Perhaps there is a new chairman for the Carole Keeton Strayhorn Booster Club: Rick Perry.

Yes, the Republican governor, who keeps calling the Texas Legislature back to pass what he says are improvements for schools and tax policy, continues to see things blow up in his face. Strayhorn, who announced recently she'll challenge Perry in next year's Republican primary for governor, has been taking potshots at Perry for months. Sometimes she's had to strain for ammunition. No more: Perry is now re-loading her guns for her.

After the Texas House of Representatives turned thumbs down on the governor's education package Tuesday, Perry said there were still 24 days left in the 30-day special legislative session to deal with it.

But perhaps too many legislators in both major political parties have bitten Perry's school finance/tax cut nickel, and figured out at best, it's wooden. They've been home and heard from their constituents, who think they're better off now than with the Perry-Craddick approach of raising taxes on the poor to give the rich a tax cut, while putting very little new money into schools.

Enough Republican House members joined with Democrats to amend the school finance bill that its sponsor, Rep. Kent Grusdendorf, R. Arlington, helped kill it.

Meanwhile, senators have grown so distrustful of Craddick's my-deal-or-no-deal negotiating methods that they prefer nothing to what's been coming over from the House.

Most folks on both sides of the capitol think the Perry-Craddick package is going nowhere.

Monday afternoon, a frustrated Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, took a break from a Senate caucus discussion on the matter. Shapleigh sat in the otherwise empty Senate chamber and explained that the three major leaders - Perry, House Speaker Craddick and the Senate's presiding officer, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst - have vastly different priorities.

Perry, Shapleigh said, is interested almost solely in cutting local property taxes enough to impress national anti-tax spokesmen.

"He wants to go into the Grover Norquist Hall of Fame with the greatest tax cut in Texas history,'' Shapleigh said.

Meanwhile, Dewhurst, alone among the leaders, actually wants the Legislature to put significant new money in schools, Shapleigh said. So do a majority of senators.

But with Perry insisting the school finance outcome should be ''revenue-neutral'' - replacing some taxes with others, but with no additional money being raised - putting new money into schools is going to be tough.

And Craddick, Shapleigh observed dryly, just wants to go home. The Speaker would rather wait for the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, glacially considering an appeal of a lower-court ruling that Texas' school finance system is unconstitutional and far too meager, to provide the Legislature some direction - or perhaps just let it off the hook, by overruling Travis County District Judge John Dietz's order.

So by continuing to call the Legislature back into special session, when his suggestions for what they should be doing have become a fireplug for the legislative dog, is increasingly futile and self-defeating. It is like calling into town a bunch of critics to hold press conferences blasting him.

"The governor turned over his re-election prospects to the Texas Legislature,'' said one neutral longtime capitol observer, shaking his head.

Perry has called for improving schools without raising taxes. He may be learning what his Democratic predecessor of two decades ago, Mark White, learned the hard way: to keep his promise to give teachers a raise, he had to break the one against new taxes.

In deciding whether to invest in educating Texas' next generation, will Gov. Perry decide to listen less to ultra-rich political financier James Leininger of San Antonio, Washington tax-hater Norquist, and New Hampshire political consultant Dave Carney, and more to Texas teachers, superintendents and parents?

Probably not. "Foghorn'' Strayhorn, more bullets for you.