Texas lieutenant governor hopefuls state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, left, and state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, right, shake hands following their televised debate last month. (AP pool photo/Eric Gay)
The lieutenant governor candidates began airing ads Tuesday that pulled no punches.
Democrat Leticia Van de Putte said her GOP rival Dan Patrick is untrustworthy.
Patrick said Van de Putte “wants Washington bureaucrats to run our schools” and is out of touch with Texas parents.
The new TV spots are so-called “contrast” commercials that try to exploit the opponent’s weakness. Clearly, Van de Putte believes Patrick is vulnerable on the $5.4 billion of budget cuts that he and other Republicans approved for public schools in 2011. She also is playing up mostly unsourced media accounts that Patrick is distrusted by many of his fellow Republicans.
In Van de Putte’s ad, a narrator asks, “Which Dan Patrick should we trust?” It then splices two seemingly conflicting snippets of his remarks from their televised debate last month.
In one, Patrick says, “I’m really concerned about the dropout rate in our inner cities.”
In the other, he says of the 2011 session, “And so we cut education.”
Actually, Patrick said the 2011 budget reductions were better than the only alternative, which he said was tax increases. He dismissed suggestions the cuts caused grave harm to schools. He questioned whether there really had been 11,000 teachers laid off. Some of those simply retired, and others were classroom slots filled “by, like, the math department head or various people,” he said.
Van de Putte’s ad segues from a grainy, sepia-toned view of Patrick to herself in living color, working in her pharmacy, greeting constituents and wrapping up her candidacy announcement last fall. It says “party labels aside,” she’s the candidate worthy of trust. A narrator recites how she resisted school cuts, has been a leader on veterans’ issues and has proposed to help more students of modest means afford college.
“I’ll fight for you,” she says in a voiceover.
In his ad, Patrick tries to burn in another contrast.
He says his opponent is “liberal Leticia,” which he is banking on to be politically fatal in ruby red Texas. Meanwhile, the spot says, he’s a conservative pushing “real reform” of schools.
Defying predictions, Patrick has stuck to his hard line on immigration in his general-election ads. And in his latest TV spot, he similarly invokes two education issues that, while they may stir many of the staunch conservatives who dominate GOP primaries in Texas, surely are less familiar and pressing to the November electorate.
They are school choice, a code word for school voucher-like proposals, which he chides Van de Putte for opposing; and Common Core, a national initiative by governors’ and chief state school officers’ groups to define what students should know in English language arts and math at the end of each grade.
Though it’s not a federal government program, Patrick’s ad suggests federal “bureaucrats” dictate the learning standards. Last year, he was Senate sponsor of a bill to ban use of the Common Core standards in Texas. It passed and became law, despite opposition from Van de Putte and five other Democratic senators. In Patrick’s ad, a slide says, “Leticia Van de Putte wants Washington bureaucrats to run our schools.” The spot then cites her vote.
“Washington’s policies have no place in Texas and neither does Van de Putte’s out of touch support for the federal government running our schools,” Patrick spokesman Alejandro Garcia said in a statement on the ad.
Patrick closes his ad by saying to camera, “As Senate Education chair, I passed some of the biggest reforms in decades to improve Texas schools. My education plan will empower parents, teachers and school districts, not government.” Though school districts are governmental units, his last remark apparently refers to the state and certainly the federal government.
Postscript: Patrick’s commercial slams Van de Putte as having “actually voted to stop schools from removing teachers convicted of a felony.”
The ad’s fine print cites a 2011 educator-misconduct bill that Gov. Rick Perry signed. The bill, which Van de Putte and eight other Senate Democrats opposed, allowed removal of teachers convicted of any type of felony. According to a House Research Organization report, the law before 2011 allowed “immediate termination only of a teacher convicted of a violent crime or a crime against a minor,” which omitted “crimes that destroy public trust, such as theft, burglary, and embezzlement.” But teacher groups opposed making any felony grounds for removal. That “could punish some teachers needlessly for mistakes made in their younger years,” the HRO report said, describing bill opponents’ argument.
You can view the two new ads here: