Kind strategist helped bring GOP to power
AUSTIN — I called on Royal Masset often over the years, and I always learned something fresh about politics, history and inner workings of the Republican Party of Texas.
After he died, I learned something more.
I learned that years ago when his daughter was a youngster, he covertly followed her when she decided to walk home from school, allowing her independence but telling her afterward that he always would be there to protect her even when she didn’t know it.
He was a man who rushed to comfort a friend who had just lost his teenage daughter in a car accident, speaking words of faith and writing of her death for the local newspaper in a way that still brought comfort decades later.
He was generous to a long-ago colleague at the Republican Party of Texas who was feverishly trying to put together a schedule for the state convention without any background materials. Masset rummaged through the piles of paper in his messy office to find just the needed documents and spent time walking through the process, getting no credit and asking for none.
They’re just a few of the details that round out the life of the kind, smart and witty strategist who helped bring Republicans to power in Texas.
Masset, who died in Laredo this month, worked for the Republican Party of Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, helping guide its ascendance from the state’s minority party to its dominant force. He later was a GOP consultant, and he wrote for the Quorum Report.
The cum laude graduate of Princeton had a way with words that made him a delightful interview, once comparing a spirited effort to topple then-House Speaker Tom Craddick to a divorce filing.
“You may stay married,” he said, “but it ain’t the same afterward.”
Rhetorical danger
Masset was unafraid to weigh in on tough topics surrounding powerful officials from his own party, calling former Gov. Rick Perry’s deal-closing enterprise fund for business a “very unconservative” effort to use tax money to pick winners and losers in the private market. He also seconded Perry’s assessment of his predecessor, George W. Bush, as something other than a fiscal conservative.
He wrote in the Quorum Report in 2011 that Republican backers of Voter ID legislation had failed to show its necessity to protect the integrity of votes, calling it “feel good legislation, pure and simple.” But Democrats, he contended, by and large did “a poor job of arguing for its defeat.”
Masset years ago saw the danger of those in his party who offered angry rhetoric on immigration.
“I am for very strong controls along the border, and I am not for amnesty,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2006. “But I am definitely not for all of this hateful rhetoric we are hearing on this issue — that we are going to felonize them, that we should deport them. It’s talk like this that is going to lose us the Hispanic vote just like we lost the black vote in the last generation.” His interest in the issue was more than political. His wife, Elsa, came from Mexico under often-frustrating immigration rules.
Masset shook his head in 2007 at a legislative effort to kill a merit-pay plan for teachers in favor of an across-the-board raise, an issue that divided the House and Senate.
“I can only assume that many members care more about re-election and retirement than doing right by the people of Texas,” Masset said then, maintaining, “Merit pay has already been implemented and works. It follows Republicans’ belief in free markets.”
Risk of losing majority
Masset had a right to his strong opinions on the GOP’s course. Rice University political scientist Mark Jones called him one of the “people who were out in the wilderness and then brought the party from minority status to majority status over a period of about 25 years.”
Such establishment Republicans have since found themselves “fighting a rear guard movement,” particularly since the 2010 tea party wave, he pointed out. Now, Jones said, the GOP “runs a risk of returning to minority status if it doesn’t keep those individuals such as him within the broader tent of the party.”
Someone sitting behind me at last week’s memorial service at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints observed, “There aren’t many people he didn’t touch when it comes to this party.”
Let’s hope the memory of his smart, kind touch stays an influence.