FORT WORTH -- Democratic hair care businessman Farouk Shami guaranteed Monday that he would create 100,000 jobs available to everyone, offer free electricity and an enact a moratorium on the death penalty if elected governor of Texas.
In the first and possibly only debate involving Shami and three-term former Houston Mayor Bill White, the two most well-funded Democrats running for governor, Shami made sweeping promises while White mostly ignored him to focus on Republican incumbent Gov. Rick Perry.
Both Democrats, however, agreed on the importance of jobs -- a key item in their campaigns.
"Creating jobs is my specialty," Shami, 67, of Houston, said in the debate broadcast statewide before a small audience from a TV station in Fort Worth. "When I am governor, everybody is going to go to work."
He also promised to pay the state $10 million -- the same amount he's budgeted for his election effort -- if 100,000 jobs aren't created under his watch. He did not provide specifics, though he's previously touted highway and landscaping projects.
White, 55, said the way to create jobs is to retrain unemployed people and ensure they have a job at the end of the training.
The question of a death penalty moratorium in the nation's most active capital punishment state was a major item of disagreement, with Shami declaring "a lot of innocent people" have been put to death.
"We cannot be bragging on how many people we have been executing," he said, insisting he wouldn't support resuming executions unless he was "110 percent sure" of a convicted person's guilt.
White said a blanket suspension wouldn't work "because that would disrespect the juries and the victims and the criminal justice where there is no question ... about the evidence used to convict."
The two men also disagreed on Shami's proposal for free electricity, which Shami said could be achieved in 10 years through expansion of wind and solar energy use.
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