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Op-Ed
McManus: A boomlet of Perrymania
There's a big hole in the Republican presidential field, and it's made to
order for a Southern governor such as Texas' Rick Perry. But will he run?
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Texas Gov. Rick Perry speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in
New Orleans on June 18.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in
New Orleans on June 18. (Patrick Semansky / AP Photo)
By Doyle McManus
July 24, 2011
For a man who hasn't formally decided whether to run for president,
Texas Gov. Rick Perry sure sounds a lot like a candidate.
"I'm not ready to tell you that I'm ready to announce that I'm in,"
Perry told the Des Moines Register, the biggest newspaper in Iowa,
where the first big test in the Republican nomination race is held.
"But I'm getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what
I've been called to do. This is what America needs."
* Doyle McManus
* Doyle McManus
* Bio | E-mail | Recent columns
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And Perry isn't just being called; he says he's being actively pushed
to run by his wife, Anita, a former nurse.
"Get out of your comfort zone!" he says his wife told him. "Yeah, being
governor of Texas is a great job, but sometimes you're called to step
into the fray."
So Perry has taken all the preparatory steps a potential candidate
should take. He's hired political consultants to prepare a blueprint.
He's met with conservative grandees, including Kansas' Koch brothers
and others who once bankrolled another Texas governor, George W. Bush.
He's visited California twice in the past month to feel out potential
donors and supporters. He's even spent time boning up on foreign
policy.
And that's been enough to touch off a boomlet of Perrymania, at least
in some parts of the Republican Party. Perry says he may not decide
whether to run until Labor Day, but the mere possibility was enough to
vault him into second place in two polls released last week, close
behind the dogged but unloved frontrunner, former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney. (Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who unlike Perry is
actually running, came in third.)
Polls don't mean much at this early stage of a presidential race, but
they do reveal whether anyone has the contest sewed up, and Romney
clearly doesn't. In a Fox News poll, Romney came in first with an
underwhelming 17% -- although, to be fair, Fox offered a long wish list
of names, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former New York
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, neither of whom appears to be actively preparing a
candidacy.
The point is that most Republican voters haven't found their dream
candidate yet. There's a big hole in the Republican field, and it's
made to order for a Southern governor who's conservative on social
issues but not censorious, and who'd rather talk about cutting
government spending and holding down taxes.
Perry's favorite claim is that in recent years Texas has created almost
as many jobs as the other 49 states combined, and that his low-tax,
low-regulation policies are the reason. Economists debate how much
credit Perry deserves; the fact that Texas produces oil and we're in an
oil boom helped too. But Texas has done better at job creation than
most states, and it's hard to think of a more potent talking point in a
campaign that will be fought largely over economic issues.
Perry's conservatism goes beyond low taxes, though.
His pre-campaign book, "Fed Up," is mostly an essay about the evils of
federal power and an appeal to move decision-making back to the states
as laboratories of democracy.
"We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind
of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own [and] what kind of
prayers we are allowed to say," he writes in his list of complaints
against the federal government (which doesn't actually tell people any
of those things, unless you count Agriculture Department brochures
about salt).
Last month, he sponsored a bill in the Texas Legislature that would
have made it a criminal offense for a federal airport security screener
to perform an "intrusive" pat-down on a passenger in Texas. (The bill
failed.)
And he proclaims himself a good notch more conservative than his
predecessor, George W. Bush, whom he blames for launching a
"big-government binge" by expanding federal programs in education and
healthcare.
But in the spirit of states' rights, Perry is cheerfully tolerant of
diversity in social policy. He's a vigorous opponent of gay marriage,
but if the voters of other states want it, he seems to think that's
their problem. "Vote with your feet," he advises. "If you don't support
the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don't come to Texas.
If you don't like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don't move to
California." (The news that Californians voted to prohibit gay marriage
in 2008 apparently never made it to Austin.)
Perry wears his evangelical Christian faith on his sleeve, which will
help him with some voters but not others. In April, he called for three
days of prayer for divine intercession to end Texas' drought. (It
didn't work.) Next month, he's holding a seven-hour prayer rally at
Houston's professional football stadium with some of the biggest names
in evangelical ministry.
What's holding him back from running?
"We don't know whether it's doable," Perry's political strategist,
David M. Carney, told me. "Most people running for president do it for
years. We'd be trying to do it in 200 days."
The biggest practical problem Perry faces, Carney said, is fundraising.
It could take $50 million to run a credible primary campaign. "It takes
time to raise money -- the candidate's time," he noted. Major donors
want to meet a candidate in person before they write a check or recruit
their friends to help.
But even if Perry decides that the fundraising challenge can be
conquered, he has a more basic decision to make.
"He needs to do a gut check," Carney said. "You can't run for president
as a hobby."
And there's a third question Perry needs to consider, in the view of
some potential supporters: Can he present his ruggedly conservative
views in a way that will appeal to voters far from Texas?
The conventional wisdom is that he's too conservative, too
controversial and maybe not as book smart as the men he'd be running
against. But that's what they said in 1980, when the candidate was
Ronald Reagan.
Shawn Steel, former chairman of the California Republican Party -- who
met with Perry in Newport Beach last month -- isn't sure that Perry can
pull off a Reagan-style victory. The former California governor, he
noted, could "take controversial positions and make them sound like ice
cream. Can Perry do that?"
Right now, Perry's rawboned conservatism doesn't sound much like ice
cream. It's more like strong tea, with no sweetener. But even his
toughest critics in Texas say he's a formidable campaigner, so if he
runs, we'll see an epic battle for the heart of the Republican Party.
doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
Copyright (c) 2012, Los Angeles Times
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