Unhappy With The Existing GOP Field... Waiting For Godot-- And Perry Ain't It

The Establishment end of the Republican Party wishes they had a better candidate than Mitt Romney to get behind. Yes, he's their guy but... they're realizing that their guy is a loser. At the same time, the far right of the party-- the racists, teabaggers, religionist bigots, lunatic fringe-- are unhappy with their (latest) standard bearer. Once they-- or at least their big money backers-- accepted that Michele Bachmann is utterly implausible and rallied round Rick Perry... well it's been all downhill from there. Above, we see Rachel Maddow talking about the dilemma. Below Lawrence O'Donnell talks with Alec MacGillis of the New Republic who just wrote the cover story, "The Permanent Candidate: What's Driving Rick Perry?"

MacGillis has managed to get down on paper what so many of us have felt about Perry all along. Keyword: INAUTHENTIC. It's all about Rick Perry-- and if he was supposed to be the guy who was the alternative to a Mitt Romney who doesn't stand for anything other than a career path... bad news. His national image as a "hardened ideologue driven by small-government orthodoxy" is a joke for people in Texas who have followed his pathetic and slimy little career. The real Perry, they say isn't "Perry the ideologue but Perry the tactician-- a politician skilled at picking up on shifts in the electorate and adapting himself to them." In effect, he's the polar opposite of a leader. And as MacGillis makes clear, "Perry often seemed more driven by personal priorities than ideological ones." He comes across more like an old-time, self-serving, Big City ward heeler than an ideological champion of any sort.

Perry, says Bill Allaway of the conservative Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, has a “knack for seeing where stuff is headed and thinking where he could be with respect to that.” The tax-day speech was an example of Perry “getting right in front of the parade,” says Miller. “He saw that this is where I need to be right now. And that’s just having good campaign judgment to do that.” Perry’s political guru, Dave Carney, basically said as much when I met with him in Austin, attributing his client’s prescience to the pleasure that Perry takes in being out among voters. “He listens, he looks you in the eye, and he gets a sense of where people are going,” Carney told me. “He has a very good sense of what’s going on.” Greg Hartman, a former Texas political strategist, marvels at Perry’s transformation since 2009. “The most amazing thing about Perry is that now that he’s jumped out there, people say he’s brash and caustic, but he built his career as lieutenant governor and governor by being pretty quiet. He’s not brash. This is a little bit of a new persona here.”

...Having secured [his first election in 1984, a state legislative] seat, Perry made clear that he did not exactly have a big policy agenda. “I had not one piece of legislation I planned to carry,” he told the Abilene paper after the election.

Once in Austin, Perry made little effort to hide his lack of interest in the finer points of policy. Garry Mauro, then the Texas land commissioner, remembers coming to Perry to sponsor a piece of legislation and Perry cutting him off when he started to explain the bill in detail. “Don’t waste your time,” Perry said. “I wouldn’t understand it anyway. Just make sure you’re there to talk about it.” Recalling the incident today, Mauro says, “You at least have to give the guy credit for candidness.”

In 1988, Perry endorsed Al Gore for president. The decision looks understandable in retrospect, given that Gore was one of the more centrist (and Southern) candidates in that year’s Democratic field. But the veteran state Democrat was struck by how eager Perry was to take a lead role in the Gore effort, which has been downplayed in more recent accounts of the episode. The official co-chairs of the campaign in Texas were two older, prominent state Democrats, Bill Hobby and Jess Hay. But Perry and a few other young House reps got together and, with the elders’ permission, started calling themselves co-chairmen as well-- with Perry flying them around the state on Gore’s behalf.

Yet, even as he was angling for status in his own party, Perry had caught the eye of those building the new GOP in Texas, notably a doughy savant by the name of Karl Rove. The state had been solidly Democratic for generations, but change was afoot, as Democrats became associated with Northern liberals like Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy. In 1983, Texas Congressman Phil Gramm had announced that he was switching parties. In 1989, with the coaxing of Rove, and with Gramm standing at his side, Perry announced he was doing the same in order to take on agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, a darling of liberals and nemesis of Texas farmers. It was a bold move. “What the hell did I just do?” Perry muttered aloud after announcing the change, according to one Republican insider. In Austin, the switch only confirmed the sense that Perry was a striver. “Governor Perry is a really, really good politician,” Hartman, the former strategist, told me. “He understood where the state of Texas was going.”

