Rick Perry

For most of history, Texas has been considered a “weak governor” state. That changed under Perry’s leadership. “His long tenure in office . . . has enabled him to establish what amounts to a cabinet style of government,” giving him vastly more power than any of his predecessors, senior executive editor Paul Burka wrote in 2009.

Perry was born on March 4, 1950, and was raised by Ray and Amelia Perry in a modest frame house with no indoor plumbing in the tiny, unincorporated town of Paint Creek. His father worked their 10,000-acre cotton farm and was a county commissioner for 28 years; his mother was a bookkeeper at a nearby gin. (His mother sewed his underwear through college, he told editor Jake Silverstein in 2011.) He enrolled at Texas A&M, and was elected by the student body to be a yell leader, joining an elite group of five guys who lead football cheers. After graduation in 1972, he enlisted in the military. He flew transport planes for the Air Force, and when his tour ended in 1977, he returned to Paint Creek to take over the family ranch operation.

Perry entered a local state representative race as a Democrat in 1984 and won handily–the first of ten straight political victories, proving that he was a “great campaigner,” as we called him in 2011. During a certain point in his career, Perry came to realize that a conservative D like himself had little opportunity to win statewide office. This dovetailed nicely with Senator Phil Gramm aggressive efforts to woo converts to the Republican party, and in the fall of 1989, Perry announced he was going to switch parties.

In 2011 during a RedState rally in South Carolina, Perry announced his intention to run for the office of President of the United States of America. He dropped out 159 days later, ending what was widely considered to be a poorly run campaign, and endorsed Newt Gingrich. Texas Monthly named Perry the 2012 Bum Steer of the Year, a decision that was finalized, “in a matter of seconds. Fifty-three of them, to be exact: the time it took the governor to go from trying in vain to name the third agency of government he would shutter as president to giving up and muttering—in a phrase that will surely go down . . . as [his campaign’s] perfect epitaph—’Oops.'”