It's Rick Perry's Party Now
Whatever happens on November 7, the lieutenant governor will be the most powerful Republican in Texas. The trouble is, few voters know him—and he's yet to prove he's ready for prime time.
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"I enjoy this," Perry said on the flight home. "I like to go out and talk to people. Getting out of Austin—it's how I pick up information. That kind of work pays off. It keeps me in tune." But it was clear that Perry had accomplished something more. He had ventured into enemy territory—Webb County is a Democratic stronghold—and established a base in the business community. He signaled that, like George W. Bush, he is an inclusive Republican; Perry, who is studying Spanish, invoked the Bush-Perry inaugural slogan, "Juntos podemos" ("Together we can") during his chamber of commerce speech. And, for someone whofaces a potential Republican primary challenge in 2002 from U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, he showed in the meeting with the teachers that, at fifty, his unforced sex appeal still works. While he won applause away from Austin, Perry would be the first to acknowledge that his summer has not gotten rave reviews from the Capitol crowd. First, an embarrassing e-mail came to light. Written last year by Dallas insurance executive Robert Reinarz, it claimed that lobbyist Bradley Bryan had persuaded Perry not to appoint a Senate committee to study insurance deregulation in exchange for a $25,000 campaign contribution from the industry. Insurance deregulation was not among the studies ordered by Perry during the interlude between legislative sessions, and according to the Dallas Morning News, Perry did receive $19,000 from insurance interests at a fundraiser held shortly after the e-mail was sent. Perry insists that there was no link between the contributions and his failure to order a study on insurance deregulation, and Bryan told the News that he had never spoken to Perry about the issue. Two weeks later, his June 28 run-in with the trooper made statewide news. On tape, Perry never directly asks trooper Dori Livingston not to write his driver a speeding ticket; this would have been a major political blunder. But his impatience is unmistakable as he says, "Why don't you just let us go on down the road?" After the incident, Perry wrote a letter of apology to the trooper. Today, he says, "I had a real human moment. It was not one of my brighter moments." Next came the controversial fundraising letter. The mailing to lobbyists contained an invitation to a September reception with an attachment listing each lobbyist's clients, with suggested donation levels up to $25,000. While it is common for lobbyists to be asked to round up contributions—it's the price of doing business at the Capitol—the actual checks usually come from clients. Fundraising quotas are not unheard of, but they are rarely written down. To lobbyists, the letter seemed to say, I know who your clients are, and if they don't come up with the big bucks, I'm holding you responsible.
Perry's explanation is that he merely hoped to determine who was really responsible for the contributions so that he could thank them properly. After his last fund-raiser, he says, he received complaints from people who felt that they had not been properly thanked. Even Perry's friends in the lobby felt that the letter had been poorly executed. Mike Toomey, a Perry confidant who represents an HMO and a tort-reform alliance, among many other interest groups, approved the idea of the letter in advance but now concedes, "In the intervening time, after the insurance e-mail and the DPS video, some of Perry's people should have looked at the fundraising letter and asked themselves if anything had changed."
Taken separately, these episodes may seem trivial to the public. But cumulatively, they can be revealing to insiders. The acknowledged way for a politician to handle a traffic stop—a stratagem attributed, in a widely circulated anecdote, to Bob Bullock—is to praise the trooper for doing her job and insist that she write you a ticket because you don't want any special treatment. The acknowledged way to raise money is to avoid any appearance that might suggest that a politician's decisions are linked to contributions. "I learned that appearance is awfully important," Perry says of his experience with the fundraising letter. When people don't know much about you, and you stand at the cusp of the state's highest office, every act will be inspected for clues into your character.
One doesn't have to be a world-class sleuth to uncover what Rick Perry's core values are. They are written down on a sheet of paper that Perry distributed at the start of the last legislative session. "If you know and understand my philosophy you will have a very good idea where I stand . . . ," it says. It is an uncomplicated message: Personal responsibility. Small government. Competition. Local control. But the source of these values is not to be found in Austin. One has to drive west, long after the Hill Country has flattened into endless farmland, to a dusty collection of farmhouses, a Baptist church, and a school that constitutes Perry's birthplace of Paint (locally pronounced "Pint") Creek. Fifty miles north of Abilene, Paint Creek is more a community than a town. It is so isolated that the school district maintains four "teacherages"—think, parsonages—behind the schoolhouse for faculty housing. The merciless August heat scorched limp cotton fields that stretched to the horizon as I drove into Paint Creek. At midafternoon, the newest crop of the Paint Creek Pirates struggled on a parched practice field behind the one-story brick school, which serves 137 students in grades kindergarten through twelve. This is how Texas used to be a century ago, a rural state with thousands of Paint Creeks, but it is urban now, and Paint Creek seems about as far removed from modern Texas as you can get.
Two miles from the school, Perry's parents, Ray and Amelia, live on their 10,000-acre farm in a tidy redbrick home nestled in a small grove of pecan trees, beyond which spread the ever-present cotton fields. Metal American and Texas flags mark the driveway. Perry's family has deep roots in West Texas farming and politics. His great-great-grandfather, D. H. Hamilton, was a Confederate veteran who served as a state representative and later settled in nearby Haskell to start his farm. Perry's grandfather farmed here too, then Ray, who was the county commissioner for 28 years, elected to seven terms as a Democrat. He and Amelia married in 1947, a year after he started farming with a lease on 312 acres. Ray bypassed college after visiting Texas A&M and being told that participation in the Corps of Cadets was mandatory. "I didn't want to go down there and play soldier," he says now, and no wonder: During World War II, he had flown 35 missions deep into Germany as a tail-gunner.
