Bill Clements

That date was pretty widely repeated until just recently a document from the archives at Llano Estacado Winery set us all straight.

January Wiese from Texas Hill Country Wineries told me that when the new ownership team took over at Llano Estacado, Chris Pernu found the original signed proclamation of the first Texas Wine Month, dated September 1988, signed by then Governor Bill Clements.

Here's how the original designation letter reads.

"In recent years, the wine industry in our state has grown tremendously, and the quality of the wines being produced in Texas is comparable to the best wines produced in America and other countries throughout the world.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, Bill Clements left $100 million to do.

It helps, right.

And then they raised...

And it reminds me, because I'm old, of the Democrats before the Republicans took over, when all the Republicans were in the, you know, Democratic Party, and you had sort of the Connally Democrats and you had kind of the Yarborough Democrats, and it was the conservatives and the liberals, and they got split.

And when they got split, Bill Clements ran up the middle in 1978.

Right.

In an, in a midterm election for Jimmy Carter, where the president was unpopular, the economy was bad, you know-

One of the things that I like f- that I'm happy to be talking about is that I've been wrestling a little bit with kind of the pace of partisan, of change in the party system and in the relative balance of power between the parties.

Right.

Right? And, you know, we, you, you mentioned Clements in '78, and there was a long time between John Tower in '61 and Bill Clements in 1978 in terms of that shift, and I think the comparison is a little deceptive for the reasons you've just laid out-

Mm-hmm

Uh, he's the one in 2000 who would go to Florida, and when James A. Baker III comes waltzing in in his boots and in a bunch of papers, they were like, "You know what? Let's just let W win so he doesn't lecture us." And that's about what happened.

Anyway, Peter Roussel told me the story about 1978 attorney general's race, and that's the year that Bill Clements wins the governor's race.

First Republican to win in a long time.

And so he wins the Republican's race, but then they drop down in the AG's race and voted for a Democrat over a Republican.

I think he beat Dolph Briscoe.

And then in the next race, they, uh, they vote Democrat.

They vote for Mark White for attorney general, who would go on in '82 to beat Bill Clements and be the governor.

And I would argue, my favorite Democrat of all time, that Mark White was a good governor.

positions, right? Yes.

The last time we had something like this was when Bill Clements was governor, actually, and you had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.

But what's different now is in 2003 when the Republicans took over the Texas House of Representatives, they started a government reorganization bill and they methodically over the next two decades have ceded power to the executive branch.

So we actually have a much stronger governor now than we – had the last time there was a divided government that way.