by Balz, Dan
Allbaugh’s advocates said he brought order to a campaign that had been mishandled from the start, that he provided more discipline to an operation that lacked it, and that he helped turn the governor’s disorderly debate prep sessions into ones that, over time, made Perry a more skilled debater. His detractors said Allbaugh concentrated mostly on administrative matters rather than grand strategy. He required the staff to wear badges with their names on them, changed the key access format for getting into the campaign headquarters, and changed the color of the paper that the block schedules were printed on from red—which made copying more difficult—to white. These critics said he never even met with campaign manager Rob Johnson—that he canceled several meetings—and that he never dug deeply into what the original team’s plans and strategy were.
The struggle between Allbaugh and Carney disrupted the whole campaign. Carney decided to disengage once Allbaugh came in, and had told Perry as much. Allbaugh believed Carney had gone AWOL. “They clashed on everything, and it wasn’t really any issue or strategy, it was just Dave can be difficult and he decided to be difficult about everything. And Joe overreacted,” said one Perry loyalist. “Joe approached it in a somewhat ham-handed way. He has done well at being sort of the battlefield commander, but coming in and giving speeches about taking care of the Perrys and being loyal to the Perrys to people who have been working for them for ten years, when you’ve been there for ten minutes, doesn’t go over very well.”
Some of the other newcomers, who had a relationship with neither Perry nor Allbaugh, were equally alarmed at what they found when they arrived. Warfield assumed Perry’s team had a comeback to the immigration issue. He assumed Orlando would be a momentary setback. He described what happened: “We’re all on board now, we’re the team, so okay, and we’re all together, we’ve taken the pledge, we’re all part of the brotherhood. Let’s see your polling. Well, we don’t have any. Aw, come on guys. No, no survey work. None. Zero. Zip. None. Not a national, not a state, nothing. I mean, it is stunning. . . . In Texas obviously it was manageable, this immigration tuition deal, [but] they had no answer because they’d done no polling. They had no awareness of the power of the issue and since they’d done nothing to frame a response they had no chart out of it.” One of the veteran advisers said, “If we had had more information, more data, there might have been ways we could have fixed things faster and better. We had to do it from scratch real quick. The [new] team was very critical of that, from day one—to Carney, to anybody that would listen to them. They would say, ‘This is nuts.’”
• • •
Perry was now a significantly diminished figure, but he survived the two October debates better than those the month before. At the Dartmouth debate on October 11, he no longer was placed in the center—the result of his plunging poll numbers. At the Las Vegas debate on October 18, he decided he would not let Romney put him on the defensive again on immigration. He reprised an old attack against Romney for having hired a lawn service that employed undocumented workers. As Perry kept interrupting, Romney got testy. “I’m speaking. I’m speaking. I’m speaking,” Romney sputtered. He explained the rules to Perry, looked plaintively to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, noted Perry’s poor performances in earlier debates, and generally lost his cool. Perry’s charge was mostly spurious, but he had finally gotten under Romney’s skin.
The next debate was on November 9 in Michigan. Perry’s team vowed that he would be more rested and better prepared than in the first debates and scheduled his arrival in the state well before the forum. But the warfare between Allbaugh and Carney spilled into the debate preparations, at least according to several advisers. “Carney had done something which really ticked me off,” Allbaugh said. “I called the governor, who was on his way to the airport, and I said, ‘Governor, this is not going to work, I have tried.’ He said, ‘Well, you do what you need to do, I understand, this is a different game.’ I knew better at the time and I knew the governor well enough that he would probably stew about this.” The night before the debate, other members of Perry’s team got wind of what was happening. “The debate prep room was overflowing with angst,” said one person in the room that night. But no two memories of that night are the same. By one account, Deirdre Delisi, the campaign’s policy director and a long-standing adviser to the governor, had approached Perry to plead the case for Carney’s continued role as the chief strategist in the campaign. By another, Delisi did not think she was trying to get anything reversed. She felt she knew the roles Perry wanted people to play. She felt it was her responsibility to raise it with the candidate.