Instead, he threw himself into building a farm and a ranch operation that eventually grew to its present size and included two oil wells. They lived a life few Texans can imagine today. At one point Ray Perry worked his farm by day and operated heavy equipment by night on the construction of Lake Stamford. Amelia did seasonal bookkeeping for the cotton gin. Ricky, as he was known in his Paint Creek days, and his older sister, Milla (now a vice president of the Baylor Foundation in Dallas), grew up in a frame house with no indoor plumbing until he was six. The nearest city, if you could call it that, was Haskell, fourteen miles away. His mother sewed most of his clothes, down to his undershorts. Today she laughs about sending him off to Texas A&M University with "homemade drawers." But Amelia Perry remembers her son as a content child: "He had a horse, a dog, and a full belly. He didn't know there was anything else you could want."
Paint Creek was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody. Perry was close to his scoutmaster, Gene Overton, and the local agricultural extension agent, Frank Martin, a polio survivor with no children of his own. Amelia recalls that when Ricky made Eagle Scout, "He went to his dad and said, 'Frank Martin doesn't have a son. Would it upset you if I asked him to stand up with me at the Eagle Scout ceremony?'" In his senior year in high school he was the top-ranked boy in his graduating class of thirteen students and third overall. In other years he was chosen Most Popular and Beau of the Future Homemakers of America; in the yearbook's senior will section, a graduating student named Larry Edwards bequeathed his "good looks and romantic charm to Ricky Perry, who is in desperate need of them."
At sixteen Perry had a date to an out-of-town football game with Anita Thigpen of Haskell—in Paint Creek terms, a city girl. He was on the team, but his arm, which had been badly broken when he was trampled by a horse that spooked when he was loading it into a trailer, was still in a cast, so he could not play. Despite the injury, Perry's hard-nosed coach insisted that he ride on the team bus to the game and required him to handle the down marker on the sidelines. Anita rode to the game with Perry's parents and sister. The date boiled down to this: They sat together at halftime. Their slow-starting courtship would last sixteen years and two months: He went to A&M; she went to Texas Tech. He joined the Air Force; she worked on her master's degree in nursing. He came home ready to start farming and get married; she moved around the state, concentrating on her career. Finally, Perry says, "the planets lined up" and they married in 1982. "She's the only girl I ever loved," he says.
Perry chose A&M for its veterinary school, but his dreams of practicing animal medicine evaporated at the end of his sophomore year when his grades failed to measure up to the program's highly competitive standards. What he did succeed at was politics. In his junior and senior years he was elected a yell leader. In the Aggie world, where spirit is not just limited to sporting events but is deeply embedded in the campus culture, his position was one of leadership. He built an immense network of loyal Aggie friends who remain crucial to his political success today. Ray Perry remembers helping his son drive his family's belongings to Austin in a rented trailer after Rick's election as agriculture commissioner; when they arrived, says the elder Perry, "about half a dozen Aggie friends showed up to help unload that stuff."
After graduating from A&M with a degree in animal science, Perry joined the Air Force in August 1972. Military service "was kind of a family thing," he says. "At A&M I got comfortable with the military and the camaraderie and the patriotism. I never saw a war protest in person." He flew transport planes to such places as Germany, the Canal Zone, and Saudi Arabia. The travel, he says, only helped him appreciate home more. As the end of his tour of duty approached in 1977, he decided to go back home to the ranch. His father put him on salary his first year after which the two became partners. Rick ran the ranching operation while Ray tended to the farming. Then in 1984 the area's state representative decided not to run for reelection. As with his decision to enter the military, Perry's family history helped him make up his mind: He would run for the Legislature as a Democrat. In the Texas House of Representatives, a lawmaker's influence is shaped by two things: friends, particularly in his freshman class, and committee assignments. Perry immediately became close friends with two other freshmen conservative Democrats from rural areas, Cliff Johnson of Palestine and Ric Williamson of Weatherford. The three men shared an apartment in Austin and immersed themselves in figuring out the Legislature's often-Byzantine culture and process. Their efforts were rewarded in their second term when House Speaker Gib Lewis named all three to the powerful Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for the state budget. It was 1987, Texas was in the throes of the oil bust, and money was tight; committee chair Jim Rudd met with Perry and seven other sophomores on his committee to tell them to find massive cuts to help balance the budget. The committee table consisted of two tiers of seats, and the new members sat on the bottom tier. Their location and their combativeness in grilling bureaucrats about their budget requests earned them the nickname "pit bulls." The pit bulls cast an estimated four hundred votes as a bloc against higher state spending. Yet, Perry was able to forge a political "odd couple" relationship with liberal Democrat Debra Danburg, whose district encompassed the Montrose area of Houston. "The pit bull sessions were tough and grueling," Danburg recalls. "It could have been a horrible time. We told stories, so at least it was bearable." What was it about Perry that appealed to Danburg? "Rick Perry knows more gossip than any male I know," she says admiringly. "He knows stuff about people that would make your head spin."
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