2022 Bum Steer of the Year: Greg Abbott
At the end of the horror movie The Shining, Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer turned homicidal maniac, freezes to death, lost in a swanky hotel’s hedge maze in the midst of a 1970s winter. For the final shot, the camera pushes in to reveal a detail from a vintage photo on the wall of the hotel ballroom: a dapper Jack pictured in a temporally impossible 1921. The building has absorbed him.
That’s roughly how Greg Abbott came to live in the Governor’s Mansion in 2015: it absorbed him. By that time, he had been in public life for more than twenty years, including twelve as the state’s attorney general, but had left little mark. He had not, and still has not, faced a truly competitive election, nor had he ever had much to do with making policy of any kind. He was nominated for governor because it was his turn. And then, one day, he was just . . . there, running things, though it was no easier to detect what he was actually doing or indeed even what he wanted to do.
Texans have historically liked colorful politicians and disdained colorless ones, but one suspects that preference has always entailed an element of Stockholm syndrome. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for us to date a strong, silent type for once—someone boring enough to bring home to meet Mother. It was possible to imagine, at the outset of Abbott’s administration, that his apparent blandness could be an asset, that it would allow him to push aside the dumb stuff and work on the important bread-and-butter issues that don’t get headlines. He inherited education and health-care and foster-care systems that were among the worst in the nation and a state government built on shortcuts and accounting tricks. There was plenty to do, and he had the means to do it: a healthy legislative majority and billions of dollars to play with.
But Texas got the opposite of that sort of workhorse: a governor who wanted to continue being governor and didn’t seem to care about much else—except, perhaps, for positioning himself for a run at the White House. From the beginning, Abbott was attuned to the 4 percent of Texans who decide Republican primary elections and that group’s many peculiar priorities. The slightest shift in the wind from the right would provoke a change in direction. (Before the 2020 election, when the GOP’s hold on the state House seemed in doubt, he briefly shifted to the middle. After the campaign was over, he swung hard-right once again.) Big, substantive issues seemed to slide to the periphery, and in 2021 the chickens came home to roost. In his sixth year as governor—the twenty-sixth consecutive year his party has held the office—Texas, the energy capital of America, couldn’t even keep the lights on.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/2022-bum-steer-greg-abbott/
Greg Abbott isn’t the only 2022 Bum Steer! Read about Ted Cruz, the January 6 rioters, the lady who fed Cheetos to spider monkeys, and all the rest. Also, check out our Best Things in Texas list for examples of some of this year’s uplifting moments.
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