We interrupt your regular blogger to bring you a special message from the editor:

So it’s official. As of today, at 1:30 pm EST, Governor Perry is finally a formal candidate for president (though we’ve been convinced he had eyes on the job as far back as February 2010). The question has at long last gone from if/when to how? How will he run? We know he’ll run strong. Perry has never lost a race, something that neither his predecessor, nor the man he hopes will be his ultimate opponent in the 2012 campaign, can say. Most people in Texas would now agree that Perry is an extremely skilled campaigner. But there are 13 people, in particular, who know it in their bones. Who are they? Perry’s 13 vanquished opponents in his ten contested elections. For a feature entitled “The Great Campaigner” in the September issue (available online today), we interviewed these 13 candidates (0r, in a couple reticent cases, their staff) for a candid look at what it’s like to run against (and get beaten by) Governor Perry. It amounts to a fascinating oral history of Perry’s electoral march from unknown Democratic state rep to powerful governor and presidential candidate.

The art for this story deserves a little explanation too. It’s a riff on Boris Vallejo’s iconic 1983 movie poster for National Lampoon’s Vacation. The idea to put the governor in this pose had been on our minds since his pasting of Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2010 Republican primary and his comfortable win over Bill White in the general election that followed. Like most ideas, it hatched and then followed us around for a while until the right time arrived. That time is now. So with apologies to Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Barack Obama, and with condolences to the defeated, here’s the original movie poster, followed by the illustration created for our September issue by artist  Tyler Jacobson. Note the dead coyote and horned toad in the foreground. Details, people, details. (Also, a note to bloggers: Tyler’s illustration can be copied and pasted to your heart’s content.)

We now return you to your regular Burkablogger, senior executive editor Paul Burka.

-JAKE SILVERSTEIN

Boris Vallejo's 1983 movie poster

Tyler Jacobson's illustration for us

Tagged: 2012, barack obama, bill white, kay bailey hutchison, Michelle Bachman, mitt romney, presidential campaign, rick perry

From the PPP Web site:

Approval/Disapproval (Republicans)
Approve 47%
Disapprove 37%
Unsure 18%

Job Performance
Approve 37%
Disapprove 43%
Unsure 20%

Should Run for Reelection in 2012 (Republicans)
Yes 43%
No 41%
Not sure 17%

Vote for KBH in 2012 (Republicans)
Yes 43%
No 41%
Not sure 17%

Vote for KBH or Someone Else (Republicans)
Hutchison 35%
Someone Else 48%
Not sure 17%

Ideology (Republicans)
Too liberal 25%
Too conservative 23%
About right 39%
Not sure 13%

What this says to me is that Hutchison is unelectable in 2012. Her base has been compromised, and there is a large constituency that is already aligned against her. Clearly the door is open for Dewhurst or Roger Williams or Dan Patrick, or Michael Williams, or just about anybody with name recognition to challenge her. This poll isn’t going to help her fundraising either.

John Cornyn approval rating (all voters)
40% approve
29% disapprove
31% not sure

PPP surveyed 500 Texas voters from June 19th- 20th. The survey’s margin of error is +/-4.4%.

Tagged: kay bailey hutchison

The fight is over a bill Jones supported in 2001 providing for undocumented high school students to be able to pay in-state tuition rates at Texas colleges and universities — the same rates that legal residents pay. According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the entire Lubbock delegation voted for the bill at the time. Perry derides the law as creating “in-state tuition scholarships for illegal aliens.”

Jones fired back: “This is a straight-out lie. The way I see it, I don’t see how anybody who was not a legal resident could benefit from it.”

Does this argument ring any bells? Readers may recall that the issue arose in one of the gubernatorial debates before the Republican primary. Perry’s response was one of his finest moments. He said something like, “If these kids go to Texas schools and work hard enough to graduate, we want them in our colleges and universities.”

My memory of this exchange is not precise. My recollection is that Medina was critical of Perry. I thought Hutchison was too, but a member of the Hutchison camp e-mailed me that she did not have the opportunity to engage in the discussion. I had written some remarks that were critical of KBH which I have removed as the result of the e-mail.

