Rick Perry’s Mission

Rick Perry is the sort of Republican who convenes prayer rallies, scoffs at global warming and says of evolution, ‘There are some holes in that theory.’ Some 234 prisoners have been executed in Texas during his time as governor — a modern-day U.S. record — and Perry says his idea of gun control is “Use both hands.” In short, Perry is the sort of Republican who makes heads melt in faculty lounges from Madison to Middlebury and is perfectly suited to lead the right’s long-standing battle against the coastal elite. Yet on Sept. 12 he found himself center stage, at a debate among Republican presidential candidates, being booed by a Tea Party audience.

His crimes? Trying to require a vaccination for Texas schoolgirls to fight cervical cancer, which was — according to rival Michele Bachmann of Minnesota — an offense against liberty. And supporting a policy of letting children of illegal immigrants who live in Texas attend college at in-state tuition rates — which, several other candidates insisted, reeks of lawlessness. Perry looked a little dazed. A man who opposes the direct election of Senators isn’t accustomed to being flanked on the right.

(See pictures of Rick Perry’s life and career.)

When you look at Perry, it’s easy to picture him in an old western. His late arrival in the primary field in August certainly felt like that moment when the big stranger steps through the swinging saloon doors and all heads pivot and the plinky-plunk piano dies away. The new sheriff loomed in the polls: a dozen points ahead in the latest CNN survey, overshadowing former front runner Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and sucking the air from Bachmann’s win in the Iowa straw poll. But now it’s flying fists, smashed whiskey bottles and Perry crashing through a plate-glass window, all suggesting that this movie might not have reached its final reel.

Perry’s rough-and-tumble entry has enlivened a previously plodding race, forcing Romney to abandon his play-it-safe strategy and go for his guns. Inside the Obama White House, the beleaguered troops are delighted. With the economy in shambles, their man will run for re-election on the theme of Republican extremism — and since Perry’s debut, pumped-up debate audiences have been cooperating. At a debate in California, there was hearty applause for his execution record, while in Florida, someone shouted, “Yeah!” in response to a question about letting patients die if they fail to buy health insurance. Perry’s squint, swagger and occasionally snarled syntax all recall the last Texas governor to run for President, but in this year’s GOP there is no compassionate modifying conservative.

(See pictures of the rich history of Mitt Romney.)

Which is really Perry’s challenge now that he leads the Republican field. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is easily the most important force in American politics today, but it is also a volatile, hard-to-please and impatient suitor. In less than a year, the faithful have fallen in — and out of — love with Bachmann and Donald Trump, and many still yearn for another white knight. Hopefuls capture the movement’s heart at their own peril.

Perry understands that success depends on taming the Tea Party just enough without spooking the rest of the GOP. “Am I going to make everybody happy with every position?” he asked in an interview with TIME on Sept. 13. “I’ve made a lot of decisions, and I’ve got a substantial record. From time to time I’ll get something wrong. I’ll admit it, as I’ve done, those times when I have not been correct. But people will never have to guess where I stand on an issue.”

(See the story behind Rick Perry’s cover image for TIME.)

Perry can plausibly claim to embody a wider range of Republican assets than his leading competitors. A master at sensing the ebbs and swells of public opinion, he caught the Tea Party wave on Day One, delivering a featured speech at one of the rallies where the movement was born in 2009. He has executive experience like Romney, talks as tough as Bachmann and can be almost as prickly in his individualism as libertarian iconoclast Ron Paul. And he knows how to win. In compiling a perfect 6-0 record in statewide races, Perry has scored every variety of victory: upstart beats incumbent, incumbent survives tough primary, incumbent wins in squeaker and blowout.

Moreover, Perry doesn’t mind kicking over idols in the high church of conventional wisdom, a favorite Tea Party pastime. He’s the one who calls Social Security a “monstrous lie,” throwing in “Ponzi scheme” for good measure. Social Security is called the third rail of American politics, which is, of course, a reference to the electrified portion of a subway track. Touch it and you die. But there aren’t any subways where Rick Perry comes from.

