Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 238
implicit objective to affect the direction of some public policies in Texas. I joined the
board just as Dr. James Leininger was leaving the chairmanship. Jeff Judson had been
president and chief executive for just a couple of years. It was an economically
dangerous, albeit exciting, period of transition. After setting the ideological course of the
organization and finding the right executive, raising the funds to run it was, to me, the
board’s main responsibility.
1998 was an election year. Most, but not all, of the candidates that TPPF and I
supported were Republican. In the November 1998 elections, for the first time since
Reconstruction, the Republican Party had won all the statewide elective offices and
acquired control of the Texas Senate. TPPF used the occasion to stage an inaugural
banquet attended by most of the new state leaders, who proclaimed adherence to our
limited government views. The fact that we were able to pull this off catapulted the
organization to a new level of credibility in the state.
My direct exposure to the process of passing laws during the 1999 legislative session
qualified me to be a better board member. It helped me understand with crystal clarity
that often candidates’ pre-election talk does not translate to post-election action.
Therefore, the need to maintain the intellectual connection established before election
after electoral victory is very important. Pragmatically speaking, the line between policy
research and lobbying can blur very rapidly. Thus, TPPF’s job is first to provide the
intellectual thrust to lift the veils obscuring the issues and then to help legislators apply
the conclusions of the research into writing the law. In my view Jeff Judson manages
these dual responsibilities with great success.
As I stated many times before, the importance of economic philosophy among elected
officials is very high, but in the presence of strong lobbyists it can be relegated to less
important planes. The enormous complexity of divergent points of view, different
interests, avoidance of un-intended results and broad nature of viable interpretations of
the role of government in specific instances, make it very difficult to write a law purely
from the philosophical angle. It is this gray area from which many relatively different
laws, possibly all generally friendly to creative free enterprise, may come out. This gray
and undefined area of semi-acceptable political action is the hunting ground for the
lobby. The larger the area is the more the lobby likes it. This is where the strong win and
the weak lose; it is an area where money is the ultimate weapon. Only large resources
can direct enough and constant pressure on lawmakers to make them focus on the
issue and help them see it in a certain way. We, the people interested in specific laws,
provide the ammo (money) and the lobbyists are the trained gunners. They are
expensive!
In my view, the preceding assertion does not minimize the role or importance of the
TPPF, which is not a lobbying organization. Much to the contrary, it serves to point out
how important it is to define more narrowly the sometimes wide-open philosophical
right-of-way within which lawmakers chose to act. In rare moments of confidential
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