Tagged: charles perry, delwin jones, kay bailey hutchison, rick perry, tuition

This is not exactly shocking news. Most people who follow Texas politics closely have been predicting that she would serve our her term since her campaign began to collapse in January, or was it last September? It is her best option, and perhaps her only option.

Hutchison has been a good senator for Texas. One of the disturbing developments of the campaign was Perry’s labeling the good work she does for the state as “pork.” This sets a very bad precedent for the future. Texans send their money to Washington, and they are entitled to get some of it back. There is nothing wrong with that. If every Texan in Congress is going to be assailed for bringing home the bacon, Texas is going to be a lot worse off than it has been with KBH as senator. For all Perry’s talk about creating jobs, I think it’s a safe bet that Hutchison created more jobs with highway funding, NASA funding, military funding, university research funding, and projects requested by local leaders than Perry created with his enterprise fund, and, unlike the shell game in switching money around in Perry’s funds, there was nothing unseemly about it.

The losers in Hutchison’s decision, of course, are the wannabes, especially the apparent frontrunners (John Sharp, Roger Williams, and David Dewhurst), who will have to wait until a special election in 2013. And Bill White can take another bite at the apple if he loses the governor’s race.

Hutchison’s decision gives her a chance to regain her popularity. It also means that, if the Republicans retake control of the Senate, she would be in line to chair the important Commerce committee.

It was never easy to understand why she wanted to give up her Senate seat to run for governor–and she never told us. She made the same mistake that all of Perry’s challengers have made, which was to underestimate him. Now she’s back where she should have stayed in the first place, and Perry can contemplate whether to seek national office.

Tagged: kay bailey hutchison

Perry’s decisive victory over a sitting United States Senator is going to propel him into national prominence. Republican power brokers will have to take notice of him as a potential presidential candidate, if they haven’t already done so. Who on the Republican side would make a better candidate? Mitt Romney is probably the best the R’s have from the standpoint of intellectual firepower, but he can’t inspire people. Everybody mentions his religion, but the greater problem is that he doesn’t come across as a regular guy that you would want to go hunting with. There is a group of governors–Pawlenty of Minnesota, Daniels of Indiana, Barbour of Mississippi, Jindal of Louisiana–who will explore their possibilities. And, of course, there is Palin. She has the inspirational qualities to be president but not the intellectual qualities. And she’s just too polarizing to win a general election. If you really analyze the situation, Perry has the best combination of personality and message of anyone on the Republican wannabe train. The Hutchison race was the perfect test for him. He was like the boxer who gets to fight a contender with a big reputation and a good record but who actually has a glass jaw and can be put away early in the fight.

Anyone who doesn’t recognize Perry’s political talent by this time has to be deaf, dumb, and blind. He has assembled an electoral juggernaut that is brutally efficient. The Perry team knew in 2008 the strategy they were going to use against Hutchison in 2010. I was working on a story about the race for the February 09 issue, and they told me what it was — that Hutchison was a spender, an appropriator, and they were going to shove Washington and all its sins into her lap. They didn’t care whether Hutchison knew it. That’s how confident they were about this race. Perry lives, eats, and breathes politics 24/7. That’s his strength, and also his weakness. But he is far better at it than anybody Texas has produced–better than Bush, better than Richards. The only Texan I can think of who had a similar focus on nothing but politics was Lyndon Johnson. Or, I should say, LBJ as portrayed by Robert Caro.

What Perry did in this race was expand the base of the Republican party. He and his team learned the power of the social media from Obama’s use of them in 2008 and put it into practice here. One of the most striking facts about the Perry campaign is that he never deployed a yard sign, never knocked on a door. He relied on personal appearances and voter contact through the electronic media. He and his team have built a political machine that is brutally efficient. The social media have allowed him to develop a following that is personally loyal to him. Hutchison was light years behind.

