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Rick Perry Taps Into Fear Of Washington
Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie and Scott Brown scored recent Republican victories by singing from the same political hymnal: focusing on kitchen-table issues, criticizing Washington without demeaning the president and keeping their distance from the GOP’s most polarizing figures. Their strategies resounded in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts and won plaudits from GOP establishment voices as the way to win in the Obama era.
Meanwhile, Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry has embraced the cause of state sovereignty, suggested his famously independent state could secede from the union, deemed the president a socialist and, last month in Houston, happily stood by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s side to receive her endorsement.
As Texas Republicans go to the polls for the state’s gubernatorial primary, Perry’s approach seems to be paying dividends. He enjoys a wide lead in polls over his chief primary opponent, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, and the only real question that remains is whether he can crest the 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off in his quest for a third full term.
Unlike the trio of recently successful statewide Republicans, Perry’s positioning has, notably, taken place within a GOP primary in a deep-red state where conservatives make up much of the electorate.
But if McDonnell, Christie and Brown harnessed tea party energy while mostly sticking to safe scripts, Perry has become the first prominent Republican to make the movement’s fears about a Washington leviathan central to his candidacy.
His success against the once seemingly formidable Hutchison illustrates both the political opportunity and danger at the moment for Republicans. The Perry message, in which the federal government wants to redistribute wealth and foist a radical agenda on states, plainly resonates among right-leaning voters who don’t just oppose Obama but are downright afraid of him.
Already, White is training his fire at Perry and making the case that the Republican has hurt himself with swing voters by moving to the right to dispatch Hutchison.
It’s a view held by some Hutchison supporters, as well.
“I think he’s pandering to a certain wing of the party,” said Kelly Moreno of Plano, a Republican who after hearing Hutchison speak Sunday afternoon complained that the governor wasn’t addressing issues of education and transportation.
Appearing in the back of a burger joint in Plano, part of the sprawling Dallas metroplex, the senator herself raised the issue of general election viability.
“I will be the better nominee for our party,” she said to about 50 supporters, arguing that she could help the GOP regain ground they’ve lost in recent years among suburban voters in places like Dallas and Houston.
But, having been conditioned to avoid being portrayed as a moderate, Hutchison declined to make the case explicitly in talking with reporters and instead resorted to more vague language.
“The difference is in our record and how we treat people,” she said in a press availability that clocked just over three minutes. “I’m a conservative, and I help people and I work with people, and I don’t posture against Washington at the same time I’m taking their money.”
Pressed, she again cited her “good record of working with people.”
If Perry has shrewdly zeroed in on the mood of the conservative grass roots, Hutchison has blundered terribly in judging the primary electorate.
She never resigned from the Senate to focus on the governor’s race, as she said she was going to do, making her an easier target to paint as a creature of the dreaded Beltway. And as Perry played to the right-wing with his secession talk, Hutchison managed to underscore her establishment credentials by rolling out endorsements from the likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former President George H.W. Bush.
Speaking to the crowd of GOP activists two days before the primary, she sounded as if she were already in the general election. She decried the state’s high school dropout rate, said she wanted to lift up teachers and touted her many newspaper endorsements — not exactly the stuff that excites the conservative base of the party.
Meanwhile, Perry keeps tossing rhetorical red meat to Republicans convinced their very way of life is threatened by Obama and congressional Democrats.
“We don’t want Washington bureaucrats telling us how to educate our children; we don’t want Washington bureaucrats telling us how to deliver health care,” Perry told supporters in Beaumont on Monday via telephone (Bad weather prevented him from making the trip.).
Asked about border control after a rally in Houston later in the day, he began the same way: “Washington’s been an abject failure.”
White is sure to try to take advantage of Perry’s penchant for such sweeping broadsides should the two meet in a general election. But he may be four years too late. In 2006, Perry captured just 39 percent of the vote in a four-way race against weak opposition.
But in a state where Obama’s approval rating among independents is, according to one recent survey, 19 percent, the governor’s bombast may not represent as much of a political risk.
“You can go to any place in Texas and ask, ‘Is the federal government overreaching?’” said Dave Carney, Perry’s chief consultant. “It’s a conservative state.”
Just how conservative, and how wide the fear of Washington runs, is likely to be determined in November.
“This administration and this Congress have scared people; they’ve overreached,” Perry said in an interview at a charter terminal here before beginning a final fly-around the state Monday. He depicted the Democrats as saying, “’We will make all decisions centralized in Washington, D.C. — on health care, on energy policy, on education. Those are the ones we just know about now.”
Of Obama, Perry says flatly: “I think he has socialist beliefs.”
To hear the governor tell it, the policies being pursued at the federal level pose nothing less than a fundamental threat to ability of states to determine their own fates. And, he said, the alarm was being sounded by the people.
“I suggested this last week: More people read the U.S. Constitution in the last 6 months than in the last 50 years,” he offered. “That may be a little bit of hyperbole, but it may not.”
Such talk has lifted Perry, who once trailed badly to Hutchison in early polling, and made him an influential voice for grass-roots conservatives uneasy about what they see as the looming encroachment of the federal government.
Yet While Perry’s dire warnings about the 10th Amendment may appeal to the segment of the electorate that watches Fox News and listens to Rush Limbaugh, it remains an open question how it will sell with general election voters worried about the more typical fare that decides governor’s races — the economy, roads and schools.
Officially, Perry won’t discuss his game plan for the general election —“You’ll have to wait until this fall” — but it seems likely that he’ll be talking up how the state has become a haven for relocating businesses rather than crusading for states’ rights.
“I think my path to victory is my record,” he said.
Should he, as expected, win the GOP nomination, Perry will almost certainly face White, a business-friendly Democrat who has raised more than $9 million to date and offers his party perhaps its best chance to capture the governor’s office in 15 years.
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Sources: Politico, MSNBC, Google Maps
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