Double Down: Game Change 2012 (28 page)

Meanwhile, in the auditorium, Bachmann was being introduced over the loudspeakers. Her butt remained planted on the bus. The announcer intoned her name again. Still no Bachmann.

Finally, one of her aides cajoled her out of her crouch, telling her that Perry had made his exit. But when Bachmann reached the rostrum, she looked out in the crowd—and there he was, beaming at her from a table in the front. Noticeably flinching, she scooted over to move out of Perry’s line of sight. Distressed and discombobulated, she meandered through a disjointed version of her stump speech. Rather than mingling with voters in the audience when she finished, Bachmann remained onstage, leaning down to scribble some autographs, before being escorted out by a phalanx of factotums.

Bachmann knew immediately how dreadfully she’d done, that the showdown had become a rout. “Worst speech I’ve ever given,” she told Rollins afterwards. “I just totally freaked.”

In the space of twenty-four hours, Bachmann had plunged from the heights to the depths, and she would never gain altitude again. The coverage of Waterloo was bruising; she absorbed it all. She followed up her victory in the straw poll by taking a vacation, vanishing from the campaign trail. Her fund-raising dried up on the spot. Her poll numbers started falling. Her relationship with Rollins was poisoned; he quit three weeks later. And the media that inflated her bubble in the first place shut off the helium spigot. The press was bored with Bachmann and, more to the point, entranced by a new bauble—the tough-talking stud in a ten-gallon Stetson, whom Bill Clinton called a “good-lookin’ rascal.”

•   •   •

R
ICK PERRY’S PULCHRITUDE WAS
beyond dispute, but it accounted for only part of the Republican fascination with him. Born in the West Texas town of Paint Creek, raised in a house without indoor plumbing, he was folksy and swaggering at sixty-one, a natural populist who boasted about packing “a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets,” and once using it to fell a coyote that crossed his path. Lone Star State liberals mocked Perry as a nimrod; the late columnist Molly Ivins dubbed him Governor Goodhair. But since 1984, he had stood in ten contested elections—for state representative, agriculture commissioner, lieutenant governor, and governor—and won them all. Having secured his third statehouse term in 2010, Perry was the longest-serving governor in the country and in Texas history.

It was Perry’s recent reelection that brought him national attention. Confronted with a stiff primary challenge from U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Perry tapped into the energy of the Tea Party in its formative stages. At three massive anti-tax rallies, in Austin, Arlington, and Fort Worth on April 15, 2009, he decried the federal government’s stranglehold on the states. Asked by a reporter about a fringe conservative call for Texas to secede, Perry replied, “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no
reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?”

Hutchison thought Perry’s flirtation with secession would doom him, but instead it roused the right. A year later, he thrashed her by twenty points and his general election opponent by thirteen. The day after the midterms, he flew to New York to promote a new book he had written. Entitled
Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington,
it contended that Social Security was a “Ponzi scheme” and that the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments—which allow for the federal government’s collection of income taxes and the direct election of senators, respectively—were mistakes. On NBC’s
Today
show, he declared that
Fed Up!
was proof positive he wasn’t running for president.

Perry privately told everyone around him the same thing. Even as speculation to the contrary grew in the spring of 2011, with a Draft Perry movement popping up and Limbaugh virtually begging him on the air to dive in, Perry kept insisting that he had no interest in immigrating to Washington, a town he despised. His chief political strategist, Dave Carney, and his 2010 campaign manager, Rob Johnson, had joined Gingrich’s campaign, with Perry’s blessing. His plan was to complete the Texas legislative session and then have surgery to fix a malformation in his lower back, which had nagged at him for years and lately worsened.

But as the legislative term wound to a close, Perry’s stance began to waver. At a bill-signing ceremony in Austin on May 27, he said for the first time, “I’m going to think about [running]”—but then quickly added, “I think about a lot of things.”

Even Perry’s closest aides were shocked. Carney, a gruff, bearlike, reclusive presence who had been Perry’s sage for thirteen years, called him up and asked if it was true. Perry, noting the apparent groundswell beneath him, said it would be silly not to explore whether a late entry was feasible. Two weeks later, amid turbulence on the Gingrich campaign, Carney and Johnson left Newt and started gaming out a plan for the governor.

