Ratliff Likes the Kitchen, But Not The Heat.

• Author: McNeely, Dave
• Position: Bill Ratliff, Texas lieutenant governor - Brief Article

The Texas lieutenant governor featured in an April State Legislatures story has decided he'd have to compromise too much to run for the office.

No more Mr. Nice Guy. Bill Ratliff was chosen for the Texas lieutenant governor's job in the first place by almost not campaigning for it. (See April State Legislatures magazine.)

Now, 10 days after announcing he'd run for a full four-year term in a job he really likes, he decided he doesn't have the stomach to do what his advisers say he must to keep it.

Although his exploratory committee told him good things that caused him to announce in the first place on May 26, Ratliff said he'd had a "growing uneasiness ever since.

"After reflecting on that decision, I have concluded it was a mistake," Ratliff said.

The wear and tear of a statewide campaign, the suggestions he change how he delivers his message, the enormous money he'd have to raise in a hurry all contributed to his change of mind.

"I suppose it finally sank in to me the price you pay," Ratliff said. So he and his wife made the "extraordinarily difficult, gut-wrenching decision" to drop out.

In the end, it was the very allure Ratliff held for the Senate colleagues who chose him as their presiding officer that caused him to quit.

He is a gentlemanly, no-nonsense, solution-oriented, moderate-conservative policy man, known for delivering straightforward, honest judgments without frills or flourishes. He is known by his Senate colleagues as Obi Wan, after the wise old man in the Star Wars movies.

In today's political world, Ratliff, a pleasant though tough centrist, was ill-suited-or at least, felt he was-for the rough-and-tumble, brass-knuckles ideological battle of a Republican primary.

And even if he won that, he'd face an us-against-them battle against a Democrat-probably former comptroller John Sharp-whose personal politics aren't all that distant from Ratliff's.

"You can't really run a political campaign in 2002 without that gung-ho, aggressive attitude ... where you get out there and beat up on somebody," said political sage George Christian, a press secretary to the late President Lyndon Johnson and two Texas governors. That's...