A BLACK Democrat who could win a crucial Senate seat in George Bush’s Texas homeland has so unnerved the White House that the President is sending his wife and mother to rally the Republican campaign.

Ron Kirk, a balding, bespectacled former Mayor of Dallas, is in a virtual tie with his Republican opponent, John Cornyn, for the Texan Senate seat last held by a Democrat in 1961: the former President Lyndon B. Johnson.

If Mr Kirk wins in next month’s mid-term elections, in a state where the President enjoys 80 per cent approval ratings, it could not only prevent the Republicans retaking control of the Senate but also provoke a political earthquake.

The contest is so charged with political symbolism that it has drawn more energy and interest from the White House than any other mid-term race. Mr Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the former President George Bush Sr have made numerous visits in the past month to raise millions of dollars for Mr Cornyn.

Laura Bush, one of the President’s most valuable electoral weapons but not a regular campaigner, will appear with Mr Cornyn at a fundraising event in Forth Worth next week. Later in the month the President’s mother, Barbara Bush, a formidable campaigner, will do the same.

The race that the White House believed it would not have to worry about now has national political implications. If Mr Kirk wins the seat, vacated by the retiring Republican Phil Gramm, he will become an instant superstar, severely damaging the prestige of the President. He would also become the only black person — and only the third since Reconstruction in the 1870s — to sit in the Senate.

He would be an almost irresistible choice as a Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2008. More significantly, a Kirk victory would break the decade-long Republican stranglehold in Texas. Mr Bush’s overwhelming presence has obscured the extent to which the state, like many other southern regions, is changing politically and demographically, with a political tide toward the Democrats caused by a rapidly growing Hispanic population.

Bruce Buchannan, a professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin, says that the White House is rattled. “If he loses Texas, it is a huge embarrassment,” he said.

The secret of Mr Kirk’s success is that he is pro-business, successfully running one of the country’s most conservative cities, Dallas, for seven years, and brazenly pro-Bush, an ingenious tactic that is infuriating his opponent. He is also a black man who transcends race, something which voters find attractive.

“I’m not here to go and do battle with the President,” he said on a campaign tour in the fiercely conservative rural north east of Texas last week. “This election is not a referendum on George Bush. There is not anybody in America that is unclear about where Texas stands in terms of its love and respect for George Bush.”

After a wobbly start over Iraq that was ruthlessly exploited by his opponent, Mr Kirk now unequivocally backs the President in his quest for a congressional resolution authorising force.

All 27 of Texas’s elected officials are Republican, but Mr Kirk, 48, a fourth-generation Texan whose father was the first black postal clerk in Austin, has already proved a formidable opponent. He became the first black Mayor of Dallas in 1995 and was re-elected in 1999, winning 74 per cent of the vote at a time when Dallas overwhelmingly supported George Bush for President.

The Kirk formula for victory is straightforward, and not without racial undertones. He must win at least 85 per cent of the black vote, 65 per cent of the Hispanic vote, and 35 per cent of the white, or Anglo vote. This may have led to his only major campaign blunder.

Speaking last month to black and Hispanic war veterans in San Antonio, he said that the rich might not back a war against Iraq if their children were sent to fight, a clear reference to the private wealth of Mr Cornyn, the Texas Attorney-General and a close friend of the President.

“I wonder how excited they’d be if I get to the United States Senate and I put forth a resolution that says the first 500,000 kids have to come from families who earn a million dollars or more?” he said. He later apologised.

Mr Cornyn, 50, told The Times: “He showed extremely bad judgment in that. You have to be a team player to be an effective Senator. Kirk is not a team player. Race should be irrelevant.”

Absolutely not irrelevant is the support of the Bush family. The President’s telegenic nephew, George P. Bush, a Texas University law student and musician, played at a Cornyn fundraiser in Houston on Friday. The First Lady’s appearance comes after the President’s second campaign visit on behalf of Mr Cornyn late last month, which raised $1.1 million at a $1,000-a-head party.

Mr Cornyn, a former state Supreme Court judge, is seen as unexciting, and desperately needs the Bush magic touch. “He is not personable, he is not energetic, he is not a natural politician,” Professor Cal Jillson, of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said. “He’s decided George Bush is so popular in Texas that all he needs to do is say, ‘I’ll haul George Bush’s water, so send me up to Washington’.”

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