To Perry’s mind, the logic behind his putative candidacy was impeccable. In a race that would center on the economy, his record in Texas, which had led the nation in job creation during the downturn, gave him a terrific
story to tell. His business boosterism and home-state eminence provided him with a mighty donor base. Between his southernness, his Tea Party credentials, and his avid evangelical faith, he presented a package more complete and better tailored to the Republican electorate than anyone in the field. And he was a hell of a talker—a man “able to communicate to people in a boardroom, people in a pool hall, and people in a church pew,” in the words of one of his aides. And thus a man capable of stomping the bejesus out of Romney.

Perry’s wife, Anita, agreed that her husband had the White House goods, and that mattered more than anyone knew. Protective of their two adult children and her family’s privacy, Anita generally kept her distance from Rick’s political doings. But at the RGA meeting in November 2010 where anti-Romney sentiments boiled over and Barbour told his fellow governors he was considering a bid, Anita urged her husband to go for it, saying,
You’re
the one who should think about running. A nurse, Anita objected to Obamacare and believed that the president had to be defeated. She also knew that her husband thought Romney was a hollow conniver, and a yellow-bellied punk.

Perry’s distaste for the front-runner stemmed from an altercation between them in 2006. As RGA head, Romney had employed a consultant, Alex Castellanos, who was working at the same time for an independent candidate challenging Perry. The incumbent considered this an outrageous conflict—a sort of RGA subsidy to his opponent. In a heated meeting at the governor’s mansion in Austin, with Carney looking on, Perry demanded that Romney stop paying Castellanos or send Perry additional funding to even the score. Romney’s reaction struck Perry as disingenuous, defensive, thin-skinned, and limp; after one sharp exchange, Romney stood up as if to storm out, then shrunk back in his seat and sulked.

When the meeting was over, Perry snorted to Carney, “How’s he going to deal with Putin if he can’t deal with this?” (Romney thought Perry was acting like a bully, and started referring to Carney as “Jabba the Hutt.”)

On July 1, Perry underwent his scheduled back surgery. Two weeks later, Carney, Johnson, and Perry’s statehouse chief of staff, Ray Sullivan, came to the governor’s residence to meet with the Perrys and “scare them straight,” as one adviser put it, about the realities of what a run would mean. Given the extreme lateness of Perry’s start, his schedule would be punishing.
Assuming a mid-August launch, he would face three crucial debates in September while at the same time having to rake in a whopping pile of cash to demonstrate his fund-raising strength by the end of the third quarter.

The Perrys had been subjected to invasive scrutiny in the past, including over a raft of rumors in 2004 that Rick was gay. Anita had hated that episode, and it left her husband disgusted and prone to passive-aggressive tangles with the press. A presidential campaign would be exponentially worse, his advisers warned the couple. Carney cited the stories about the Daniels marriage, which Perry’s people (like everyone else) assumed had been driven by the Romney campaign. They’re ruthless, Carney said, and the national press would be jackals. “There will be people following you, people following your family,” Johnson added. “Your lives will change forever.”

Nothing Perry’s advisers were saying struck him as new information.
I’ve been in this business long enough to understand the seedy underbelly of politics,
he thought.
Sure, they play rough and hit hard in the NFL
.
But Texas football ain’t exactly powder-puff.

The Perrys told Carney and Johnson that they understood the dangers. The couple was ready to make their decision.

“Don’t say yes now,” Carney cautioned. “You need to think about this.”

The next day, Perry phoned his lead strategist and said firmly that he was in. The degree of his confidence was stratospheric—and rooted in delusion about how prepared he and his team actually were.

