Short Cuts: Episode III 
Behind the Scenes 
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?
brazilb69 says: The rest of the nation is on to the joke known as, Governor Perry. He has done a good job of making himself seem so accomplished. He is a teabagging religious nut. And we do not want his steering wheel up our ass! (August 12th, 2011 at 1:05pm)
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Alliances with prominent Republican activists. Perry’s dance card includes Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, who is best known for his desire to reduce the size of government until you can “drown it in a bathtub.” His relationship with Norquist dates back at least to 2004, when Perry, some of his major donors and political allies, and Norquist went on a lavish (and much criticized) three-day retreat in the Bahamas over the Presidents’ Day weekend. In an interview with the Washington-based National Journal in January 2009, Norquist named Jindal and Perry as his top two choices for the 2012 presidential nomination, but Jindal blew his chance at stardom with his lackluster response to Obama’s first State of the Union address. (Perry has said that Norquist will come to Texas this year to campaign for him in the Republican primary.) Then there’s Rush. On the last weekend of the 2009 legislative session—crunch time in the Capitol—Perry blew into Houston, where he made Limbaugh an honorary Texan. William Bennett, who was Secretary of Education during the Reagan presidency and now hosts the Morning in America talk show, has also endorsed Perry for reelection.
None of this will matter if Perry can’t get by Hutchison in the March 2 primary. The state’s senior senator is a formidable candidate, but once again, timing has been on Perry’s side. The anger of the Republican base toward Washington has had a cruel impact on Hutchison’s campaign. She has been a good senator for Texas. As a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, she has brought in billions of dollars for local communities, military installations, and universities across the state—only to find the Republican base inflamed over excessive spending and her efforts ridiculed as earmarks and pork by the Perry campaign. But her problems run much deeper than the day-to-day exchanges between the two campaigns. Hutchison never appreciated the resistance among Republicans to the idea of a sitting senator’s returning to the state to run against the sitting governor. She had a low opinion of Perry and assumed that most Republicans did too—and according to the first polls in the race, many did. She has never been able to articulate why she wanted to make such an unusual move and why Republicans should support it.
This was painfully evident when she spoke to the Texas Federation of Republican Women in Galveston in November. The first two things she said she wanted to do were lower school property taxes and address the problem of illegal immigration. On both issues, Perry had gotten there first. After wrestling with the school finance issue for three years in mid-decade, the Republican leadership at the time (Perry, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, and Speaker Tom Craddick) cut school property taxes by $15.7 billion. As for immigration, Perry has sent Texas Rangers to the border; he has doled out money to border sheriffs; he spent $2 million to place cameras along the border that could be viewed on a Web site with the goal of catching illegal activity, all accompanied by considerable fanfare. I am not praising these decisions—far from it. The property tax cut has been disastrous, creating a structural deficit in future state education budgets. On the border, his actions were mainly for show. As Brandi Grissom, of the Texas Tribune, noted, “Reports from the first year of the border camera program show it fell far short of its initial law enforcement goals.” But the potential advantage in the primary lies with Perry. He was on the record as having already addressed what Hutchison said she wanted to do.
Likewise, Hutchison’s attack on Perry’s conservative bona fides has focused on three issues, all of which have thus far failed to rouse much passion from the voters. One was Perry’s 2007 executive order to require girls entering the sixth grade to be given a cervical cancer vaccine. This is a hot-button issue in Republican circles; many Republicans regard mandatory vaccinations as an interference with parental rights. But the Legislature quickly invalidated the order, Perry dropped the plan, and the whole flap disappeared from the radar. Her second line of attack was Perry’s support in 2006 of a new tax on business to bring in more revenue for schools after the Legislature slashed property taxes. The tax was unpopular with small businesses, and Hutchison told business interests that she wanted to repeal it. But she never offered a plan to replace the lost revenue. The third issue was the Trans-Texas Corridor, Perry’s controversial attempt to privatize highways. The Corridor and TxDOT, the agency responsible for it, deserve their share of criticism, but like the vaccinations and the business tax, the Corridor is a mess that is several years old. Republican concerns today are much more about what is going on in Washington.