The only unanswered question about the race is whether Hutchison ever had a chance. In retrospect, the race was over when Perry defined her as the candidate of Washington. He locked that in early. The very thing she was best at–getting our money back from Washington–he turned against her. Where was the anger in this campaign? Aimed at her, directed by Perry. Her one and only opportunity came and went early in the race, in the first quarter of 09. She had the money to go up on television, run positive ads, and provide voters with a credible rationale for why she left the Senate to challenge the governor of her party. She had the field to herself and didn’t take advantage of it. Indeed, she attacked Perry, and in three months a lead that started at 26 points shriveled to six. The Hutchison campaign had plenty of negative messages, but it had few positive ones. Then she embarked upon strategies that were self-defeating. She needed to entice moderate Republicans to vote in the primary, but she made arch-conservatives Dick Cheney and Dick Armey her ambassadors to the electorate. She needed to expand the primary, but she attacked Perry over and over, on HPV, on Trans-Texas Corridor, on cronyism, despite the time-honored rule that a negative campaign depresses turnout, and she needed to expand turnout. She was determined to prove that she was more conservative than Perry, which was impossible for anyone not named Debra Medina, and certainly impossible for someone who is pro-choice.

From Perry’s very first ad in the fall (“Washington is broken”), his campaign tied her to D.C. She never responded. There is a good response to having voted for the bailout–that the Republican president of the United States asked her to vote for it to keep the nation’s financial system from going into the ditch…she knew it would be unpopular, but she had to do the right thing. Just look into the camera and be sincere. She never did anything to counteract it. She brought in mediocrities to run her campaign, people who had no idea about Texas and just applied their formulas that didn’t work. I knew the campaign was headed for disaster when I asked if they had a plan to identify moderate voters and Terry Sullivan told me that their strategy was to contest Perry for the conservative vote. What he said was that the GOP primary voters had been voting for Perry and Hutchison all along, so they had just as good a chance to win them as Perry did. That’s what comes of hiring folks who know nothing about Texas. They, and she, had no clue that Perry had pushed the Republican party far to the right, no clue about the electorate that they were dealing with. Worst of all was her public handwringing over whether and when to give up her Senate seat. The campaign even turned it into an ad, quite possibly the worst ad ever run in a major Texas race. (The competition is Bob Krueger’s “Terminator” ad.) The ballots have been counted, but the handwringing is still going on.

Now it is the Democrats’ turn to take on Perry. Here is my advice to Bill White: DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE RICK PERRY. You’re smarter than he is. In every other aspect of politics, he is better than you are. He has more experience, he is more personable, he has more discipline, he knows the state better, he has a bigger following, he has the better organized political party, he has the bigger fundraising base, he is hungrier, he is meaner. You are going to have to raise the level of your game. And then you are going to have to raise it again. Your natural impulse will be to react to Perry as Ann Richards did to Bush, only moreso: underestimate him, underrate him, regard him as dumb, treat him as a lightweight. If you do this, and I’m not sure you can help yourself — Richards couldn’t, Hutchison couldn’t — you will lose by fifteen points and be like all the other corpses in the political graveyard who can’t believe they lost to … Rick Perry? Perry is many things you and I don’t admire, but he is not a lightweight. One reason that he beat Hutchison like a drum is that he has an unerring sense of who his constituency is and what they want. He also has a first-rate political team that has been together for years. Here is what the Democrats must not forget: Rick Perry was a ten-year incumbent running for reelection in a year when incumbency was the mark of Cain in the Republican party. He should have been the target of the Tea Parties, but he has such finely tuned political instincts that he knew he had to get out in front of the movement and co-opt it. You’re an amateur up against a pro. That’s the way to think of it. Laugh about his hair and he’ll destroy you the way he did Hutchison.

Tagged: bill white, Debra Medina, kay bailey hutchison, rick perry

This was supposed to be an unpredictable election due to the tea parties and the Medina candidacy. It was supposed to be an election in which angry conservatives rose up and smote incumbents. Nothing remotely like that occurred. Republican congressional candidates, who might have been tainted by Washingtonitis, won with ease; the closest race was Ralph Hall’s 57% victory. In fact, this was a bad election for conservatives, with one exception–Rick Perry. He was a ten-year incumbent in an election cycle that was supposed to be terrible for incumbents, but his keen political instincts enabled him to get out in front of the tea party movement early and become its champion instead of its victim.

