Bush gimmick funds his re-election

The country may be going broke, but in just nine months President Bush has amassed more than $175 million to spend on his re-election, the most any candidate has collected in a presidential election.

The reason Bush has been so successful is that he has a good gimmick. He has assembled 151 individuals he calls "Rangers," who have raised more than $200,000 each, and 241 he calls "Pioneers," who have raised at least $100,000 each. Now, he's added a third group of fund-raisers -- individuals under 40 who have raised at least $50,000. There are 52 people in that category, which he calls "Mavericks."

I have no quarrel with Bush naming big-hitters after his former baseball team, the Texas Rangers. It's fine as well that he designates his medium-size hitters "Pioneers," even though a pioneer, by definition, is someone who settles new territory. He has been raising campaign money since he ran for Congress in 1978.

I must draw the line at Bush's use of the word "Maverick" to describe his rookies. This is a linguistic crime, the equivalent of John Kerry raising money under the banner of Dick Nixon.

I can't stop picturing my old friend and mentor Maury Maverick Jr. -- a crusading liberal who fought every single day of his 83 years on behalf of civil liberties and world peace -- rolling angrily in his grave. Maury died in January 2003. Over the 29 years that he wrote a newspaper column, Maverick would occasionally conduct channeled interviews from the grave.

I never much liked it when Maury would conjure up conversations with people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. It seemed like such an old-fogey thing to do. Now I understand why he did it. Extreme times require extreme measures, so I conjured up Maury's spirit and this is part of the exchange we had:

"Well, kiddo, there are more liberals in heaven these days than on Earth, that's for sure. Just the other day, I had breakfast with Franklin Roosevelt, tea with Eleanor and dinner with my old man, the last of the New Deal Democrats. By the way, my father's as tempestuous as ever. He can't open the ice box up here without getting into a fight with a milk bottle."

"Maury, I need to ask you a serious question. What do you think of these young Republicans using `Mavericks' to raise money for Bush?"

"We Democrats must have Bush on the run if he's so desperate that he's using my name to raise money. You will recall, I made about $13,000 a year when I was a civil rights lawyer.

"But seriously, don't they know that the name `Maverick' stands for free-thinkers and iconoclasts? I'm sorry I'm not there for this election. What fun, what joy it would be to wade into this fight with you, kiddo. Hit 'em in the kisser for me."

"I'll try, Maury. Can you tell us how the word `maverick' came to be part of the English language?"

"I'd much rather talk about purple martin houses, but sure I'll tell you the story. In the 1840s, my great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick, arrived in Texas when it was still under Mexican rule. He had a ranch, but paid so little attention to it that he didn't brand his cattle. He let 'em run wild. In time, the word `maverick' became synonymous with unbranded Longhorns, who are stubborn, independent animals that follow their own heads. This became the definition of a maverick.

"People use the word for all sorts of things, but I hate to think it's being used by a bunch of swells to raise money for that boy Bush. For the most part, we Mavericks have been progressives. My father was run out of politics because he refused to deny free speech to a small group of communists.

"The most satisfying work I did as a lawyer was representing conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. We were wrong in Vietnam, and we're wrong in Iraq. I was a Marine myself, but when I see all those Marines getting blown up, it tears me up.

"Semper fidelis to you, too, Maury. I'll tell the Republicans they need to find a new name for the rookies. Maybe they should be called `Ambassadors.' After all, Bush named 24 of the top fund-raisers in 2000 as U.S. ambassadors."

In the 1840s, my great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick, arrived in Texas when it was still under Mexican rule.

She needs to go back to History class. The Battle Of San Jacinto (which shortly followed the fall of the Alamo) occurred on April 21, 1836.

Mexico was not running Texas in the 1840s.

Also to clarify, Samuel Maverick came to this area in 1835 (so yes he was in Texas under Mexican rule but briefly).

You'd think someone living in San Antonio, writing about family history in Texas the weekend "The Alamo" opens would know better. At least if she's going to whine about others using the word.

Here's Leon Hale's take from earlier this year.

Probably the version nearest fact is in the New Handbook of Texas. This is a husky six-volume reference published by the Texas State Historical Association, an organization that does its best to cull the fiction out of our state's history. Not an easy job, especially when we've got folklorists making daily contributions of legends and myths.
The handbook tells us that in the 1840s Samuel Maverick moved for two or three years from San Antonio to the Texas coast. Lived at Decros Point in Matagorda County.
While there, a fellow who owed him $1,200 paid off the debt with 400 head of cattle. Apparently Maverick wasn't enthusiastic about ranching on the Gulf Coast. When he moved back to San Antonio he left those cattle in the care of a family that didn't take care of them well. A lot of the calves were not branded and of course were running free.
So, when local folks saw an unbranded calf they referred to it as "one of Maverick's," and eventually called it simply a maverick.
Writers of cowboy fiction have long been fascinated by this story and versions keep popping up.
Recently I ran across an offshoot of the story in Wolfville Days, a book written in 1902 by Alfred Henry Lewis. An old cattleman in this book tells tales about life in Arizona when it was a territory. One day he used the word "maverick," and a greenhorn asked what it meant.
Long ago, says the old cowman, before fences came to the range, all the ranchers in Texas got together about branding cattle. (Getting all the ranchers in Texas together even long ago would have been a fancy trick.) Each rancher described how he would brand his cattle, and these brands were recorded in a great book.
"A old longhorn named Maverick," says the storyteller, announced at the meeting that since everybody but he had declared a brand, without objection he wouldn't do any branding at all, so any unbranded animal on the range would be recognized as belonging to him.
Nobody objected (if you can imagine that), and within 10 years Maverick had gathered thousands of unbranded calves that were missed on roundups or strayed from their mamas, and so he became in this way a major Texas rancher.
Furthermore, according to Lewis' storyteller, it came out that this fellow had bamboozled everybody in the cow business, because in the beginning the only livestock he owned were a few scrawny steers, and not one mother cow that might have an honest calf.
Which is a story you might still tell for the truth in Arizona, but not in Texas.

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