Dewhurst's Community College Gauntlet

What do you do when one of your main roadblocks to being Governor is reviled statewide for an unpopular veto? If you're David Dewhurst, you start running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

The story is all over the state's news today: the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the El Paso Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and plenty of others have the story that Dewhurst is going to bat for community colleges who feel raided and drained by Perry's budget veto that cut $154 million and upset the apple cart on how those community colleges handle employee health care. This was the rocket that broke away from the cluster of vetos and earned the instant ire of editorials and community college board members from all over the state.

The problems that Republican state legislators and executives cause for colleges are well documented. If you've been to college in the last five or six years, you know that Republican tuition deregulation has transformed college into an unaffordable prospect for many young people. Community colleges were a way to balance college costs for some families, and Perry's latest move was going to cause tuition and fees to increase even more at those institutions.

Now, suddenly, Dewhurst seems to be controlling the agenda and drawing together people, including Perry, to work on the issue. For my part, I think the problem needs to be solved and the colleges need their money. I also happen to think that Dewhurst's sudden commitment to the matter in the wake of the extremely negative public response is a clear indicator that someone is collecting chits for the future.

Was this more than just another in a long line of bad decisions by Perry? I'm not sure what sort of mandate or political capitol he felt like he was acting on. Maybe he assumed it wouldn't be a big deal. This isn't the kind of issue that could drive him from the castle, by any means, but it is another in a long line of over-reaches that are piling up to make a pretty effective case against his stewardship, and his opponents at the top of the fractured GOP leadership establishment are seizing upon it with zeal.

The bad news for them, however, is that they've all been members of what is more or less thought of as Team Perry for a while. They are all representative of the whole unit that's been so ineffective for the last several years, the government that has failed to deliver on even the most basic of conservative principles, like lowering property taxes. They have guilt by association, the association being with everything that's gone wrong, more or less, since the wheels started to come off, the GOP took over the State House, and DeLay started drawing districts.

It is an inescapable, all-encompassing stain that won't wash off no matter how many times they play Musical Issues and try to get the drop on one another, and less stalwart Republicans will be discouraged by it. It will also likely not escape the notice of independents and swing voters, those two chunks making up the same bloc that abandoned Perry in November. That general malaise plus the growing strength of Texas Democrats could — notice I don't say "will" or "must" here, but rather "could," because even the latent, baseline strength of the GOP in Texas should not be underestimated — add up to some serious changes in 2008, setting a much more difficult stage for Dewhurst and every other Republican in 2010.