One of the undercurrents in this election was that conservatives disgruntled by Joe Straus’s defeat of Tom Craddick in the 2009 speaker’s race saw an opportunity to destabilize him by running hard-right Republicans against moderates on his team. Todd Smith was assailed for holding up Voter ID; he won with surprising ease. Vicki Truitt was assailed for offering a local option gasoline tax; she dispatched three opponents without needing a runoff. Burt Solomons had an unexpectedly close race but prevailed. Chuck Hopson, who switched from Democrat to Republican, infuriated Republicans in his district by announcing that he would continue to vote as he had in the past–and smashed his two opponents. Most of the opposition didn’t come from the grass roots; it came from self-appointed kingmakers like Texans for Lawsuit Reform and Michael Quinn Sullivan. Incumbency proved to be mightier than ideology. The voter anger never materialized; it metamorphosized into a brief infatuation with Medina and faded away after she self-destructed on the Glen Beck radio show.

A bonus for Straus: One Republican he surely didn’t want to see in the House was former Legislative Council director Milton Rister, a longtime Republican operative and hatchet man who is close to Craddick and Dewhurst. Rister was running for the Gattis open seat, but Dr. Charles Schwertner won that four-person race without a runoff.

In the end, only five incumbent legislators lost, three Democrats (Al Edwards, Dora Olivo, Tara Rios Ybarra) and two Republicans (Betty Brown and Tommy Merritt), and none of the losses could be blamed on voter anger or ideology. Rios Ybarra could not overcome issues in her personal life that became public, and the others lost for the typical reason why legislators lose: They stayed too long and had too little to show for it. Brown could also attribute her loss to the suburbanization of her district.

(more…)

Tagged: chuck hopson, Debra Medina, Joe Straus, kay bailey hutchison, ralph hall, rick perry, thomas ratliff, todd smith, vicki truitt

Perry creeps ever closer to the magic 50% that would enable him to win without a runoff—which the Perry camp expects him to do. Hutchison’s position appears to be hopeless, not that this is anything new, but it does raise the question of whether, if Perry comes in with just under 50%, she will concede the race or take it to a runoff. The Perry folks are saying that she has cut back her ad buys, suggesting that she doesn’t have enough money for a runoff. This is spin, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Readers may remember the 1982 Democratic governor’s race in which Mark White was close to winning without a runoff after the first round of voting. Buddy Temple, the runner-up, conceded the race. What will Hutchison do? I think she’ll fight on to the end.

I posted a fanciful item yesterday about why Democrats should vote in the Republican primary for Hutchison, but, really, it isn’t that fanciful, at least for Democrats who live in Republican suburbs. In some areas (Lubbock, for one), many of the surrounding counties do not have any Democratic races. White’s nomination is assured, so why not vote in the Republican primary to weaken Perry?

Hutchison’s newspaper endorsements ad is getting heavy play in the Austin area. It’s a good ad, but it’s all old news. Everybody knows the case against Perry by now. Most people made up their minds about him, one way or another, a long time ago. He benefits from low expectations, as Bush did before him — low expectations about the performance of his duties as governor, not about his campaigning abilities. It’s hard to move voters. I think this race is going to end up at 50+/30/18.

Tagged: Debra Medina, kay bailey hutchison, rasmussen poll, rick perry

Sifting through the dumpster behind the Democratic party headquarters, I came across discarded copies of this memo.

From: Your Democratic leaders
To: All Democratic voters
Re: Election strategy

To all Democrats in Texas:

We have determined that the best strategy for Democrats in this election is to vote in the Republican primary and we urge all loyal Democrats to do so, except in areas of the state, such as South Texas, El Paso, and some East Texas counties where most local officials are Democrats.

