Rick Perry and His Eggheads by Sasha Issenberg

Author:Sasha Issenberg [Issenberg, Sasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-98677-1
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2011-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

In the spring of 2005, Carney stood in an empty Mexican restaurant called the Oasis on Austin’s Lake Travis, in front of what amounted to Perry’s extended political family, and prepared to introduce a quartet of strangers. A crowd of about forty people were seated, auditorium-style—a group that included the core campaign staff for 2006; a retinue of outside consultants and vendors; Perry and his wife, Anita; and their kitchen cabinet of informal advisers, many of them former aides.

Those who worked for Perry considered him “a dream client,” as Baselice put it: eager to make fund-raising phone calls, willing to defer to his advisers on strategic questions, and happy about following their orders. He also showed his personal gratitude to those who served him. After 2002, to congratulate them on his victory, Perry invited members of his core team (including Carney and his wife) to join him climbing Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas. A little over a year later, he rounded up many of the same advisers (including Carney again) for a retreat in the Bahamas, an outing that was nominally devoted to school-finance policy but was more hands-on in its treatment of scuba-related issues. (The trip triggered an ethics investigation when it was revealed that the expenses had been paid by political supporters. Perry was eventually cleared of wrongdoing.) “The joke is we’re like the mafia—you only think you get out,” says Deirdre Delisi, who managed Perry’s 2002 campaign before becoming his gubernatorial chief of staff. “Perry inspires a lot of loyalty in terms of people who have worked with him and stayed, whether they’re officially in it or not.”

The campaign was preparing for what it expected to be a difficult primary against Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the state comptroller and former Austin mayor. The rivalry was already intense between Perry’s world and Strayhorn’s, and early in the day Carney had set the tone by claiming, “We’re going to rip her leg off and beat her over the head with it!” The statement jarred Republican operative Bill Noble, who had expected to be attending more of a planning session than a pep rally, one where there would be an open exchange of ideas about strategy but little need to fire up Perry’s loyalists. Then he saw how Carney’s bluster was received by four strangers in their midst. “I just looked over at them, and there was this look of shock,” says Noble. “It turns out it was for effect.”

Carney appeared intent on unsettling everyone at the Oasis restaurant that day, both the eggheads and the political hands they would be encountering for the first time. The daylong retreats were a ritual for Perry campaigns—and many in attendance were veterans of past retreats Carney had organized before the 1998 and 2002 races—but this was the first time he had prepared a syllabus. Carney had ordered fifty-five copies of Get Out the Vote!, and everyone who was to attend the retreat received one with orders to read it.

Perry would likely

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