by Balz, Dan
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Perry joined the race with a burst of energy. His announcement tour took him overnight to New Hampshire and then on to Iowa. His first stop in Iowa was the Black Hawk County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner at the Electric Park Ballroom in Waterloo, which happened to be Michele Bachmann’s hometown. Bachmann was also scheduled to speak at the dinner. The press quickly billed it as a confrontation between the surprise winner of the Iowa Straw Poll and the newest conservative threat in the race. Perry arrived early and worked the entire room, trailed by a mob of photographers and reporters. When he spoke, he talked about the economy and Washington as well as his experience as a farmer and an agriculture commissioner and a childhood that included the 4-H Club and the Boy Scouts. Fielding questions, he slipped out of his jacket and noted how wrinkled his shirt was. When he was finished, he sat back down at his table to await the other speakers.
Bachmann was a late addition to the program, and many of her advisers opposed her being there. They knew she was worn out and believed she would be better off doing a victory lap somewhere else rather than muscling in on Perry’s night. Ed Rollins had insisted she attend, Bachmann adviser Keith Nahigian said: “Ed’s position, I believe, was there’s this mythical Perry, we just won the straw poll, let’s go crush him.” Bachmann waited in her bus until a local Republican told her frantically she was due onstage. Inside, the music announcing her arrival queued up on the public address system, but still there was no sign of her. When she finally got inside, she took the stage without acknowledging Perry and then gave a desultory speech. Ray Sullivan, traveling with Perry, said, “If you could literally see the air come out of the campaign, we were seeing the air come out of the Bachmann campaign.” Brett O’Donnell, traveling with Bachmann, said later, “She went up on the stage and she showed that she was fatigued. She didn’t really give a very good speech. And it was like the showdown at the O.K. Corral . . . because we had sold it as the showdown at the O.K. Corral. So it was a very bad mistake, very bad mistake, and it was in my opinion one of the biggest mistakes of our campaign.” Bachmann never recovered.
The next day, Perry made his first mistake. He was in Cedar Rapids, on a deck around a swimming pool, speaking to a small group of Republican activists, when he was asked about talk that the Federal Reserve might engage in another round of quantitative easing. Referring to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, Perry responded, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous, or treasonous, in my opinion.” The comment was delivered with a kind of aw-shucks tone, but the words on paper sounded especially harsh, and the comment went viral that night. As Perry’s bus moved through other parts of Iowa the next day, he and his advisers watched as the remark was played over and over and over to widespread criticism, including from White House press secretary Jay Carney and Perry’s nemesis, Karl Rove. Perry would not back down. “I would use those words again,” he later told me. But his advisers were chastened by the experience.
On his first visit to Iowa, Perry also had made the obligatory stop at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. A reporter asked whether he was carrying a gun. Perry declined to answer. “That’s why it’s called ‘concealed,’” he quipped, referring to some states’ concealed carry laws. Another reporter asked him about Romney. Perry blew an air kiss to the camera. “Give him my love,” he said. In Boston, the picture of Perry blowing kisses infuriated Romney’s advisers. Campaign manager Matt Rhoades used it as locker room material, something to post on the wall as motivation. He chided the rest of the campaign: “He’s blowing kisses at Mitt. Are you guys going to let him get away with that?”
Romney’s team took the threat seriously, and for good reason. Within weeks, Perry had eclipsed Romney as the new leader in the polls. The Texan embodied the core region, core constituencies, and core values of the Republican Party of 2011. Perry also could point to success in creating jobs. Texas had accounted for 40 percent of the jobs created in the entire country in the aftermath of the 2008 recession (although some of this was due simply to population growth). Romney’s record of creating jobs in Massachusetts, by comparison, was pitifully small. Perry also had the potential to raise the money necessary for a sustained nomination battle. He had some obvious weaknesses. He had never demonstrated a capacity to reach to the middle of the electorate, although that was never a problem in conservative Texas. Nor was it known whether Perry could take his Texas style north to compete effectively in the Midwest, even in the GOP primaries. And of course, there was the Bush factor. Was America ready for another candidate who sounded like George W. Bush? Still, those who had watched him most closely in Texas did not underestimate his skills—or the ruthlessness of his team. Paul Burka of Texas Monthly, one of the most astute political writers in the state, understood Perry’s strengths and weaknesses as well as anyone. As Perry was preparing to enter the race, Burka wrote that the handsome Texas governor with the big head of hair should not be dismissed as some “soft or feckless” pretty boy, as if he were a Republican version of the Democratic Breck Boy John Edwards. “Perry is a hard man,” he wrote. “He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved—or respected.”
