Shapiro Branches Out

But this race has a dynamic unlike any other. If Hutchison resigns early - almost a certainty at this point - Gov. Rick Perry will appoint her replacement. A special election will follow, but that replacement will have at least a claim to incumbency status that may be hard to shake.

The first out of the box was Michael Williams, the long-time Railroad Commissioner, who was a George W. Bush appointee who has never faced a serious opponent, but nonetheless has hit the ground running with a very active and Internet-saavy grassroots campaign.

Williams' fellow Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones has also put her name forward. Although she has little name recognition outside her San Antonio base, Jones is hoping to change that. And of course, there's also former Secretary of State Roger Williams, who will have money to put into the race and strong support in the business community.

One potential candidate in this non-race is only now just starting to spread out her wings, and she may have as good of a chance as any of them. Long-time State Senator and former Plano Mayor Florence Shapiro is getting out and about, meeting the party base and showing her strength.
Experience, experience, experience

In terms of legislative experience, Shapiro trumps them all. She entered the Texas Senate in 1993, a landmark year that represented the Year of the Republican Woman. Shapiro and fellow GOP Senator Jane Nelson entered the Texas Senate and Hutchison won a special election to the U.S. Senate.

Among Republican women, there's a pride in having one of the two U.S. Senate seats. Hutchison is the first and only woman from Texas to have such an honor, and many Republican women wouldn't mind keeping that seat. Jones or Shapiro would make that possible.

Shapiro deferred campaigning during the session, and while not officially campaigning now, she is getting out and working the state. On Monday, she spoke to the Williamson County Republican Women and gave a speech that was about 90 percent legislative update and only 10 percent campaign.

But Shapiro can get away with that, because she's been in the thick of most of the big legislative battles for years. Her speech was good Republican red meat, and while some conservative capitol watchers aren't sure she has the best conservative credentials, she spoke like a suburban Dallas version of Barry Goldwater to this crowd.

"We passed a budget that did not increase taxes, we lowered taxes," she said, pointing to the increasing of the franchise tax threshold from businesses with incomes of $300,000 to incomes of $1 million. The effect of that is to remove 40,000 businesses from the franchise tax altogether.

Commenting on a recent Financial Times article which compared Texas' budgetary position favorably with that of California, Shapiro said, "It shows you that conservative principles and values in the right place are very beneficial."

Of course, Texas avoided a tax increase or a siphoning off of Rainy Day Fund money partly by taking federal stimulus money, but Shapiro pointed out that the state was discriminating in the money it took, in order to keep the state's position strong in the future.

"Anything that didn't have strings attached, we looked at very closely," she said. "Anything that had strings attached, we didn't take, such as unemployment insurance."

Shapiro is about as much of an insider as they come, but she was quick to pay tribute to the conservative activists of the Tea Party movement, the Barbarians at the Gate of liberalism. She took issue with the media and administration portrayals of these people as some kind of "right wing nuts."

"Right wing nuts?" she said. "Let me tell you, those are average Americans coming out. They are not extremists, they are people who care. They're asking questions like, ‘What's in the [health care] bill?'"

Shapiro took aim at federal entitlements, which put Texas in a box, limiting the state's ability to control the growth of government because so much of the budget is tied up in government mandates.

This will only get worse, she said, if Obama's health care legislation passes, with its massive government intervention which she said will cause businesses to dump insurance, effectively creating a single-payer system by default. Thus, whether the supporters of such legislation acknowledge it or not, Shapiro said it would be de-facto socialized medicine.

"Any opportunity to socialize health care in this country must be stopped," she said. "I have never seen government create a job in my life. People create jobs."

And she mixed no words on what she thinks of the financial stability of such a program. Washington, she said, does not have a good track record of creating programs that are fiscally sustainable.

"People think Bernie Madoff had a Ponzie Scheme," she said. "I'll tell you who has a Ponzie Scheme, it's the federal government: entitlement programs, social security, Medicaid and Medicare."

Education, Voter ID

As chairman of the Senate Education Committee and as a former teacher herself, Shapiro is most animated when talking about education issues. She highlighted the legislature's attempts to dump the TAKS test and move to end-of-course exams, which was highly popular among her audience.

She also outlined efforts undertaken to improve college readiness and vocational programs for those students who aren't college-bound.

Shapiro also delved into the issues killed by the Democratic maneuvering in the Texas House. Voter ID legislation, she predicted, will come back.

"This is not the last session that you have heard of Voter ID," she said.

Waiting for the Race to Begin

The speech was for the most part a speech of someone who expected to stay in the Texas Senate for a while. That's partly because of Shapiro's newness on the federal campaign trail, but mostly because she's technically not on the trail yet anyway. So much of the race for the Texas senate is completely outside the hands of the candidates running for it that standard campaign paradigms just don't apply.

But Shapiro, like all other candidates, is getting her motor revving for the race to come. With strong name recognition in Dallas/Fort Worth, she is in good position for a campaign. Jones is known in San Antonio and Roger Williams is also known in Dallas. Michael Williams has no geographic constituency of note (he's from Midland), but he and Jones have been on the statewide ballot, so they're not totally unknown.

Of course, geography would be the best ally to a candidate from the Houston area, but there is none in the race at this point, so Shapiro has an advantage there. Geography, of course, isn't just about name recognition, it's about fundraising, and Shapiro will need plenty of that. In terms of money in the bank, she has about half as much as Roger Williams, and a little less than Elizabeth Ames Jones. Michael Williams, who is the most active candidate from a media standpoint, is nonetheless behind all the other candidates in fundraising.

But that money in the bank mostly represents only a fraction of what candidates could raise, since all of them have to leave their often considerable state accounts on the table and set up new federal accounts.

Why is money raised important when Perry will appoint the candidate? Because fundraising prowess will go a long way towards determining who will be a successful candidate down the road. Perry will likely appoint a candidate who looks strong, and a mixture of polling data and fundraising can give him clues on that score. But Perry will have other motives. His decision will likely resonate in the GOP primary for governor, and a pick that excites the base could be big for him as well as for the anointed one.

For that reason, it helps for the candidates to get out there and speak a message that the base wants to hear, and that's what Shapiro was doing on Monday. As the candidates gather at the track to prepare for the race of a lifetime, the biggest factor they have to deal with is one they can't control - which one of them gets to run from the pole position.