Bob Perry Needs a Hug
The biggest campaign contributor in the country is a reclusive Houston homebuilder who doesn’t cooperate with the press (until now), never poses for photographs (until now), and keeps his personal life top secret (until now). Maybe it’s because so many people blame him for dragging American politics into the gutter.
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Perry’s Swift Boat donations are typical of a good deal of his giving, which one of his acquaintances describes as “completely binary—the switch is on or the switch is off. He believes in it or he doesn’t.” Once he has decided he likes an idea, he gives massively and without oversight. Beyond putting up the money, Perry had nothing to do with the production of the anti-Kerry ads. Unlike other Texas megadonors, such as the notorious Bo Pilgrim, Perry has never been found at the Capitol, twisting arms before a floor vote on a favored cause. “He gives money because he supports the mission statement of the group,” says Holm. “After that he keeps more than arm’s-length distance. He has nothing to do with the actual activities of the 527.”
Perry’s style of autopilot giving is perfectly suited to the 527 system. Once he’s signed a check, he can leave full control of the message to the consultants and media mavens who make the ads and in effect surrender any responsibility for their content. At the same time, the operatives who run the 527’s—like AFHOI’s Sue Walden—are prevented by law from having anything to do with parties or candidates, which implies a staggering lack of accountability in the system. It is an efficient apparatus, and indeed, almost all of Perry’s giving in the 2006 federal elections—$9.3 million—went to 527’s. The largest of those, the Economic Freedom Fund, to which Perry gave $5 million, funded political advertisements in congressional races in West Virginia, Indiana, Georgia, Iowa, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. Perry also gave $3 million to AFHOI, which financed races in Indiana, New Mexico, Iowa, Kentucky, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina, and $1 million to the Free Enterprise Fund Committee, which funded ads attacking MoveOn.org, a group that supports Democratic causes and candidates.
Almost every television or radio ad and every direct-mail campaign funded by Perry and produced by these 527’s last fall questioned the integrity or record of the Democratic candidate. But for the most part, the charges they leveled were in keeping with the general climate of political hostility that was the by-product of a national dogfight for control of the Senate and House. In their approaches, and their attacking style, the ads financed by Perry were very much like most ads run by Democratic candidates and the 527’s backing them.
There are exceptions, of course. Perhaps the most famous was an ad run against Jon Tester, the Democratic challenger for a Senate seat in Montana. Funded by the Free Enterprise Fund Committee, to whom Perry was the sole donor, the spot purported to be a trailer for a movie. It opened with an image of men on horseback that recalled scenes from Brokeback Mountain, the controversial 2005 film about gay cowboys. The voice-over intoned: “Coming soon: Brokebank Democrats. They can’t fight their nature.” After proclaiming that Tester, who opposes an outright ban on gay marriage, would raise taxes, the ad closed with a cowboy saying, “I guess old Tester just don’t know how to quit … taxin,’ ” a play on the famous line from the film “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
Another recipient of Perry’s largesse, the Economic Freedom Fund, which got the largest single donation to any 527 in the 2006 election cycle, gained notoriety when it was sued by the Indiana attorney general for using illegal “robo-calling” methods. It was also the subject of a complaint filed by the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center to the Federal Election Commission that it had failed to register, as the law requires, as a political committee.
The defense that Perry’s role in all this is simply as a donor of cash rings hollow to some critics, such as Brooks Jackson, the director of FactCheck.org, a Washington-based, nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer advocacy group for voters. “My suspicion is that while he has this convenient excuse that is technically accurate,” says Jackson, “what I suspect is going on is a mental attitude I find among the people who run these independent groups on the left and right. They just don’t care if it is right or wrong. They are so ideologically driven that anything that advances their cause is good and anything that hurts the forces of evil on the other side, that’s okay.”
Holm says the charge is unfair, since not only does Perry have no control over the content of the ads he pays for, but he often doesn’t even watch the ads by the 527’s. “The same is true with his giving to the Republican Governors Association or the Republican National Committee or Progress for America, which represent millions and millions more,” Holm says. “He doesn’t monitor their ads. He just can’t. He is running a business with hundreds of employees. He believes in the mission statement and/or the operators of the organizations. He makes the donation and that’s it.” Perry’s close friend and political ally Dick Weekley offers a refinement on that notion: “If he thinks it’s helping his state or his country, it doesn’t matter to him if he knows the candidates or not. Some don’t even know who he is. How many people that you know would make a contribution to people they have never heard of and never seen? It is a very selfless thing to do.”