Most campaign strategists would have told Hutchison not to attack Perry at all. She would have been better advised to run some positive TV in the spring of 2009, reintroducing herself to the voters at a time when Perry was occupied by the legislative session and prohibited from raising money. She had a considerable lead in fund-raising at the time. Perry was going nowhere. She should have ignored him and talked about her own plans for Texas. Instead, after three months of trying to paint him as not a real conservative, she had lost all but six points of her lead.
When I asked Hutchison staffers at a meeting several months ago about her strategy of trying to outflank Perry to his right, their explanation was that most of the voters in the Republican primary will be conservatives who have voted for both Perry and Hutchison before and she has to compete for those voters. This challenges the conventional wisdom about this race, which is that the conservative base favors Perry and that Hutchison needs to attract moderate voters to win. Recently, a former GOP political consultant showed me some numbers from the 2008 elections. In Harris County that year, 171,108 voters cast ballots in the Republican primary. Compare that with the general election, in which the lowest-polling GOP candidate in Harris County, scandal-tarred sheriff Tommy Thomas, got 495,246 votes. There are a lot of Republican voters out there who typically don’t vote in primaries. Hutchison needs to enlarge the primary electorate if she is going to win, but so far, her campaign has made strategic decisions that alienate rather than attract mainstream Republicans, such as trying to out-conservative Perry and using Dick Cheney as the spokesman for her conservative credentials.
Nevertheless, the race is not over. Despite the Hutchison campaign’s strategic blunders, despite her own hesitancy to decide when and whether to resign her Senate seat, despite a dreary initial TV spot in which she attempted to explain her indecisiveness rather than what she hoped to achieve as governor, what has happened so far is mostly material for insiders. The public is only now beginning to pay attention to this race. Most of the cross fire between the two campaigns has thus far taken place on Web pages and in e-mail press releases, largely out of sight of ordinary people. The race is going to be a sprint, from now to March 2. Hutchison’s best hope is that a silent majority of November Republicans is suffering from a bad case of Perry fatigue and will take the cure by showing up at the polls in March. But the usual effect of negative campaigning is to depress turnout rather than stimulate it.
Should Perry get past Hutchison, his next hurdle, in November, is sure to be ex-Houston mayor Bill White. Texas has not seen a general election that mattered since 1994, when Bush defeated Ann Richards and ushered in an era of Republican dominance that still prevails. It will see one this year. White is no patsy. He was the popular mayor of a city of 2.2 million people for three terms. He has crossover appeal to Republicans. He has a track record of being able to raise a lot of money. His main problem—the problem facing any mayor who tries to make the jump to statewide office—is that he is not well-known outside his home media market. In 2002 Dallas mayor Ron Kirk and Austin mayor Kirk Watson ran for U.S. Senate and attorney general, respectively, on the Democratic ticket. Like White, both were popular mayors based in large media markets. Neither came close.
As it has been since 1985, Perry’s advantage in this race is timing: 2010 is shaping up as a Republican year, possibly a huge Republican year. Perry’s team believes that the tea party movement has significantly increased the numbers—and the passion—in the hard-right Republican base. Mike Baselice, his pollster, says that Republicans currently enjoy a six-point edge in party identification, but he expects it to increase to eight points after this election cycle. Perry is vulnerable on a lot of benchmark issues—insurance rates, utility rates, student performance, the Corridor, the list is long—but his ace in the hole is that Republicans are significantly more energized than Democrats this year.
And then, if everything goes right for him, the last hurdle for the man who has always been in the right place at the right time might be another man who has always been blessed with a good sense of timing: Barack Obama. You just know how much Perry would love to take up that fight—the champion of the right against the champion of the left, the chance to turn back the clock, to undo the New Deal, to chase the socialists out of Washington, to one-up Bush. And who knows? If the timing is perfect, he just might win.
Heaven help us all.
My Library