See pictures of Tea Party souvenirs.

Standing Apart
James Richard Perry, 61, comes from a place that isn’t there — or, as he once put it, “I don’t really have a hometown.” Paint Creek is an unincorporated expanse of nearly empty land on the brown plains of west central Texas, north of Abilene. There, the future governor grew up the son of tenant farmers on a “dryland” cotton farm. The dictionary says this means the land wasn’t irrigated, but the word also speaks to the sort of people willing to do such work. Dryland farming can be a tolerable living when it rains, but in Haskell County, the average rainfall is only about 2 in. (5 cm) per month, and sometimes a drought comes along that lasts for years. During the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s, when Perry’s parents were young, the area around Paint Creek lost about 11% of its population, starting a trend that continues to this day. Huge sandstorms still blew over the harsh country in Perry’s youth, 20 years after the Dust Bowl. “The only time I ever remember seeing my mother cry as a young boy was — they rarely ever bought anything and certainly didn’t buy anything new, but she had bought a new couch,” Perry told Texas Monthly magazine last year. “And there were places in our house that you could see outside through the cracks by the windows, and this dust storm came in, and there was a layer of dust all over that new couch. And it just, you know, kind of — it was a hard life for them.”

Lonely too: the nearest boy Perry’s age lived miles away. There wasn’t much money — he can remember when his father installed indoor plumbing — but then there wasn’t much to spend it on either. “There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church and Boy Scouts,” the Eagle Scout recalled. In 1968, when Perry left the farm to become the first member of his family to attend college, beneath his jeans he wore homemade underwear.

(See pictures of Republican memorabilia.)

But nothing symbolizes the cultural distance between Perry and much of modern America as well as his destination that day. Texas A&M is the oldest public university in Texas, and from the start it was a place apart, a tribe unto itself. Until the 1960s, it was all male and all military, and mocking the Aggies for low intelligence is as much a part of Lone Star Texas tradition as Bob Wills and Shiner Bock beer. Heard the one about the Aggie who bragged of finishing a jigsaw puzzle in just 45 days when the box said “2 to 4 years”? Or the one about the Aggie fired from the M&Ms factory because he threw away all the W’s? No? Guess you’re not from Texas.

Students who embrace this world apart become part of one of the most distinctive and close-knit cultures in American higher education. It starts with Fish Camp, a freshman orientation in the Piney Woods of East Texas, and builds through midnight pep rallies and mass volunteer projects. A&M maintains a Traditions Council just to keep all its customs straight. By senior year, school spirit is so intense that virtually everyone buys an Aggie ring, which forever signals the wearer’s identity to others from the tribe. According to ringmaker Balfour, 94% of last year’s seniors ordered rings, at prices ranging from $500 to nearly $1,500. Perry still wears his. Though most students today are civilians, the heart of Aggie culture is still the Corps of Cadets — no other member of the prestigious Association of American Universities is also a government-chartered senior military academy. It’s a point of pride on campus that A&M produced more World War II officers than West Point.

So while other campuses were erupting in antiwar protests, Cadet Perry spent the Woodstock years with his hair short, his back straight and his trousers creased. And he loved it — though not the going-to-class part so much: Perry struggled academically under a heavy load of science courses. But definitely the parts involving firecrackers in the toilets and live chickens in other guys’ dorm rooms. Twice, the student body elected him to the coveted post of yell leader.

As a candidate, Perry can draw on a network of thousands of fellow Aggies, some of them very successful. His prodigious fundraising abilities assure that no matter how long the primary fight might go on, “he ain’t gonna run out of gas,” as one Texas Republican puts it. Yet coming from A&M is more than that to Perry; it is a key to his identity, as he says when asked how he differs from George W. Bush: “He’s a Yale graduate. I am a Texas A&M graduate.” Ultimate insider, meet ultimate outsider. Most Texans get that, but it remains to be seen whether Americans beyond the Red River Valley will appreciate the distinction.

