Tom Pauken never in his life took political fashion to heart. It cost him. He twice failed of election to Congress, to which venue he would have brought intelligence and, yes, consistency of principle. Elected chairman of the Texas Republican Party in 1994, he collided sometimes with Karl Rove’s and George W. Bush’s aspiration to make the Bush gubernatorial tenure a vehicle pointed straight for the White House garage.

Whatever furthered those aspirations was ipso facto good, as Rove saw the matter. Whatever tended to sidetrack "compassionate conservatism" — this included anything less than willingness to fall on one’s sword for the Bush agenda — was injurious.

The problem here wasn’t some innate hostility on Pauken’s part to the Bush agenda, which certainly had its conservative aspects. Rather, the problem was Pauken’s perception, which matched Ronald Reagan’s, that a proper conservative agenda aimed at the reduction of unnecessary government interference in the marketplace, unnecessary government spending, unnecessary taxation, and civilized insistence on the performance of these objectives. So also that agenda aimed at the perpetuation and strengthening of traditional moral values.

The governor wasn’t at odds with all this. He was just, shall we say, highly concerned with perceptions from outside Texas as he climbed the hill to the White House.

No point in dwelling on all that apart from noting how deeply Pauken’s Reaganite faith resonated with the rank-and-file of his party, which made him its leader, prior to the general election in which Bush dispatched Gov. Ann Richards. I attended that convention as a journalist. I saw, not just the delegates’ acceptance of Pauken’s arguments; I saw the hope in their eyes as he spoke. He was their guy! (And Congressman Joe Barton, the establishment opposition in the chairman’s race, wasn’t.)

The president of the Texas AFL-CIO, a certain Becky Moeller, came unstuck over Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment of Pauken as public member of the workforce commission for a term ending in 2013. Wow! Workers were really in for it on account of how this guy had "a long record of advocacy for right-wing views."

Kind of a fascinating comment, if you think about it. What if Pauken had a long record of advocacy for left-wing views? You know, like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? No doubt Becky Moeller would find that kind of record endearing if not yipee-yipee wonderful. She’d probably even concede that no conservative is all bad who can be bullied or wheedled into doing the AFL-CIO’s bidding.

The left does love politicizing everything. Far less so the right, or so it seems to me. Take the objective that Pauken, a Vietnam veteran, underscored at his swearing-in ceremony this week — that of using the workforce commission to help integrate returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans into the job market: making sure their skills get appreciated and utilized.

A right-wing policy? Most would probably call it patriotic (we owe these vets) and sensible (these vets can help Texas). Pauken, moreover, has pointed to Texas’ February unemployment rate of 4.1 percent as evidence of the Texas economy’s vibrancy. A major conservative principle — which isn’t just conservative, I must add — is that you don’t, or shouldn’t, undermine success. The workforce commission, which oversees state programs on job training, unemployment benefits, and labor market research, has as chairman a man committed to the principle that freedom always works better than dependency, not to mention servitude.

Pauken’s insistence on modest taxation and limited government — reflected in the work of the commission he recently chaired on property tax reform — sounds like what the doctor ordered for such a time as this. Don’t we, in all conscience, value a public official who says what he thinks and thinks what he says, as opposed to kind who flaps like clotheslines laundry in a windstorm? We should. But even if we don’t, that’s the kind of workforce commission chairman we’ve got.

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