We realize that our statewide ticket is very weak, with one exception–Bill White, of course. Don’t waste your vote in the Democratic primary. The best way to help our party and our future nominee for governor is to vote in the REPUBLICAN primary for Kay Bailey Hutchison. The result we seek is for Hutchison to force Rick Perry into a runoff. At the very least, this will embarrass Perry; at the most, it could lead to his defeat. In any case, Perry will have to spend money to win the runoff that he could otherwise hoard until the general election. If Perry emerges from the runoff as damaged goods, this will improve White’s chances of defeating him. If as many as 200,000 Democrats vote for Hutchison in the REPUBLICAN primary, Perry will likely face a runoff.

Some in our party may object that Hutchison would be more difficult for White to defeat than Perry. They have argued that Democratic support for Hutchison might backfire: She might win the Republican primary. While this possibility may have loomed large at one time, it is not the case today. Hutchison’s support has been declining for months. She is not as popular as she once was. Perry’s negative advertising has all but destroyed her as a viable general election candidate. The best course for Democrats interested in helping bill White is to try to weaken Rick Perry.

As we learned in the 2008 presidential primary, a lot of Democrats live in Republican suburbs — Collin County, Fort Bend County, Denton County, Williamson County. What we showed the rest of Texas in 2008 is that Democrats haven’t gone away. We just haven’t had anyone to vote for. When we had a competitive presidential primary, we turned out in overwhelming numbers. Check out these early voting numbers for the two primaries in the ten largest counties:

Harris 170,032 D, 51,199 R
Dallas 119,880 D, 31,852 R
Tarrant 82,578 D, 35,621 R
Bexar 101,244 D, 32,457 R
Travis 95,219 D, 17,995 R
Collin 35,665 D, 23,368 R
Denton 27,979 D, 16,290 R
Fort Bend 34,387 D, 14,323 R
Montgomery 12,622 D, 15,920 R
Williamson 32,252 D, 13,113 R

Please vote today in the REPUBLICAN primary for Kay Bailey Hutchison and help elect Bill White governor.

Tagged: kay bailey hutchison, republican primary, texas democrats

Perry 40% (39%)
Hutchison 31% (28%)
Medina 20% (24%)

(numbers in parentheses = PPP 2/9 poll)

N = 400 likely Republican primary voters
MOE = +/- 4.9%

These numbers seem intuitively correct. They suggest that Perry and Hutchison have beaten each other up enough that both are more or less stuck. However, Hutchison’s three-point gain has brought her within single digits of Perry. Medina’s four-point slippage, due entirely to self-sabotage, seems to have gone +3 to Hutchison, +1 to Perry. This is about what you would expect: 3 to 1 against the incumbent. Perry cannot be happy about these numbers. He hasn’t put her away yet. Is it possible that there are enough normal people in Texas — people who don’t think that the Tenth Amendment, nullification, and secession are the most important issues facing Texas — to make a race out of this?

Tagged: Debra Medina, kay bailey hutchison, public policy polling, rick perry

I received this e-mail from a lobbyist whom I have known for many years:

Just got a robocall from “Texans for Kay” (was “Private Caller” on caller ID) with a clip from the Glenn Beck show about Perry is someone who says and does good things during an election but as soon as the election is over he goes back to being a moderate, “progressive” Republican.

Amazing that Hutchison is still trying to persuade Republican primary voters that she is more conservative than Perry. Perry has leveled a lot of unfair accusations at Hutchison, so I suppose he deserves to get some of his own medicine, but the fact is that Perry raised taxes only after the Texas Supreme Court ordered the Legislature to reduce its reliance on school property taxes to fund public education. Perry then passed a significant (though overrated) property tax cut and passed the business margins tax to offset some of the lost revenue. He did the right thing. What would Hutchison have done? Well, when asked for specifics about how she would pay for new highways, her answer was that she would audit TxDOT and establish a select committee to look at solutions to TxDOT’s funding crisis. These kinds of risk-averse responses have undercut her stature as a leader.

Tagged: kay bailey hutchison, property taxes, rick perry, robocall, txdot