It’s Rick Perry. Well, not exactly. What has happened is that Team Perry has taken over the Dewhurst campaign. Dave Carney is in charge. Mark Miner has joined the communications team. Rob Johnson is heading up the Super PAC. Everyone understands what that means. It means that the Perry playbook will be the textbook for Dewhurst’s runoff campaign against Ted Cruz. And the contents of the playbook have never been a secret. Chapter One is “Always attack.” Chapter Two is “If the first attack doesn’t work, try another one.” Chapter Three is “The only good use for earth is to scorch it.”

The unsolved mystery of Perry’s deep involvement in the Dew’s Senate race is why he cares. He must think  he can benefit by Dewhurst’s going to the Senate.

How? In the first place, it is to Perry’s advantage to have an ally in the Senate, assuming he intends to remain active in state and national politics. Texas’s senior senator, John Cornyn, and Perry are not close. Nor does Perry have a lot of friends in the Texas congressional delegation. He won no allies in the delegation by running for governor against Kay Bailey Hutchison in 2010 with an anti-Washington message that irked all the members of the delegation, not to mention rubbing off on many of them. Most members of Congress work hard. They regard Perry as a show horse, rather than  a workhorse. Cruz is certainly no friend of Perry’s, and he is also a rival for Perry as the leader of the tea party in Texas.  That leaves only Dewhurst as a possible ally.

Finally, it’s possible that Perry can gain from Dewhurst’s departure by the simple possibility that Dewhurst would no longer be light gov. The Texas Senate would have to choose a successor, and Perry, as governor, would be in a position to influence that selection, which could prove to be useful if he remains in office as governor.

As I wrote in a previous post, the issue of how to run against Cruz is crucial. Cruz is a grassroots candidate. Dewhurst clearly is not. He is the establishment candidate. Cruz has an edge in using social media to contact his voter base and get them to the polls. Dewhurst’s failure to reach 50% in the closing days of the primary race indicates the campaign’s lack of a social media strategy that can identify and turn out his voters.

Carney will follow his usual strategy of attacking his opponent in the media. This strategy has the dual benefit of weakening Dewhurst’s opponent and providing consultants with more income from the placement of advertising. But how many bombs does Dewhurst have left to throw at Cruz? They have already hit him with an attack on his representation of a Chinese company that ended up having to pay a large jury verdict to an American competitor. A claim that Cruz supported amnesty for illegal aliens did not appear to have much credibility. What else is left? If the Dewhurst campaign is out of bombshell revelations, they could find themselves on the defensive in the closing days of the runoff.

Tagged: dave carney, david dewhurst, Ted Cruz

Dewhurst has no business being behind the eight-ball in this race. His campaign should have wiped the floor with Ted Cruz.

In late January, Cruz’s name ID was 40%. All Dewhurst had to do was stay with his message–that is, touting his record as a conservative light guv and basically ignoring Cruz. That’s when his campaign made the fatal mistake: On February 1, it hired Dave Carney. What kind of consultant is Carney? He’s an attack dog. Dewhurst ultimately went on the offensive with the China ad. It was very effective. It hurt Cruz, but it helped in even morem by raising Cruz’s name ID, which was around 40% at the time. That was the last thing Dewhurst wanted. The Dewhurst campaign stayed on the attack, including a late spot accusing Cruz of favoring amnesty, which had little credibility. The amnesty attack ad was so overdone that it caused Dewhurst to lose ground in the days before the primary. In effect, Carney’s tactics handed the initiative to Cruz.

Dewhurst should have stuck to his record. He could make a great positive case for himself. (If Cruz ever ran a positive spot, I never saw it.) Instead, he put his campaign in the hands of someone whose most recent credit was the failed Perry presidential campaign. All that got Dewhurst was an endorsement from Perry that hung a sign around Dewhurst’s neck labeled “establishment candidate.” Perry’s performance in the presidential race was evidence that Carney wasn’t the grand strategist he was reputed to be. (Remember, he worked for Craddick, too, in 2008, and didn’t have much to show for it either.)

Tagged: dave carney, david dewhurst, Ted Cruz

No surprise here. A WMUR/Granite State poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, shows the former Massachusetts governor far in front, Bachmann running second, and everyone else in single digits. The date of the poll was not reported.

The poll results (773 likely Republican primary voters, MOE +/- 3/5%):

Romney 35%

Bachmann 12%

Ron Paul 7%

Rudy Giuliani 7%

Perry 4%

Palin 3%

Pawlenty 3%

Huntsman 2%

Cain 2%

Gingrich 1%

Gary Johnson, Buddy Roemer, Rick Santorum < 1%

I trust that readers do not have to be reminded that one of New Hampshire’s leading political operatives is Dave Carney, who is in the Perry camp.

