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Those words aren't much different from those she offered in her run for comptroller. But in her D.C. speech, Rylander detoured to set off alarms that she may be campaigning for something new yet again. She told the Heritage Foundation that her national defense philosophy could be summed up in the words of gangster Al Capone, who once said, "You can get more done with kind words and a gun than you can with kind words."

The Texas comptroller is involved in a lot of things. National defense policy is not one of them. Ambitious though she might be, one thing is certain: Rylander isn't running for president. But her governor is. And if Bush wins, that creates a scramble in Texas politics in 2002. Rylander could run for governor, but more conventional wisdom has her targeting the lieutenant governor's seat if incumbent Rick Perry, who would be elevated to governor in 2001 if Bush becomes president, runs to retain the chief executive post.

"It is premature and stupid in this current flux that we're in here in Texas politics to speculate," says Sanders, Rylander's press aide. It's even more stupid, however, to think that a politician like Rylander isn't already obsessing about it.

Perhaps Rylander is auditioning for the U.S. Senate. She already tried to get to Congress once, losing in a 1986 election to represent Travis County in the U.S. House. To make that race, she switched parties and ran as a Republican. Last year U.S. Senator Phil Gramm took the extraordinary step of chairing Rylander's comptroller campaign. Wendy Gramm, the senator's wife, is one of the three people chairing Rylander's e-Texas. It's conceivable that Phil Gramm might not run for re-election in 2002 and is grooming Rylander as his successor.

Rylander, meanwhile, grooms e-Texas as a means to forge new political alliances and sidle up to those willing to contribute to her cause -- not necessarily her cause of "smaller, smarter government," as she likes to call it, but rather the cause of satisfying her own political ambition.