Perry running for president again
Former governor hopes to avoid 2012 mistakes
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday announced his second bid for the U.S. presidency, seeking to rehabilitate his image nationally after a series of stumbles and gaffes ended his campaign in 2012.
“I am running for president because I know our country’s best days are ahead of us,” Perry said in a statement on his website ahead of a midday kickoff event in Dallas.
Perry, 65, has been visiting early nominating states, including Iowa and New Hampshire, to tout his record as Texas governor from 2000 to January 2015. He assumed the governorship as George W. Bush resigned to become president, winning re-election three times by double-digit margins to become the longest-serving governor in Texas history.
His greatest challenge is convincing primary voters that he’s no longer the candidate who, in a November 2011 debate, forgot the name of one of the three federal agencies he wanted to eliminate as president. That moment was one of a number of blunders, including comparing Social Security to a “Ponzi scheme,” that helped to undermine his candidacy.
He dropped out after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses and before the critical primary contest in South Carolina, where he had announced his candidacy and where he’d been betting on a strong performance.
Unlike in 2012, when he briefly led in some polls, Perry is an underdog, polling in the single digits in a crowded field.
Perry has spent the past three years boning up on foreign and domestic policy and assembling a network of advisers and donors. He’s drawing contrasts with the competition by highlighting his record presiding over a booming Texas economy that was a bright spot during the recession. He’s also a military veteran and someone, his advisers argue, who can appeal to both the tea party and establishment Republicans.
“The stakes are too high for leadership that’s unproven,” he said at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City. “Executive experience matters.”
That experience, Perry argues, makes him a stronger pick than declared candidates such as Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, all first-term senators.
“Leadership’s not a speech on the Senate floor,” Perry said.
It’s a distinction that also plays to his party’s dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama, who, like those three competitors, served just a few years as a U.S. senator before his 2008 election.
Much of Perry’s candidacy will hinge on whether voters credit him for his state’s strong job creation record. While most states suffered anemic growth over the past decade, Texas’s oil and natural gas resources buffered it from the national downturn.
Between January 2005, before the financial crisis, and January 2015, as Perry left office, the state picked up 2.1 million new jobs, a 22 percent increase. That compares to a national growth rate of less than 1 percent over the same time period.
According to the nonpartisan Factcheck.org, Perry’s claim that Texas created 40 percent of all the jobs in America is true. Even so, the unemployment rate still increased because those gains didn’t keep pace with population growth.
Texas’ population grew by 20.6 percent from 2000 to 2010.