WASHINGTON – In the annals of Texas politics, no one ever lost an election with tough talk aimed at criminals, protecting gun rights or bringing civilization to the rural folk.

There must be an election coming up, because Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has hit all those crowd pleasers lately, and more.

Hutchison said last week that she would leave the Senate in October or November to focus full time on the campaign to unseat Gov. Rick Perry in next spring's GOP primary.

There's a good argument for leaving the Senate sooner than later. She would avoid risky votes. She would get seven days a week to stump. She would deprive Perry of his favorite whispering point by erasing any doubt that she might eventually back out.

There are good reasons to stay as long as possible, too, besides getting to know Al Franken: Taxpayers provide a nice staff that helps get out her message. As a senator, she gets invited on the cable news shows a lot.

And she gets to push politically advantageous legislation.

Last month, for instance, she led the push for legislation aimed at eliminating the problem of cellphones behind bars, by allowing prisons to jam cell transitions. At a hearing, she slammed the criminals who manage to smuggle phones with which to arrange drug deals, intimidate witnesses or plot jail breaks "from the comfort of their prison cell."

"When a single call can result in someone's death, we have a responsibility to ... do everything at our disposal," the senator said at the hearing.

Hutchison has been working with Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, where in one infamous case last year, a witness was killed on orders issued by cellphone from an inmate. The issue came to Hutchison's attention when state Sen. John Whitmire of Houston started getting cellphone calls last fall from a death-row inmate.

Maybe she has been doing this sort of thing all along, when the press and public weren't paying as much attention. But with her Senate tenure winding down, it's fair to assess how she spends her energies.

She strongly denies any political motivation behind her current legislative priorities.

"That is the tacky take on everything that I do," she said. "This issue came up when Sen. Whitmire had a very scary threat. And in Maryland, the witness who was killed. ... The problems are legitimate. We want to work with legitimate issues."

Like all but two Republicans, Hutchison joined a controversial effort last month to force states with concealed weapons permits to honor permits issued by any other state; that proposal, led by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., was strongly backed by the National Rifle Association and others in the gun rights lobby. It failed to pass the Senate.

Certainly, not everything Hutchison does can be explained easily through the lens of gubernatorial politics. But some issues do seem to serve at least a dual purpose.

Take rural broadband. Hutchison filed a bill dubbed the "Connecting America Act" last month to encourage expansion of high-speed Internet through tax incentives over the next five years.

Texas is 80 percent rural, and residents can't tap into the remote learning, advanced medical diagnostics and other services available to city dwellers and suburbanites, she argued in a column in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress.

"It can allow a rancher in West Texas to sell every head of cattle in an online auction, expanding the reach of his business and raising his earning potential without the need to leave his ranch," she wrote. "We cannot leave half of America behind."

This isn't pandering. Good government is good politics, especially when an election is looming.

Todd J. Gillman is the Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News.