By Bud Kennedy
bud@star-telegram.com
In the end, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst needed a message other than "It's my turn."
Stuck with a hand-me-down campaign already worn thin by Gov. Rick Perry, Dewhurst was left hollering "Texas is great!" to Republicans who wanted somebody to bust up Washington.
Finally, they turned to Ted Cruz, the young Princeton debater, Harvard lawyer and long shot.
For months, Dewhurst treated Cruz like a boisterous kid trying to cut ahead of him in the line of state political succession.
By the time a long-delayed runoff arrived, voters moved Cruz up in line.
Left unnoticed in all the talk about Cruz's Tea Party support - much of it generated with $6 million from political action committees - is that Cruz was also the candidate of religious conservatives.
When Cruz introuced his campaign leadership team more than a year ago, the chairman was Plano lawyer Kelly Shackelford, the president of Liberty Institute and the go-to lawyer for conservatives in religious freedom and civil-rights cases.
When almost nobody else would endorse Cruz out of fear of Perry, Cruz named supporters such as Focus on the Family's James Dobson, Aledo author David Barton and former Texas Eagle Forum President Cathie Adams.
Unlike some Republicans, Cruz never openly preached. But as a Roman Catholic converted to Southern Baptist, he knows how.
Dewhurst, an evangelical Presbyterian with a history of quiet faith, never reached out to religious conservatives until the campaign's next-to-last day.
Even when he campaigned at a Chick-fil-A, he joked later that it wasn't about faith, "It was about chicken."
Then he said he was sticking up for Chick-fil-A because "Here in Texas, we don't try to be politically correct when people come to invest in our state."
Only later, privately, did he take a reporter aside to say: "The Bible was a huge influence in my decision. But we don't get involved in other people's religious decisions in Texas."
Former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, who finished third, also had prominent pastors' support.
He said he had talked with Dewhurst about faith, but Dewhurst preferred to keep his personal.
"If you go back and look at his tax forms, he's very generous," Leppert said.
"But he's not like a lot of us. He doesn't wear his faith on his sleeve. He puts it into practice."
By then, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum were rallying church voters nationwide to help Cruz.
Dewhurst was left without a prayer.
Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538Twitter: @budkennedy
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