THE DOSSIER ON BOB PERRY is amazingly thin for such a prominent force in American politics. Here are the basics: He is 74 years old, of modest stature but trim, physically fit, and powerfully built, the product of frequent exercise. He played halfback on his high school football team and was known for being “small but fast,” in the words of a classmate. He is handsome, a successful genetic splice of good-looking parents. He is formal, restrained, and wears dark, conservative suits when he is working. Almost everyone addresses him as “Mr. Perry.”
He lives in a stately, 13,874-square-foot, eight-bedroom, dun-colored stucco house with four big pillars in the town of Nassau Bay, southeast of Houston, on a narrow bayou called Clear Creek a few miles from NASA at Clear Lake. He has lived there for thirty years. Aside from a small crop of large homes, the neighborhood is pretty solidly middle class. Nothing fancy. The house is appraised by Harris County at $662,010, though most of the houses around it are in the $200,000 range. He is an ardent pro-lifer and a member of the Nassau Bay Baptist Church. He is not a teetotaler—he drinks a glass of wine socially now and again. He is a proud alumnus of his alma mater, Baylor University. His wife, Doylene, is a former fourth-grade teacher who, after their four children left home, went back and got a master’s degree and then taught at a community college. He exercises daily and is an avid reader of Latin American literature. He likes to tell jokes but tells them badly and then apologizes when they don’t work.
I know all this from looking at photographs of Perry and talking to his friends and acquaintances. I have never actually met with him. To the best of my knowledge, no one in my profession has. Perry’s policy of not talking directly to the press hasn’t changed, but for this story, he did allow me some rudimentary access. I was allowed to ask questions through an intermediary. I was permitted to tour his business, taken to see the exterior of his home, invited to visit certain of his charities, and cleared to speak with several of his friends and close associates. He also allowed texas monthly to photograph him, though I was not there for the session.
Almost everyone I interviewed told me how important Perry’s work is to him. At an age when many people with his wealth would be pitching 9-irons across expensively manicured golf courses, Perry still goes in every day to the drab, undistinguished, three-story building on the Interstate 45 frontage road about a mile and a half from Hobby Airport, where Perry Homes is headquartered. The office practically screams “anonymity.” Inside, there are marble floors and cream-colored walls and a few paintings but little other adornment. The company has been in this location since the early seventies.
During my tour of the building, I was allowed to step inside Perry’s office. He was not present. Predictably, the modestly appointed room offered up little in the way of clues. It contained a desk, a high-backed leather chair, a few aerial maps, and an enormous globe. His view takes in a parking lot, the Lucky Dragon Buffet, a Super 8 Motel, and the elevated concrete columns of I-45. I tried to imagine him on the phone in this office, speaking with the organizers of the Economic Freedom Fund Committee. What does he say? “I’ll put that five-million-dollar check in the mail next week”? Along one wall of the office there was a set of shelves where I expected to find pictures of his family, but the only photo was of Ronald Reagan.
This dreary, paved-over corner of Houston is where all the money comes from. Like everything else about Perry, his company is private, and therefore information on it is scarce. But one can do some primitive triangulation. He founded Perry Homes in 1967 and has slowly built it into the nation’s thirty-fifth-largest homebuilder. In 2005 the company put up 2,688 homes, all in Texas. The houses are mostly traditional, four-square brick affairs, ranging in price from roughly $150,000 to $500,000. These days the company builds both master-planned homes in the suburbs and townhouses in the city. According to Builder magazine’s list of the top one hundred homebuilders in America, Perry Homes has revenues of $593 million. Since profit margins in the industry generally run between 10 and 20 percent, the company likely earns between $59 million and $118 million in net profit every year. This would be the money that Perry, who owns 100 percent of Perry Homes, can use as he pleases. If he chose to sell his company today, it would be worth anywhere between $385 million and $652 million, based on a recent study by the Swiss bank UBS of current valuations in the homebuilding industry. None of Perry’s children are active in the business, but friends say that Perry has been financially generous with them. Still, it seems that, even with $16 million spent on politics in 2006 and uncounted other millions on charity, there is plenty to go around. If he wanted to, he could dump $50 million a year into American politics without breaking a sweat.
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