Less than a month before Perry’s presidential announcement, his entire operation consisted of fewer than a dozen people. They had held precisely one full-blown planning meeting. They had not done a speck of polling or other survey research. There had been no thorough examination of Perry’s record in Texas or analysis of how it might play nationally. Nor did his team have an accurate understanding of the surgery Perry had just undergone. His spokesman had described it publicly as a “minor medical procedure,” and that was what the governor told his advisers, too. In fact, Perry’s doctors had performed a partial spinal fusion and nerve decompression, as well as injections of his own stem cells, an experimental therapy not approved by the FDA. In the fortnight after going under the knife, as he prepared to embark on the most demanding physical and mental excursion of his life, Perry was ingesting painkillers and having trouble sustaining his
attention during meetings with potential bundlers and policy experts. Ever taciturn, ever macho, he told his people he was fine—and not one of them pressed him for more information or seemed to give it a second thought.

For a little while, none of this looked like political malpractice. Perry burst into the race as if he had been shot out of a cannon. On August 6, he hosted a prayer rally in Houston called “The Response”; some thirty thousand Christians filled Reliant Stadium to hear him sermonize. A week later, he drew comparisons to Reagan for the announcement stem-winder he delivered in Charleston. And then it was on to New Hampshire, Iowa, and the decimation of Bachmann.

The morning after Waterloo, August 15, Perry showed up at the Iowa State Fair, in Des Moines. In an open-necked blue shirt and khaki pants held up by a silver-tipped belt, he looked right at home amid the livestock pens, deep-fried butter treats, and pork chops on sticks—and sounded delighted to unsheathe his populist hatchet and hack his main competitor to pieces.

Earlier that day, across the country in New Hampshire, Romney had taken a thinly veiled jab at Perry, suggesting he didn’t comprehend “the real economy” because he wasn’t a businessman. Perry fired back: “I was in the private sector for thirteen years after I left the Air Force. You know, I wasn’t on Wall Street, I wasn’t working at Bain Capital, but the principles of the free market, they work whether you’re in a farm field in Iowa or whether you’re on Wall Street.”

Later, a reporter pressed the point: Romney says his background makes him more qualified to create jobs. What about that?

Perry smiled wryly, blew a kiss to the camera, and said, “Give him my love. Give him my love.”

•   •   •

F
OURTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY
on Commercial Street, Perry’s facetiously tender display of amour elicited a torrent of f-bombs from Rhoades and a forced laugh from Romney. For nearly a year, the default front-runner had been waiting for the other shoe to drop—and now a giant ostrich-skinned cowboy boot had come crashing down on his head.

Everything about Perry made Romney anxious. The frenzied Bible-thumping of The Response struck him as a bizarre way to kick off a
campaign, but
thirty thousand people
? Hoo, boy. Romney’s calls to his bundlers to scope out Perry’s fund-raising potential did nothing to reassure him, and neither did Zwick’s assessment: We’re going to lose market share with donors. Then there was Perry’s instant rise to the top of the polls. Forty-eight hours after his announcement, Rasmussen Reports had Perry at 29, eleven points ahead of Mitt. For the first time this cycle, Romney gazed at a rival and thought,
This guy could be the nominee.

On August 17, Romney sent an e-mail to his inner circle with the subject line “the road ahead,” the rally-the-troops intent of which was undercut by its tone of rattled apprehension:

Hi team,

It didn’t take a PhD to figure that Rick would get a rocket boost in the polls when he finally got in. The media has been begging for his entry for months, with folks like Rush and Fox among the most passionate suitors. What’s it mean for us? . . .

Of course, we will not shrink from a fight, as conflict is sure to be brought our way. And in the meantime, we will ready our forces—financial, intellectual, strategic, political. The intensity of the coming campaign will sharpen us for the contest with President Obama.

We should not burden the days ahead with heavy seriousness and worry. We are in the middle of one of the most animated features of a democratic republic—a campaign for the presidency. It should be fun, and at the least, it should be instructive. We will grow from the experience, and if we take care to hue [sic] to our values and vision, it will enrich the nation as well, win or not win. But winning would be better . . .

Lately, in my stump speeches, I’ve been quoting a New Hampshire 19th century poet. His poem was written to capture the spirit needed to overcome the challenges that faced the pioneers of America’s West. In some ways, it may apply to us. “Bring me men to match my mountains, / Bring me men to match my plains. / Men with empires in their purpose, / And new eras in their brains.”