Texas Take: Despite predictions of his campaign’s demise, Rick Perry hangs tough.
Editor’s note: Texas Take is a daily blog on Texas government and politics that appears on HoustonChronicle.com, the Chronicle’s premium website. Periodically, selected posts will be republished in print.
For the first time since his campaign stopped paying its staffers, Rick Perry has arrived in Iowa to get on the storied Des Moines Register Soapbox and stump in front of the same voters that propelled him four years ago. Nowhere is his fall from 2011 top-dog status in the GOP field to the bottom-of-the-barrel clearer.
The whisper campaign, of course, puts him dropping out of the race before the all-important Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1. As the Dallas Morning News described his arrival, it was “a rainy day at the fair for a candidate on life support.”
Perry, however, told voters he would return often in the next six months.
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m going to do something about it, to change (Washington),” Perry told the cheering crowds.
As the scrum of cameras surrounded him, he was ready to answer every question from Iowa media, but not before a lone protester shouted, “What about your indictment?”
That protester probably wasn’t going to vote for Perry anyway, but a larger question remains, given all the news that has dogged Perry’s campaign for the last few weeks: Does he have the bandwidth to fight two uphill battles at the same time?
He’s fighting for his legacy in Texas. Not just his legacy, but, according to his attorneys’ new filings Tuesday, for the legacy of every governor to come.
As the San Antonio Express-News’ Peggy Fikac reported: “Casting the argument in dramatic terms and saying the constitutional separation of powers is at stake, Perry’s legal team in its petition to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals urged it to act ‘to prevent the judicial system from being complicit in undermining the very structure of Texas government.’ ”
While he won a major, but still incomplete, victory recently when an appeals court threw out one of the charges against him, he remains an embattled former governor here.
He talks often on the stump about his challenges as governor, and how they have directly informed his decision to make another run for the White House.
His message — that he has been toughened by circumstance — has become a constant in his speeches.
From dealing with flood of immigrant children arriving at the southern border to an influx of Louisianans fleeing their state for Texas after Hurricane Katrina, “nobody gave me a handbook,” he said.
“Humbling things in life happen all the time,” Perry has said. “They’re not necessarily bad things. I think Americans judge people by how they respond when they get knocked down, and I’ve been knocked a few times and managed to get up.”