For the race against Hightower, David Weeks, the TV whiz in Rove’s shop and a friend of Perry’s from West Texas, crafted gauzy spots featuring Perry in chaps and playing piano with his young son. “David is wonderful at capturing him and projecting him,” says Miller, the Austin consultant. “Rick’s his muse.” Weeks also produced an ad that showed images of flag-burners morphing into Hightower’s face. On Election Day, Perry eked out a win, 49 to 47 percent.

As commissioner, Perry set about scrapping Hightower’s regulations on pesticides and played up his bond with farmers, defending them against attacks from “food terrorists and stomach police.” But his anti-government stance only went so far: He sought big increases in his department’s budget and defended a state loan program for farmers against a critical audit.

Meanwhile, the state’s political shift toward the GOP was accelerating. When Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a Democrat, announced he would not seek reelection in 1998, Rove urged Perry to run in the hopes of putting a Republican in place to take over as governor if George W. Bush was elected president two years later. Perry was ready-- even though it meant running against a good friend from A&M, Democrat John Sharp.

Rove couldn’t manage Perry’s race because Bush wanted him to focus on his reelection bid that year. Instead, Perry turned to Carney, an acerbic New Hampshirite who remains his strategist to this day. The two teams clashed over strategy: Rove and Bush demanded that Perry not go too negative, to help maintain the bipartisan aura that they wanted to carry into their upcoming run for president; Perry, already resentful of the Bush scion’s unearned elevation in Texas politics, chafed at the order, according to several people with knowledge of the campaign.

Sharp told me that running against Perry was like nothing he’d ever experienced. “You talk about focus-- the man gets focused. Hell, we were getting up at five a.m. in the morning to go to breakfasts, and this guy was getting up at four a.m. and doing two breakfasts and then a luncheon,” he recalls. “If you run against Perry, you’d better bring your lunch because you’re not going to have much time to eat it.” Perry was distinctly less eager about one element of the campaign-- the televised debate. At his urging, it was held in El Paso on a Friday night at the height of the high school football season. “El Paso on a Friday night during a football game and the time zones are different,” Sharp says. “How many people do you think watched that?”

Polls showed the race as a nail-biter. But, at the last minute, Perry received a $1.1 million loan from several top Republican donors, including Bill McMinn, a chemical executive, and James Leininger, a staunch social conservative and proponent of private-school vouchers who made his money manufacturing hospital beds. “That was the edge,” Sharp says. “Before the last week, our money-raising was just about equal, but in that last week he had twice the airtime. It was a big deal.” On Election Day 1998, Perry won with 50.4 percent, a far narrower margin than the one enjoyed by Bush and other Republicans on the ticket. (In an odd twist, Perry managed to lose his home county, where the shift toward the GOP had not fully taken hold.)

After the election, Perry set about retiring his debt by holding fund-raisers where lobbyists were asked to give $50,000 each, a more aggressive approach than Texas had seen before. He charted his own path in other ways, too. Among Bush’s proudest accomplishments as governor was the friendship he had cultivated with Democrats like Bullock and House Speaker Pete Laney. Every Wednesday during the legislative session, the trio would meet for breakfast. The tradition continued once Perry replaced Bullock-- but the new lieutenant governor seemed to have little interest in the gatherings. Several people with knowledge of the breakfasts told me that, while Laney and Bush would chat, Perry would sit in near-total silence. Sometimes, to fill the time, he would file his nails.

...How could a conservative Republican governor find himself so at odds with a legislature controlled by his own party? It wasn’t for a lack of partisanship-- Perry campaigned far more aggressively for state Republicans than Bush had done. The best explanation was that Perry often seemed more driven by personal priorities than ideological ones. His failed highway and rail plan, the Trans-Texas Corridor Initiative, was derided by legislators of both parties as a boondoggle that would have required a massive land grab. But the project also would have benefited three highway contractors who had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry. The governor’s attempt to mandate that Texas girls receive a vaccine for HPV, so seemingly at odds with Perry’s social conservatism, came at a time when his former chief of staff-- one of five Perry chiefs of staff to also serve as lobbyists-- was lobbying for Merck, the vaccine’s manufacturer. (Merck contributed $5,000 to Perry during the vaccine discussions and nearly $30,000 over the past decade.)