Romney’s team moved quickly to confront this new threat and soon found in Perry’s book, Fed Up!, the means to take him down. Stuart Stevens was the first to grasp the potential to turn Perry’s words against him. Perry’s book was an all-out assault on the way Washington had done business for a century, beginning with the enactment of the federal income tax and accelerating with the New Deal. Social Security, the program most associated with Roosevelt’s effort to provide economic security to older Americans, became a target of Perry’s ire. The program wasn’t just on an unsustainable path financially, Perry argued. It was ill-conceived from the start, set up like “an illegal Ponzi scheme” and possibly unconstitutional. To Perry, Social Security was exhibit A in the creation of a new relationship between an oppressive central government and a once free people. “Social Security is something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now,” he wrote. He argued that the program now stood as “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal, in stark contrast to the mythical notion of salvation to which it has wrongly been attached for too long, all at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.” Perry was determined to change that equation. The book had attracted little notice when it was released. Stevens told his colleagues in Boston that they would make sure it now got the attention it deserved.
Perry had been successful in Texas by not letting opponents get to his right. Romney’s strategy was counterintuitive: to hit Perry from the left. The attack came at the first of the fall debates, on September 7, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Perry was the center of attention and the target of his opponents. At one point he joked, “I kind of feel like a piñata here at the party.” He later told me, “When I took the stage at the Reagan debate I was the epicenter of every attack from that end to that end and inward. I felt like the catcher in the javelin contest. I felt more like the pincushion than the front-runner.”
During the first half of the debate, John Harris of Politico, moderating along with NBC’s Brian Williams, asked Perry about Social Security. Perry stood by what was in the book, even repeating that he believed it was a Ponzi scheme and taking issue with former vice president Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, who both had disagreed with him on that characterization. Romney looked at Perry and said, “Our nominee has to be someone who isn’t committed to abolishing Social Security, but who is committed to saving Social Security. We have always had, at the heart of our party, a recognition that we want to care for those in need, and our seniors have the need of Social Security. . . . And under no circumstances would I ever say by any measure it’s a failure. I
t is working for millions of Americans, and I’ll keep it working for millions of Americans. And we’ve got to do that as a party.” Perry plunged ahead. “Maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country,” he said. In the spin room, Romney’s advisers escalated the attack. Eric Fehrnstrom said, “I think it would be a disaster for the Republican Party to nominate Rick Perry.” A few feet away, Stevens offered sarcastic praise for Perry. “I give him credit for standing by his position,” he said. “It’s a bold position. It’s just a position that places him in a minority of a minority of a minority.”
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As the candidates looked to their fall calendars, they saw a succession of debates that would tie them down, limiting the days available for precious fund-raising or retail campaigning in the early states, while exposing them to potential humiliation with any misstep. After the Reagan Library forum, the calendar included two more debates in September, two in October, and three in November. For Perry, this represented a daunting introduction to the campaign trail. He had debated only a handful of times during his career and in his 2010 campaign for governor refused to debate his opponents. His advisers saw him as a candidate with retail skills but not an experienced debater who would shine on a stage with the other candidates. His preparation for the debates lacked discipline or any sense of strategy. Recent back surgery had left the candidate unable to exercise—Perry was a fitness freak who released the stresses of his job by long-distance runs—and not sleeping well. For someone who was now at the top of the polls, this proved a lethal combination.
Romney’s attack on Perry over Social Security at the Reagan Library debate marked the opening of an extended assault. The campaign would follow with a dozen releases on the topic, magnifying a confrontation that proved irresistible to the media. At the September 12 debate in Tampa, Romney again pressed the Social Security message. Perry’s defense was even less effective than it had been in California.* His advisers insisted that Romney’s Social Security offensive was having little impact. Days after Tampa, Carney said Perry had jumped nine points in a Florida poll. He said that showed that the public recognized that Social Security needed fixing and was ready to reward someone who said so. It was the elites who were out of touch.
The third post–Labor Day debate was held on September 22 in Orlando, and it coincided with the Florida Republican Party’s P5 (Presidency 5) conference, which included a straw poll the day after the debate. Perry’s troops arrived confident that he was positioned to win the straw poll and bolster his standing in the race. The day before the debate, Romney’s team tried to bait Perry again on Social Security, laying out a list of questions they hoped the moderators from Fox News would pose on Thursday night. They wanted Perry to say whether he believed Social Security was unconstitutional, which his writings suggested. A yes would lead to difficult follow-up questions, which Romney’s campaign also posed in its release: If it’s unconstitutional, how would you turn the program into something administered by the states? A no would leave Perry open to charges that he was a flip-flopper.
Megyn Kelly, moderating the debate with Fox’s Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, put the question to Perry: “Can you explain specifically how fifty separate Social Security systems are supposed to work?” Perry sought to deflect the question, saying those on Social Security would not be affected by any changes. “We have made a solemn oath to the people of this country that that Social Security program in place today will be there for them,” he said. “Now, it’s not the first time that Mitt has been wrong on some issues before. And the bottom line is, is we never said that we were going to move this back to the states.” Romney countered by accusing Perry of changing his position. “There’s a Rick Perry out there that is saying—and almost to quote, it says that the federal government shouldn’t be in the pension business, that it’s unconstitutional—unconstitutional and it should be returned to the states,” he said. “So you better find that Rick Perry and get him to stop saying that.”