See pictures of the homes of GOP presidential hopefuls.

After graduation, Perry flew cargo planes in the Air Force. Discharged as a captain, he went home in 1978 to farm alongside his father and prepare to enter politics. It was something of a family avocation; his father was Haskell County commissioner for 28 years, which in Texas was akin to being a feudal lord, overseeing the road budget and dispensing minor favors along the way. Running as a Democrat in 1984 — in Texas back then, the GOP was for blue bloods like the Bushes — Perry was elected to the state house. The world was changing; the age of the rural conservative Democrat was coming to an end. After backing Al Gore in 1988, Perry jumped ship to run as a Republican in his first statewide race and unseated Jim Hightower, the populist agriculture commissioner. After two terms, he took on his old A&M buddy John Sharp in a race for lieutenant governor.

Around Austin, everyone says Perry is a very lucky politician, not least because his narrow victory in that race put him in line to become governor when Bush went to Washington. But he is also a very good one. He is comfortable in his own skin and regards the job of meeting new people as a contact sport, telling jokes, crouching to look a kid in the eye, throwing a big arm around your shoulder. After one recent debate, some people made a big deal of a photo showing Perry with his hand clamped on Paul’s forearm and a finger pointing in the air. It looked as if he had been manhandling his competitor, but people who know the man said, That’s just Perry.

(See pictures of George W. Bush’s Texas town.)

The Acrobat
Until now, Perry has kept a surprisingly low profile for a man who is the longest-serving governor in the history of America’s second most populous state. He hasn’t been a constant TV presence like the late Texas governor Ann Richards, nor has he been impatiently measuring White House drapes as Bush did. The weak-governor system laid out by the Texas constitution has suited Perry just fine. He spent a decade quietly remaking the governor’s office into a stronger one. He busies himself with dominating the legislative agenda, vetoing bills, trimming budgets and filling courtrooms and commissions with solid Republican allies. Texans — enough of them anyway — seem to have welcomed the respite.

Perry is, in some ways, a chameleon, a shape-shifting political animal who can be for both smaller government and bigger highways, against illegal immigrants and for assimilation of their children. While claiming to be an anti-Washington maverick, he has repeatedly tapped federal programs, including the 2009 stimulus, to float his state through hard times. He’s carved a sinuous course on immigration, waxing militaristic in public about a porous border but quietly backing policies that improve the lives of those who make it across to the U.S. In his conversation with TIME, he said an 1,800-mile (2,900 km) border fence made little sense but suggested that “strategic fencing in your metropolitan areas” does.

(Read about Rick Perry’s rise to power.)

A man who wears French cuffs with cowboy boots (that say LIBERTY on them) and who counts liberal Democrats and West Texas Republicans as close friends may not want to be categorized. And it is true that Perry blends into surroundings without revealing a lot about himself. Even his appearance at a mass prayer rally in Houston in August is subject to interpretation and debate: Perry’s voice echoed through Reliant Stadium in the ringing cadences of a revivalist preacher, yet he said almost nothing about his own religious views. Instead, he simply emotionally read a series of Bible passages. It was all shades and signals. The result was highly effective. There was a roar of criticism from the secular left, where only the drawl and the thunder resonated. That criticism in turn made Perry a hero of the religious right — even though he hadn’t promised them a thing.

According to Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Perry displays “acrobatic abilities” when it comes to political positioning. That’s why he has never lost a race in the increasingly diverse Lone Star State. Though solidly Republican, the state’s population is now 54% nonwhite, far higher than the rest of the nation on average and more than three times what it was when Perry was born in 1950. “Texas,” says Perry, has become “somewhat of a microcosm of the rest of the country, particularly in this second decade of the 21st century. We are very, very cosmopolitan, if you will, very urban — but we have our rural areas. This is not the Texas of my father.”

What he has learned by campaigning in the new Texas — how to hold on to the base without alienating independents — now shapes his strategy to win the presidential nomination. If he can attract enough Evangelical votes to win the Iowa caucuses while skirting the bedroom issues that drive away the libertarians and independents voting in the New Hampshire primary, he might wrap things up within weeks of the first voting.