There were plenty of other moments where Perry’s actions seemed to align with the needs of his very successful campaign account. (By the 2006 cycle, Perry had 85 donors giving at least $25,000, double Bush’s total from eight years earlier.) In 1999, Perry’s first year as lieutenant governor, an e-mail from a Dallas insurance executive surfaced claiming that, by offering a $25,000 contribution, a lobbyist had convinced Perry against convening a Senate committee on insurance deregulation; shortly after the e-mail was sent, Perry received $19,000 at an insurance industry fund-raiser. In 2008, Perry requested a waiver from federal ethanol mandates; a month later, an East Texas poultry producer who was pressing for the waiver to keep feed costs lower contributed $25,000 to Perry. Earlier this year, momentum grew for a bill restricting texting while driving, authored by former Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick. Perry vetoed the bill in June, following a surge in contributions from telecom companies-- especially Dallas-based AT&T, whose PAC has given the governor more than $500,000, including $100,000 last year. (“This is a big deal to AT&T. We live in our cars here,” says Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston.) In August, after much debate over whether to turn millions of Medicaid beneficiaries over to managed care companies, Texas awarded a $1 billion Medicaid contract to the HMO Centene-- whose PAC has given Perry $45,000 since 2006.

When it came to appointments to Texas’s 270 boards, commissions, and agencies, the pattern was no different. Texas governors have historically made full use of the power of patronage, but Perry has done so with particular zeal. A report last year by Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group, found that he had received contributions from nearly two-thirds of the 155 state university regents he had appointed—$6 million in all. Leininger, who helped arrange the 1998 loan to Perry’s campaign that may have allowed him to barely defeat Sharp, continued to support Perry, giving him $239,000 over the decade; meanwhile, Perry appointed former top employees of Leininger’s hospital-bed company—in which Perry’s personal investment during the ’90s resulted in a $38,000 gain—to the Texas Board of Health, as chair of the influential Texas Workforce Commission, and as head of the nonprofit that oversees the state’s faith-based grant-making. In another case, Perry created a whole new government body, the Texas Residential Construction Commission, to allow building contractors to self-regulate rather than fight claims in court. Among those pushing hardest for the new board was the homebuilder Bob Perry (no relation), who gave the governor $175,000 in the two years prior to the board’s creation in 2003 and whose own corporate counsel was given one of the seats on it. (Bob Perry’s other priority has been fighting immigration restrictions that could drive up his labor costs-- which some Texans point to as one possible explanation for Rick Perry’s moderate stance on illegal immigration.)

Perry’s seeming emphasis on cultivating allies rather than advancing legislation means he has left an oddly shallow policy imprint-- especially given that he is the longest serving governor in Texas history. He has presided over few major reforms other than a sweeping tort overhaul and a much-praised repair of the state’s juvenile justice system. “What does it say if your governor’s clearest role is in vetoing bills and not passing them, in a legislature that’s Republican dominated?” asks Kirk Watson, a Democratic state senator from Austin. Here, many Texans draw a contrast to Bush, who, despite facing a Democratic legislature, managed to implement more significant reforms, notably in education. “Bush’s focus was on what’s good for Texas,” says one senior state Democrat. “Perry’s was a little more on what’s good for Perry.”

...On the national stage, Perry’s new rivals have just started testing whether questions about his record in Texas will resonate with the GOP electorate. Michele Bachmann has invoked “crony capitalism” in criticizing Perry’s dealings with Merck, and Mitt Romney has attempted to cast Perry as a “career politician.” There is certainly plenty of fodder for these attacks. What no one knows is whether Republican voters are in a mood to care.

Probably not... what they do seem to care about is that someone persuaded him to allow the children of Hispanic immigrants to pay the same tuition as the children of other Texans who go to state universities. That probably cost him the nomination.