Perry said he had no recollection of a debate prep room in turmoil. In fact, he said he felt as well prepared for that debate as any other he did. Before going onstage the night of the debate, he took his customary trip to the restroom. He saw Herman Cain standing just behind him. The Michigan debate came shortly after Politico reported that two women had accused Cain of inappropriate behavior when he was head of the National Restaurant Association. The Cain campaign accused one of Perry’s new advisers of leaking the story, a charge that was denied by Perry’s campaign. Perry recounted to me later what happened next. “He looks over at me and he’s always got that big smile on his face and I said, ‘Herman, how you doing, you big stud?’ That’s a term of endearment that I would use. Then he kind of had a funny look on his face and I was like, ‘God, I bet he thinks I’m making some derogatory remark at him because of what’s happened here in the last week.’ I walked out of there and I came in and told that story [to his advisers] and everybody was laughing. I walked onto that stage probably as kind of confident and loose as I had been—and then had that little brain fart.”
That “little brain fart” was one of the most embarrassing self-inflicted mistakes any candidate has experienced at a presidential debate—a moment that came to indelibly stamp Perry’s candidacy as one of the most inept anyone could recall. It happened two-thirds of the way through the debate, as Perry tried to outline the cuts he would make in Washington if he were president. “I will tell you, it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the, um, uh—what’s the third one there? Let’s see.” Ron Paul chimed in. “You need five,” he said. “Oh, five, okay,” Perry replied, still tongue-tied. Romney suggested maybe EPA was the third. “EPA, there you go,” Perry replied. CNBC’s John Harwood, co-moderating the debate, sought clarification. “Seriously, is EPA the one you were talking about?” “No sir. No sir,” Perry replied, too honest for his own good at that point. Harwood pressed, incredulous that Perry could not remember the third. “The third agency of government I would—I would do away with, the Education.” He paused again until someone said, “Commerce.” “Commerce,” he continued, “and let’s see. I can’t. The third one, I can’t.” He paused again, head down. “Sorry,” he said with a sense of finality. “Oops.”
In the press area, reporters watched in disbelief as it unfolded. Curt Anderson, a Perry adviser, was at home watching the debate with his wife. He had drifted off just before it happened. He heard his wife shout, “Oh no!” “I’m like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘Uh, uh, uh, uh.’ And she’s trying to explain to me. And she says, ‘Get the, get the DVR.’ So we replayed it, and I was just like everybody else.” In the Perry viewing room at the debate, Delisi broke into tears. “It’s like people describe earthquakes,” said Nelson Warfield, who was in the Perry green room with the others. “The first shake and people go, ‘Oh shit, it’s an earthquake.’ But real bad earthquakes keep going. So it just kept going. He just couldn’t get out of it, and the ‘oops’ put a little cherry on top. Honestly, it’s sort of like a collision. I can only remember bits and pieces. I remember my head hitting the computer top.” Ray Sullivan and Mari Will, who had been brought on to take charge of debate preparations, spoke to Perry as he came off the stage and urged him to go into the spin room to take some of the sting out of the moment. Sullivan, Will, and Warfield came
up with a one-liner to make light of what happened. “I’m glad I’ve got my boots on, because I really stepped in it out there,” Perry told reporters over and over.
Overnight, the campaign team rearranged the governor’s schedule. They set up a series of interviews on the morning shows and scheduled Perry to appear that night on Late Night with David Letterman to do Letterman’s Top Ten list, where after negotiating away a couple of the most noxious suggestions from Letterman’s staff, he laughed off his brain freeze with more one-liners. “The governor came down to the live shows on Thursday morning, he was pretty beaten down,” Sullivan said. “It would have been really easy for him and to some extent all of us to curl up and ride it out. By the end of the day he felt good. He had a good time. He felt as we all did that it was successful.”
