West, who's having to undergo kidney dialysis three times a week, received a different kind of endorsement at the rally that the anti-Craddick Republicans attended when his doctor appeared to say that he's healthy enough to serve in the Legislature. So he's earning his wrinkles the hard way.

Mike Hailey's column appears regularly in Capitol Inside