Doug Macatonis, who posted the poll results on the Website “Outside the Beltway,” closes with this observation: “Not much to say here other than one wonders if anyone will seriously contest New Hampshire.”

Tagged: dave carney, Herman Cain, John Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, mitt romney, newt gingrich, rick perry, ron paul, Rudy Giuliani, tim pawlenty

The Perry campaign sent this letter to supporters over the name of consultant Dave Carney:

Thanks for all of your help during the primary. The primary results are a real testament to the massive amount of support the Governor has across the Texas . Everyone helps in their own way.

Now that the dust has settled the real work begins. We need to each individually reach out to the supporters of our former competitors and welcome them with open arms. The 2010 general election is the real prize and sitting on our past victories is a prescription for failure. Moving Texas forward continues to be the mission.

You may have missed the news but Texas created 15,000 more new jobs in January while the nation continues to bleed jobs like it bleeds red ink from DC. And our hapless opponent is a failed liberal frustrated politician who spent the last year office shopping. In few interviews he has morphed into a combination of Jimmy Carter, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry rolled in to one who’s trying to avoid letting voters know where he really stands.

The campaign isn’t a week old and he has already refused to release his income taxes, a true sign of enlightened leadership — keep it a secret from voters that you’ve amassed a fortune after years of public service. His platform is all doom and gloom without a single positive solution, and his past record indicates that his borrow-and-spend approach to issues would drive the economy downward. Oh and he forgets that he’s a plaintiff trial lawyer — which Bill White himself admitted is a bad thing!

White has refused to rule out raising and creating new taxes and he is against spending cuts it appears. He does not support cap and trade because it does not go far enough to regulate carbon (a job killer in Texas if there ever was one). He has fought against guns. He denies that Houston is a sanctuary city despite the fact that Houston is classified as one by the respected nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. He has overseen the most secretive city administration in modern times it seems, as his minions have been on a shredding tear to destroy records of who knows what. His refusal to take a stand on any issue seems odd. He brags about pioneering the trial lawyers’ best friend, contingency fees, yet he won’t reveal how he voted on the tort reform constitutional amendments of just a few years ago. Trying it have it both ways I guess? And somehow he thinks he isn’t a typical politician?

But all of this nonsense should not deter our efforts. We must continue to use the positive agenda the Governor has laid out for Texas and we must redouble our efforts over the next eight months. Recruiting new Perry Home Headquarters, building upon the social media platforms and continuing to promote Texas as the land of opportunity will serve us best over this campaign.

Again thanks for all you do, huge or small, it all adds up.

Dave

Tagged: dave carney, rick perry

Who is best situated to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012? Gallup (October 31-November) finds that 71% of Republicans would “seriously consider” supporting Huckabee, with Romney and Palin at 65% each. Other names who show up on GOP presidential polls include Pawlenty, Gingrich, Giuliani, Barbour, Jindal, and Jeb Bush, none of whom are within telescope range of the top trio. But the top threesome all came out of 2008 as damaged goods. Huckabee was primarily a regional candidate in ’08 and had a hard time expanding his appeal beyond the Bible Belt. Romney didn’t connect well with voters, and Palin was too polarizing.

Not a single poll (on pollingreport.com) even listed a politician who I would argue has a good to chance to win the nomination. I believe this politician (a) has figured it out and (b) has decided to run.

It’s Rick Perry.

That would explain a lot of things — for starters, why he decided to seek four more years as governor, after he had told many of his supporters he wouldn’t (implicitly clearing the way for them to support Hutchison in 2010); and why he didn’t choose to take a victory lap and make easy money on the boards of companies that benefited from his governorship. He has to remain on the political stage in order to compete for the presidential nomination. A beatdown of Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary would elevate his standing as the GOP’s leading conservative figure, now that South Carolina’s Mark Sanford has been so generous as to commit political hari-kari and Sarah Palin, while popular, hasn’t gained in stature.

Perry’s consultant, Dave Carney, is from New Hampshire, and he understands national politics. Sometime in 2007, I suspect, Carney and Perry looked at the Republican field, and at the wreckage of the Bush presidency, and recognized that 2008 was destined to be a Democratic year. They saw no one in the GOP who was capable of defeating Clinton or Obama, the two prominent Democrats who were vying for their party’s nomination. At the same time, they realized that both Democrats had substantial negatives — Clinton because of her husband and her own stridency, and Obama because of his race. Either Clinton or Obama was going to be unpopular with older white males, the core constituency of the Republican party, and was at risk of being a one-term president. Whoever could grab that constituency could win the nomination.