Americans are going to be hearing a lot from Perry about the relatively strong economy of Texas. “While the current resident of the White House is overseeing the loss of 2.5 million jobs, Texas during my period as governor has created over a million jobs,” he said in the Florida debate. And that, he noted, has been during a “pretty tough economic period.”

What they won’t hear about is any large legacy. Though Perry has tried several times to put a big stamp on his sprawling state, he is better at riding waves than making them. He proposed a nearly $150 billion project, mixing public and private funds, to build supercorridors across the state for highways, trains and communications cable. The Trans-Texas Corridor foundered under its own massive weight as citizens objected to the prospect of paying tolls and losing land to eminent domain. Perry has also proposed a controversial plan to evaluate professors at state universities based on student assessments and classroom performance. Praised by some education reformers, the idea is running into intense opposition from the well-entrenched academic community in Austin.

Instead, Perry has excelled at the nuts and bolts of party politics. Exploiting the virtually unregulated bazaar of Texas political finance, he pulls the strings of the powerful state GOP and seeds the government with loyalists. He has filled every appointed post in the executive branch at least once and picked six of the nine state supreme court justices. His critics charge that under Perry, the state capital has a virtual cashier’s window with a sign that reads PAY TO PLAY. Perry scoffs at the idea that he can be bought with the many gifts, junkets and campaign contributions he collects. During the Florida debate, Bachmann noted that the vaccine Perry mandated was manufactured by a campaign donor of his. “The company was Merck,” Perry replied, “and it was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them. I raise about $30 million. And if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.”

In fact, since 2001, Merck’s PAC has given Perry $28,500.

A Fine Line
In the handbook of political strategies, there are two tried-and-true ways to deflate an outsider, and Perry’s opponents are already rolling out both. The first is to argue that the outsider is, deep down, just another status quo insider. “Many of the new jobs that Perry boasts of having brought to Texas were in the public sector,” observed the American Conservative magazine on Sept. 9. “As Texas governor he expresses the hope that all high school graduates will be able to attend a university for a cost of no more than $10,000 per year. Need we even wonder whether the state debt will be increased to pay for this favor?” Other Perry critics cite his support for Gore in 1988 and his more recent endorsement of the socially liberal Rudolph Giuliani for the 2008 GOP nomination.

The other line of attack is to portray the outsider as way outside. Perry is facing that one too. In fact, he stockpiled ammunition for his enemies in his book Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, published last year. Describing himself as “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights, loaded with hollow-point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog,” Perry lays out a severe criticism of federal government — not just Social Security and Medicare but also the practice of electing U.S. Senators by popular vote. Perry says the book wasn’t intended to be a campaign blueprint, and no doubt that’s true, because it steers him perilously close to the Glenn Beck fringe that finds little worth preserving from the 20th century — except perhaps the conspiracy theories.

Perry knows that some in the old Republican guard worry that he is too brash for a broader electorate, but he believes they are out of touch. “There may be someone who is an established Republican who circulates in the cocktail circuit that would find some of my rhetoric to be inflammatory or what have you, but I’m really talking to the American citizen out there. I think the American citizens are just tired of this political correctness and politicians who are tiptoeing around important issues. They want a decisive leader.”

If Perry survives those attacks to win his party’s nod, he will be the most conservative nominee since Ronald Reagan. His stern critique of federal power represents a very real shift to the right in the Republican base, driven in part by the exercise of that power by the current President. The prospect of a general election pitting Rick Perry against Barack Obama paints the starkest contrast Americans have seen in a generation — probably the most dramatic in nearly half a century. It would be the Corps of Cadets vs. the Harvard Law Review, country boy vs. city sophisticate, cotton farmer vs. community organizer, white Republican vs. black Democrat, the red against the blue. For years, the polarizing forces of modern politics have been pushing toward this sort of crystal-clear clash. In sizing up Perry, the brawling Republicans will decide whether it comes.