Dallas' Political Designing Woman

"Dunning always said as soon as somebody who he felt could get elected out of the minority community came forward, he would support them," Reed says. (By some accounts, Dunning was pressured to drop out of the race by a corporate leader who believed Dallas needed a black mayor to ease the city's racial strife.)

With her original client out of the ring, Reed was free to work for Kirk, who had previously served as Texas' secretary of state, an obscure post that gave him zero name recognition. Reed is not one to muse about the abstract significance of things, so when Kirk talked to her about making history, she talked to him about strategy. Unlike how she introduced an unknown Tom Leppert before the city 11 years later with a flurry of billboards and slick TV ads, Reed went with a more grassroots approach with Kirk.

She hired a professional to organize at least 100 "Meet Ron Kirk" coffees throughout the city, where neighborhood leaders, activists and other likely voters could see the candidate face to face. Reed's people also brought yard signs, nametags and brochures. On a good night, 40 to 60 people would show up, but the invitation alone served as a nifty campaign ad.

Reed's coffee strategy cost only $15,000, less than the price of a poll, and immediately created a buzz around the new candidate. Reporters crashed many of these functions and found Kirk to be effortlessly connecting with his audience.

But Reed had another reason for pushing Kirk before potential voters, long before she even put up a billboard.

"I did the coffees so that people would realize that Kirk was not a [Dallas County Commissioner] John Wiley Price, who was picketing every week, or [former city council member] Al Lipscomb," she says.

You could take that to mean that Reed wanted to show that her candidate was a racial moderate who wasn't going to really poke at the accepted order of doing things in Dallas, and maybe that was part of it. But Reed really did have to distinguish her candidate from the unseemly aspects of black leadership in the city at that time. Many black politicians, including Price and Lipscomb, had troubles with the law or just a knack for starring in silly controversies.

Even without Reed's help, Kirk was a natural politician in the best sense, brimming with charisma and star power. But even candidates on their way to victory can grow angry, bitter and disconsolate. Local leaders who promise their endorsements decide to hedge their bets, or donors send less money than promised. Reporters blow an off-the-cuff remark out of proportion. Kirk never really stumbled in the public eye, but he still counted on Reed's sense of perspective when things got rough.

"We'd go through this stupid drill. When someone angered me I'd say I'm going to call so-and-so and tell them what to do and where to go," Kirk recalls. "And she said, 'Well, that sounds good. Now say it again. I want to see how it will look in the Observer or on the front page of The Dallas Morning News when you're telling someone to go kiss your black...'"

Kirk doesn't finish his sentence. Reed taught him well.

Just three months after his own poll showed he only had 12 percent name identification with registered voters, Kirk won a massive victory over opponents Darrell Jordan and Domingo Garcia. It didn't hurt that Kirk, like nearly all of Reed's candidates, was able to outspend his opponents 2-to-1. (His campaign went through so much money that Reed was putting some expenses on her American Express card.)

Much like she did in the Leppert campaign, Reed paid little attention to her candidate's opponents. Instead, she relentlessly promoted her guy while rejecting the type of negative tactics that are common in most city races. After Kirk became the first black mayor of Dallas, the two did, in fact, soak up a ton of publicity for making history.

"All of it was two simple things: Ron Kirk and Carol Reed," wrote Dallas Observer columnist Laura Miller, who would go on to become Kirk's arch nemesis at this paper and later when she was elected to the city council. "The candidate and his manager—two personable, bright people with bigger-than-life personalities who came together in an incredibly unlikely coupling (a black Democrat and a white Republican strategist?) to knock Dallas on its keister."

Since the 1996 mayor's race, Kirk and Reed might as well have formed their own political party. She first helped him barely pass the arena referendum in 1997, giving tax breaks to developers building what was to become the American Airlines Center and Victory Park. Then just a few months after the arena vote, Reed directed another winning campaign when she helped Kirk squeak the original bond package for the Trinity River project past a skeptical electorate. Reed also worked on Kirk's one losing effort, his 2002 campaign for U.S. Senate.

In high school Reed, born Carol Trumbauer, was a cheerleader in Thousand Oaks, California, a mountainous suburb just north of Los Angeles. The football team paid more attention to her than to their passing, blocking and tackling drills. You could hardly blame them. She wore tiny skirts and tight black sweaters and had a trim figure that came from playing sports with her younger brothers. Her medium-length blond hair framed an All-American smile.