Perry’s decision to face Texas voters was high-risk. If he lost his primary battle against Hutchison (and the first poll in the race showed her with a lead in the mid-twenties), he would be remembered in Texas history as the state’s longest-serving governor but one who left no legacy because he stayed too long. But luck — bad luck for America, good luck for Perry — proved to be on his side, as it has been throughout Perry’s career. The economy collapsed, Bush bailed out the banks, and all of a sudden a Republican civil war broke out between Main Street and Wall Street. I interviewed members of Perry’s inner circle around a year ago, and the strategy for defeating Hutchison was already in place: label her as the candidate of Washington values, position him as the candidate of Texas values. Another aspect of Perry’s good fortune is that his opponents always seem to be afflicted by brain seizures: Jim Hightower was overconfident and didn’t spend money in the closing days (agriculture commissioner, 1990), John Sharp pulled the hard-hitting ad that had him in the lead (lieutenant governor, 1998), and the current Hutchison campaign has been inept and messageless.

Here are the reasons why Perry is well placed to be a viable contender in 2012:
1. Unlike Huckabee, Romney, and Palin, he is still in office.
2. He is the longest-serving governor in Texas history.
3. He is governor of the biggest red state that sends the most delegates to the Republican convention.
4. He has the best conservative record of any contender: significant tort reform, a large property tax cut, refusal to raise taxes in the face of a $10 billion budget deficit (2003), declining to expand government by accepting strings-attached unemployment insurance stimulus funds, implementing efforts to enhance border security. During his tenure as governor, Texas has been active in passing social legislation, including a strong abortion bill in 2003 and a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. You can argue that the effect of the property tax cut was wiped out by rising appraisals, or that his border security efforts were all for show, but it adds up to a record that will be popular with Republican voters.
5. He has assiduously courted key figures in the Republican establishment, such as Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh (whom he made an honorary Texan), as well as other talk radio hosts.
6. The Murdoch news empire loves him. He is the beneficiary of puff pieces in the Wall Street Journal and softball questions on Fox News.
7. He has an extensive fundraising apparatus in Texas that is capable of raising enough money to make the race, and he is now in charge of finance for the Republican Governor’s Association, giving him access to the GOP’s big national donors.
8. He has not one but two strong messages. One is the familiar refrain that Washington is corrupt to the core and out of touch with Main Street. The second is the Texas economic miracle: that by following conservative fiscal policies, Texas has been able to survive the recession in better shape than most, if not all, other states. Low taxes, low spending, constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, saving for a rainy day, and business-friendly regulatory policies have made Texas the top state in job creation year after year. Perry can say to residents of the other states: Do what Texas did and you can enjoy economic growth too. It is a strong message in a recession.
9. He was quick to understand the significance of the tea party movement and attended many of the early gatherings. The tea party people are a natural Perry constituency: angry, unyielding folk who are eager to go where few in American politics are willing to venture: states rights and secession.
10. With rare exceptions (such as the HPV vaccine controversy), he almost never deviates from the conservative line. He is against the border fence, but he makes up for it with his emphasis on border security, even though the cameras and the deployment of Texas Rangers were mainly for show.

* * * *

I’m not saying that Rick Perry SHOULD be president. Heaven forbid. I’m saying that it is not hard to make a case that he CAN be elected president, that he has the necessary ingredients — the resume (grew up poor, farmed, served his country, married his childhood sweetheart, started out as a Democrat, switched parties as a matter of conscience), the record, the money, the conservative credentials — to make the race. Yes, I know, this is Rick Perry we are talking about. Governor 39%. Governor Goodhair. Forget all that. Familiarity breeds contempt. You have to look at Perry as he will present himself to the Republican electorate. He can make a compelling case for himself. I just made it for him.

Perry was a terrible public speaker early in his career, but he is very polished now. Whatever you may think about his hair, the camera loves him. He never takes a bad photo or looks out of sorts on TV. In those TV spots of him prowling the border in 06, he came across as the embodiment of the rugged individualist.

Of course, there is another side to the Perry record. Readers know that Texas’s public schools are chronically underfunded, that the state faces a $17 billion budget hole in 2011, that we lead the nation in the number of people who are uninsured, and so on. There is no need to chronicle the state’s deficiencies; we know what they are, and they will become part of the debate if Perry decides to run. As we are finding out in the governor’s race, though, Republican primary voters do not care about what the government is not doing.

The main argument that I have heard against Perry’s presidential aspirations is that the rest of the nation will not elect another Texas president any time soon. They don’t love us, that’s for sure, but presidential elections are about issues and principles, not geography, and Perry’s brand of unapologetic conservatism is a perfect fit for the Republican party in the tea-party era. Timing is everything in politics. And, right now, the timing is right for Perry.

