WASHINGTON – Ronald Reagan isn't on Mount Rushmore. But lots of Republicans think he should be. Thus, it is no small matter for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison when doubts are raised about her commitment to the party's hero.

Dust off those clippings from 1976, a seminal year for Texas Republicans. Reagan's challenge brought legions of enthusiastic newcomers to the party – and some friction between them and the traditionalists who had labored years to break the Democrats' grip on Texas.

President Gerald Ford had named Hutchison vice chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, and she sided with him against the insurgent, naturally.

"But after that, certainly I was very pro-Reagan," Hutchison said last week. "Loved Ronald Reagan. Supported him, was chairman of his Women for Reagan committee in Texas [in 1980]. I've got a lot of Reagan supporters supporting me for governor right now.

"And I've never supported a Democrat for president after I was involved in politics – unlike others who are running for public office," she said. "I never ran as a Democrat, either."

Consider that a brushback pitch. As her campaign pointed out last week, Gov. Rick Perry was elected to the state House in 1984 as a Democrat, and in 1988, he chaired Al Gore's presidential campaign in Texas.

"The governor has been a true conservative his entire career and will be more than happy to match conservative records on fiscal responsibility and many other issues," Perry spokesman Mark Miner said.

But let's stay focused on fallout from the Ford-Reagan fight, and "myth versus fact" – the title of a missive the Hutchison campaign e-mailed to supporters last week, to rebut one element of a Dallas Morning News article examining her conservative credentials.

The article quoted the political editor of Human Events, an influential conservative magazine, explaining the roots of mistrust some social conservatives feel toward Hutchison. Part of it, he said, is that Hutchison and her husband backed Ford. As he recalled it, primary voters punished Ray Hutchison two years later when he lost a run for governor.

Not quite accurate, it turns out.

Ray Hutchison, the state GOP chairman at the time, had remained "absolutely neutral in the Ford/Reagan primary race" according to the Kay for Governor campaign. News accounts from the time confirm that assertion.

The campaign rebuttal also noted that as part of the Ford administration, "of course she supported her boss ... as did Senator John Tower and many others."

Nonetheless, Reagan's decisive win in Texas marked a turning point, and there were implications then and for years to come.

The "board room" types lost their solid grip on the Texas GOP. Grass-roots conservatives motivated by social causes began their takeover.

Recall that in 1996, those forces nearly blocked Hutchison, a U.S. senator, from serving as a delegate to the national convention.

At the convention two decades earlier, Tower was so mindful of the groundswell that he resigned as Ford's floor leader. The head of Reagan forces in Texas, Ray Barnhart, challenged Ray Hutchison for the chairmanship; many Reaganites considered it their due.

But Ray Hutchison survived the challenge. Many Reaganites stuck with him. Barnhart succeeded him as chairman a year later when he quit to run for governor, though he lost the primary to oilman Bill Clements, who had no Ford/Reagan baggage.

But the most conspicuous omission from the examination of Hutchison, her campaign asserted, was Perry's history as a Democrat.

Miner, the governor's aide, accused her of "overreacting" because she is so "sensitive ... on her lack of conservative credentials."

Will Hutchison make an issue of Perry's Democratic roots?

"It depends," she said, on whether "someone else chooses to go back to 1976 or 1978 or 1984. I would not be making that the basis of my campaign, but I certainly am not going to stand and let somebody suggest that I am not pro-Reagan – I am – when someone else is pro-Al Gore."

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