Social Security, however, would prove to be the least of Perry’s problems in Orlando. At one point, he became tongue-tied as he tried to lay the flip-flop label on Romney, mangling what was to have been a killer sound bite. “I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with,” he said. “Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it—was before he was before the social programs, from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against Roe v. Wade? He was for Race to the Top, he’s for Obamacare, and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and—and—and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.” “Nice try,” Romney said as the audience laughed at Perry’s syntactical pileup.
Having first attacked Perry from the left on Social Security, Romney came to Tampa ready to start another attack from the right, aiming at a long-standing Texas policy that allowed children of illegal immigrants who had graduated from Texas high schools to pay in-state tuition at Texas colleges and universities. The law had been on the books for years and had passed the Texas legislature with little opposition. Romney had vetoed similar legislation when he was governor and accused Perry of offering a $22,000-a-year carrot that would only increase the flow of illegal immigrants. “That kind of magnet draws people into this country to get that education, to get the $100,000 break,” he said. “It makes no sense.” Fox’s Chris Wallace turned to Perry. “How do you feel being criticized by a number of these other candidates on the stage for being too soft on immigration, sir?” he asked. Perry began by restating his tough posture on the border. Then he turned to the tuition issue. “But if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” he said. From the audience came a round of boos. Democrats might attack Republicans as heartless, but not a fellow Republican.
Perry remembers Orlando as the moment his campaign suffered an irreversible setback. “We had busted our chops every day. I’m not sure we had any full day off from the thirteenth of August all the way through this period of time raising money,” he later told me. “We had a really good forty-five-day fund-raising period and I wasn’t prepared to go into the Orlando debate from a rested standpoint.” His back surgery had affected his stamina and overall well-being. “The biggest impact that the surgery had on me is I had to quit running, and I was a very devout runner,” he said. “That’s how I managed my stress. From the first of July to about the middle of September, I didn’t run, and it had a huge impact on my ability to sleep and my ability to get rid of whatever is eating on me. I had been a twenty-, twenty-five-mile-a-week runner, and poof—it went away.” Perry said he could feel the air go out of the hall in Orlando when he made that comment. “There were a lot of people in that room that wanted to be for Rick Perry. We brought to the table the economics, the Tea Party, there was a lot of excitement. And when I said that, there were a lot of people who went, ‘Wow!’”
Commentary the next morning from other Republicans was brutal. Pete Wehner, a veteran of George W. Bush’s White House, put it this way: “Perry has had three debates. His first was mediocre. His second debate performance was weaker than his first, and last night’s debate was worse than either of the first two. . . . He comes across as unprepared, sometimes unsteady, and at times his answers border on being incoherent.” Whatever chance he had to come out of Orlando as a winner had been destroyed by the debate. Herman Cain finished first in the straw poll with 37 percent of the vote—more than Perry and Romney combined.
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After Orlando, Perry plummeted in the polls. His fading campaign soon became a snake pit of backbiting, second-guessing, and infighting—the worst of any campaign of the 2012 cycle. In mid-October, deeply frustrated with the state of his campaign, Perry called Joe M. Allbaugh, the manager of Bush�
��s 2000 campaign and later Bush’s FEMA director and a longtime friend. On Sunday, October 23, Allbaugh met with Perry and his wife at their residence. Allbaugh found Perry unhappy with the operation of the campaign, with his packed schedule, and particularly with the way debate preparations had been managed. Allbaugh said Perry told him, “‘If you will come in you have carte blanche to change, do anything to make things happen,’ and I said, ‘Okay, because that’s the only way it’s going to.’” Late that afternoon, Perry told his senior staff of the change. The team was caught totally by surprise. “No one on our side knew that was coming and the roles were not well defined,” Sullivan said.
Perry’s campaign announced the Allbaugh appointment the next day. The release also announced several other additions to the team that had been in the works for weeks and were unrelated to Allbaugh’s arrival, which was news to Allbaugh. Among them were veteran GOP consultants Tony Fabrizio, Nelson Warfield, Curt Anderson, and Jim Innocenzi. The latter three were to join David Weeks as part of the campaign’s media team. The whole announcement added up to a major shake-up of a struggling campaign. Perry’s spokesmen, Sullivan and Mark Miner, could not explain the changes to inquisitive reporters, insisting that the shake-up was not a shake-up and that Allbaugh’s authority did not threaten Carney or any of the others, which as everyone knew was fiction. Perry had bought himself a whole new set of problems, with his campaign now divided into warring camps who were more than happy to air out their differences in the press. The biggest clash was between Allbaugh and Carney, whose personalities were as sizable as their hefty physical bearing. “Dave didn’t like it,” Allbaugh said of Carney’s reaction to his arrival. “I think he was hurt and upset, wounded that he had done all this with Rick. He told me face-to-face in a couple meetings, ‘It’s just not going to work, it’s not going to work.’ I said, ‘We haven’t even tried. How about trying?’ He just wasn’t interested. I said, ‘Dave, we’ve known one another a long time, I know what you’re capable of doing,’ and then I started, ‘What’s the plan, what’s the plan?’ There wasn’t any plan, which is another problem.” Carney disputed all aspects of Allbaugh’s description of events, saying that no conversation like that ever took place. More than that, he said Allbaugh never showed interest in knowing what the campaign’s plans were.