BUSH LITE:

Right Place, Right Time: An exquisite sense of timing--and a good deal of luck--has helped transform Rick Perry from an unknown Democratic state legislator into a swaggering Republican who's spent more years in the Governor's Mansion than anyone in Texas history. Is it enough to carry him past Kay Bailey Hutchison and all the way to the White House? (Paul Burka, February 2010, Texas Monthly)

Perry's inner circle, particularly his consultant Dave Carney, has believed that he has had national potential at least since 2006. Carney made that point during an interview I had with the Perry team that summer for a story about the upcoming governor's race. Carney is from New Hampshire, the incubator of presidential ambitions, and he knows what it takes to succeed on a national level. The rest is my hypothesis: Sometime in 2007, after Perry had been sworn in for his second term, his team surveyed the Republican field and the wreckage of the Bush presidency and recognized that 2008 was destined to be a Democratic year. They saw no one in the GOP field who was capable of defeating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. (Best not to mention John Edwards.) But they also saw that the two leading Democrats were destined to be unpopular with older white males, the core constituency of the Republican party. The Democratic winner in 2008 was at risk of being a one-term president.

This scenario may explain why Perry, against all expectations, opted to sacrifice a comfortable retirement to run for a third term at a time when his prospects, even for reelection, were not great. It's not about 2010; it's about 2012.

I pressed Carney on this hypothesis when I met with Perry's top advisers in early December. He acknowledged again his conviction that Perry has the political talent to run for president, but then he added, "He doesn't want to go to Washington. He doesn't want to live that life." That's probably true. Who does? Even George W. Bush had second thoughts. "I'm not sure that I want to live the rest of my life in the bubble," Bush told me once, before he jumped into the pool. But as Perry's career attests, politics is all about timing, and if you're a politician and the timing is right, you have to go for the brass ring.

The paradox of Rick Perry is that, although he is the state's longest-serving governor and he has a following that reaches beyond the borders of Texas, he has never gotten a lot of respect at home. This is true even inside the Capitol and even among Republicans. Once, during a prolonged battle over school finance reform, the Republican-led House voted down Perry's plan 124 to 8, amid whoops and hollers and horseplay. Considering his long tenure in office--six years as state representative, eight as agriculture commissioner, two as lieutenant governor, and a record nine years (and counting) as governor--Perry has had little to say about the critical issues facing Texas, in particular, education and health care. When he has gotten involved, it is usually on ideological grounds, such as support for vouchers, merit pay for teachers, and privatization of state health services. (These experiments have been flops. A proposed voucher program died in a House floor fight; a merit pay program for teachers was abandoned after it failed to show improvement in student performance; and the privatization contract was a fiasco.)

But Perry has one overriding asset: good timing. It has propelled him, over the past 25 years, from unknown Democratic state legislator to credible Republican presidential contender. His ability to figure out where Texas politics was headed and to get out in front of the parade has been the essential skill that has enabled him to stay in sync with the state Republican party as it has evolved over the years.

Until Ronald Reagan came along in 1976 to challenge President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, the GOP in Texas had typically been run by rich folks from Dallas and Houston. Reagan's insurgency caused a rift, on one side of which were the state's best-known Republicans, U.S. senator John Tower and former congressman George H.W. Bush, who were loyal to Ford, and on the other, grassroots populists, who embraced Reagan. The struggle between the GOP establishment and the more-conservative populists has been a major theme of Republican politics ever since.

Perry's ability to anticipate the mutations of the party and to capitalize on them reveals an aptitude for politics that he rarely gets credit for. One of the reasons that he rose steadily through the GOP ranks is that his arrival as a freshman Democratic legislator, in 1985, was perfectly timed to take advantage of the tectonic shifts in Texas politics, as the state was evolving from blue to red. The Democratic party was becoming more urban and more liberal; Perry's allegiances were rural and conservative. The Democratic party was moving away from his political comfort zone, the GOP toward it. He aligned himself with newly elected U.S. senator Phil Gramm, who was proselytizing in the Democratic ranks, trying to get conservative Democrats to switch parties, as Gramm himself had done in the early eighties. "It's the last copter out of Nam, and you'd better get on it," Gramm would warn potential converts.

Gramm understood that as long as Texas politics remained a three-legged stool--liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats, and Republicans--the GOP would always be a minority party, but if conservative Democrats could be prevailed upon to switch parties, the Democrats would be left with liberals and minorities. And that's what happened. As the Democratic party became more liberal, conservative Democrats, who accounted for a little more than a quarter of the electorate in the eighties, began to melt away; today, their share of the spectrum has shrunk to 9 percent. Perry knew he had no future as a Democrat, so in 1989 he changed parties. His timing was exquisite. A general election was right around the corner. Republicans were looking for candidates for down-ballot offices. They needed someone to run for the unglamorous office of agriculture commissioner. Perry had grown up on a farm. No one gave him much of a chance to defeat the incumbent Democrat, Jim Hightower, but Karl Rove was Perry's consultant, Hightower was overconfident, and Perry won.

The party mutated again in 1994, and it was to Perry's advantage once more. Bush was the gubernatorial nominee, but the evangelicals who had swelled the Republican ranks in the eighties and early nineties didn't consider him one of their own. At the convention that year, evangelicals led by Tom Pauken, a Dallas lawyer and party activist (and current Perry appointee as chairman of the Workforce Commission), ousted chairman Fred Meyer, who came from the establishment wing of the party. The convention elected Pauken to replace him. (Party rules stipulate that the delegates, not the party hierarchy, control the state convention.) This was advantageous for Perry, because as long as urban establishment types controlled the party, which they had always done, Perry was going nowhere, stuck as agriculture commissioner. He was not their kind of guy, too rural, too ideological, too rough around the edges. But with the grassroots types in charge, it was a different story. He could be as partisan and ideological as they were.

If Jeb and Mitch don't run, W's successor as governor is his most obvious heir, no matter their personal differences.

Posted by oj at September 4, 2011 8:55 AM
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