Tagged: dave carney, kay bailey hutchison, rick perry

OK, so maybe he hasn’t “posted” any “updates” on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s exploratory committee, but I did catch Burka in the hall to do a video with me to at least talk about the interview he had with her yesterday. And I’m all, yesterday? She never returns my calls.

In any case, STREET FIGHT!!

Perry v. Hutchison: Three Drink Minimum

Honorably Mentioned: KBH, Rick Perry, David Dewhurst, Florence Shapiro, Bill White, John Cornyn, Elizabeth Ames Jones, Susan Combs, Todd Staples, Mike Baselice, Dave Carney

Tagged: bill white, dave carney, david dewhurst, Florence Shapiro, kay bailey hutchison, mike baselice, paul burka, rick perry

Things are about to get ugly in the speaker’s race. The Craddick forces, led by several longtime loyalists (I want to run another check on the names), are trying to stir up a coordinated campaign to put pressure on wavering colleagues to vote for Craddick. According to credible reports I have received from Republican operatives, they are asking members to call various GOP and conservative groups with which members may be connected. The purpose is to get activists in these organizations to call House members and urge them (a) to support Craddick and (b) to oppose a secret ballot for the selection of the speaker.

One of the first shots in this battle was fired by Republican County Chairmen’s Association president Linda Rogers. She sent a letter to all GOP county chairs warning that “Texas Liberals are attempting to take over our State House of Representative by nefarious means.” As the Quorum Report pointed out, among the people “attempting to take over” the House are conservative Republicans Burt Solomons and Jim Keffer, and the “nefarious means” are a vote of the members of the House of Representatives, as specified in the Texas Constitution.

So members can expect to spend their Christmas holidays being badgered by county chairs and members of Republican womens’ clubs, right-to-life organizations, and any other affiliated groups. No doubt the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) members will get their shots in too.

As the Republican apparatchiks gear up to support Craddick, the speaker’s race is likely to become an issue in state GOP politics. Tina Benkiser, the current chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, is a virtual certainty to become the vice-chairman of the Republican National Committee. Party rules require that if the RNC chairman is male, the vice-chairman must be female (and vice-versa). Since Benkiser appears to be the sole female candidate for vice-chair, and all of the candidates for chairman are male, she can hardly lose. Her successor at the RPT will be chosen by the 62 members of the SREC (a man and a woman from each of the 31 state Senate districts).

Among the leading candidates are Denise McNamara, one of the two RNC members from Texas, and Gina Parker, who lost her race for RPT chairman to Benkiser. Former RPT vice-chair David Barton and attorney Kelly Shackleford wield a lot of clout with the SREC. One can picture the various candidates sparing no threat to prove themselves most adept at delivering votes for Craddick.

The problem for Craddick is that things have gotten to the point where every time he acts like, well, Craddick, he reminds GOP members why they wish he would just go away. Many members are still fuming about Craddick’s iron-fisted control of members’ races. Candidates had to come to Austin and appear before Christi Craddick, the speaker’s daughter; operative John Colyandro; and consultant Dave Carney. They were told what they had to do in their campaigns in order to get money that the speaker controlled. They had to bring their campaign plans and subject them to Christi Craddick’s scrutiny. She could overrule the members and insist on their using speaker-approved campaign materials that had already been prepared by consultants. Many members were furious; they felt that they knew their districts better than Carney, who is from New Hampshire, or Ms. Craddick. These hard feelings have not subsided.

Another source of ill will for Craddick is the redistricting map that the Legislative Redistricting Board adopted in 2001. A lot of Republicans have been defeated because of that map, which was supposed to make the House safe for Republicans for a decade. It is apparent, in retrospect, that the map adopted by the Legislative Redistricting Board was drawn to elect not just a Republican speaker, but a Republican speaker named Craddick. It was drawn to maximize Republican districts, not to safeguard incumbents.

Craddick couldn’t settle for 85 Republicans, because, back in 2001, there were 15 to 20 ABC Republicans who would never vote for him for speaker. To get more GOP districts, safe seats had to be sacrificed for more marginal seats. These are the seats Republicans have been losing: a net of twelve seats lost to the Democrats since Craddick became speaker in 2003.

I think Republicans in the House are finally beginning to realize the damage that Craddick has done to the GOP majority. Does it mean that the GOP rank and file will turn against him? The discontent with Craddick is far greater than I thought it was. But at the moment, it appears that fear still outweighs outrage.

Tagged: burt solomons, christi craddick, dave carney, david barton, denise mcnamara, gina parker, jim keffer, john colyandro, kelly shackleford, linda rogers, republican party of texas, speaker's race, state republican executive committee, Texas house, tina benkiser, tom craddick