Texas populist Jim Hightower shouldn't be giving speeches, joining demonstrations and raising money for good causes in Madison this week.

 He should be down in Texas running things. Or maybe in the U.S. Senate. Or maybe even campaigning for president.

But politics is a nasty business. And Hightower, who will be in Madison tonight and Friday for a busy schedule of rallies, book signings and radio shows, has seen politics at its nastiest.

And the nastiness cost America one of its most promising contenders.

Back in 1982, Hightower was a crusading editor and all-around rabble-rouser in Austin, the Madison of Texas. Like his friends Jesse Jackson and Ed Garvey, Hightower was inspired in those dark days of Reaganism to try his hand at politics. Jackson, Garvey and Hightower recognized that the limp Democratic challenge to Reagan's right-wing policies needed to be replaced with a left-wing populist appeal.

Hightower ran for the obscure job of Texas commissioner of agriculture on a visionary platform that promised to side with small farmers against corporate agribusiness, defend farm workers and protect consumers. To just about everyone's surprise, he won and, even more surprisingly, he kept his promises.

Hightower was such an outstanding ag commissioner that he became a national figure -- a leader in the family farm defense of the 1980s, a battler for safe food, and one of the few statewide officials in the country to back Jesse Jackson for president. A big part of Hightower's appeal was his ability to cut through the ''morning in America'' fog of the Reagan era and get to the essence of the issues. Campaigning for Garvey's 1986 Senate run in Wisconsin, Hightower described Reagan's plan for farmers: ''a seven-course dinner: a dead possum and a six-pack.''

Texas voters loved Hightower. They re-elected him in 1986, and he appeared to be headed for a bright political future. Until the Bush family intervened. When Hightower sought re-election in 1990, President George Bush was determined to destroy Hightower's political future -- as it posed a genuine threat to the advancement of his son, George W.

The Bush camp used federal agencies to launch a dirty tricks campaign against the ag commissioner, and they dispatched their chief mudslinger, Karl Rove, to coordinate the ''Get Hightower'' initiative.

In his rip-roaring new book, ''If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates'' (HarperCollins), Hightower recounts, ''Running for re-election as state ag commish in 1990, a last-minute negative ad smeared me ... and hurt me. It came from my GOP challenger, whose campaign was being coordinated by Karl Rove, a fellow who now is consultant-in-chief on the George W. Bush presidential bandwagon. The ad showed a flag burner torching Old Glory and tossing it on the ground to burn. The camera panned in on the flag, them, arising out of the flames came my picture, along with the somber voice of a narrator declaring that Jim Hightower supports flag burners. I did not, but the impact on voters, though, was visceral and damaging -- 'My God,' I could hear the viewers muttering to themselves, 'I kind of liked ol' Hightower, but I had no idea he was a flag burner.' ''

On Election Day, Hightower was narrowly defeated.

Hightower's book isn't really about his own political experience -- that's a book that still needs to be written. Rather, it's a primer for Americans who want a politics that's better than anything Al Gore and George W. Bush have to offer. (Hightower's a Ralph Nader backer.)

But this fall, as voters tote up reasons to despise George W. Bush -- as if sensible folks really needed help in that department -- they can begin with the fact that the Bush machine's dirty tricks stole from America the promise that Jim Hightower's political career represented.

© 2000 The Capital Times