But Perry’s already reeling campaign could not recover. Jay Root of the Texas Tribune later wrote that “oops” turned Perry’s misadventures into “a hall-of-fame disaster.” Later that month, Carney and Allbaugh had a final parting. The relationship had deteriorated further. Allbaugh said, “I said, ‘Dave, you ought to go to New Hampshire and not come back unless you’re specifically invited.’ That was the last time we had a conversation.” Carney said Allbaugh’s words were conveyed in a voice mail, not a direct conversation, after he had already decamped back to his home in New Hampshire, having told Perry early on that he did not intend to stay in Austin with Allbaugh in charge. On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Politico ran a brutal story about a campaign that had met none of the expectations set for it. It was, said one beleaguered adviser, “like a nuclear bomb in the middle of the campaign.” Long after Perry was out of the race, the divisions remained deep, as Perry advisers played and replayed events, wondering whether it was ever possible for him to have been a serious competitor.
Perry later looked back at the “oops” moment with some humor. His campaign by then, he later concluded, was already fatally wounded. “My low moment happened in Orlando,” he told me. “I told somebody the ‘oops’ moment was kind of just one of those things that happens in life and I knew I was going to see it over and over and over again, but it wasn’t anything. I think I went back and actually slept that night.”
My interview took place in the governor’s office in the Capitol building in Austin in the spring of 2012. Perry was upbeat, as he generally is, showing photos he had taken with his iPhone on a recent trip. I asked him why someone who seemed to fit the party as well as he did could not have been a more serious contender. “I go back and I don’t think I’m putting too much emphasis on the “Orlando debate,” he answered. I think that was a very, very damaging moment both in words and in visual at the end of the debate when we were trying to tag Mitt [as a flip-flopper].” But he said there were other lessons from his experience. “The big thing that I learned out of this was you got to start early. You’ve got to start early and you better be prepared for a grinding process, have yourself physically, mentally fit and be ready to go and have a great deal of luck on your side as well.” When we talked he was already thinking about another campaign for president. He said, “You would see a substantially different campaign and even a different candidate from the standpoint of preparation and strength of physical and mental capability.”
Perry had one brief moment of redemption after he quit the race. He was the Republican speaker at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington on March 24, 2012. He poked fun at others but mostly at himself. One line brought down the house. He said, “It was the weakest Republican field in history, and they kicked my butt!” That was the story of Rick Perry’s campaign.
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Matt Rhoades kept a memento of Romney’s battle with Perry in his office in Boston. It was a fever chart on a single sheet of paper. The headline said, “Rick Perry Decline.” It showed Perry’s standing in the polls from the day he announced until late November. Perry started at 13 percent in early August, jumped to 38 percent in one poll by the end of the month. Then, as the attacks from the Romney campaign began, he declined steadily until he was at 4 percent in late November. The center of the chart was highlighted in yellow, and in smaller type was a heading that read, “Perry’s decline: 6 weeks.” The chart noted that Romney’s campaign had issued a dozen press releases attacking on Social Security during September and another seven on immigration in October. The chart underscored what Perry had concluded: He was out of contention long before he ever said “Oops.”
“Rick Perry was a formidable opponent,” Rhoades said later. “Go back and read all the covers that all of you wrote about him as he got into this. He was the only governor that was creating tons of jobs, conservative from Texas, he was a very formidable candidate. And I think people rewrite his decline and rewrite how potent a candidate he was because of some of the things that happened later in the primary process. But if you look at this graph you can find out what happened to Rick Perry and how it was Governor Romney and the campaign we ran that really diminished Rick Perry’s chances of winning, and it was on the issues. . . . So this isn’t a trophy, but this is something. It’s the truth, and this guy was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”
CHAPTER 13
Strange Interlude
The demise of Rick Perry left Romney in an enviable position more than two months before the first votes would be cast in Iowa. Five current or former governors, the pool that so often has provided presidential nominees, were now out of the running: Pawlenty, Perry, Christie, Barbour, and Daniels. Left standing in his way was a collection of candidates who were either unelectable, implausible, or simply underfunded long shots to become the Republican nominee. His real opponent then was the sizable portion of the Republican base that remained tepid in its enthusiasm for the former Massachusetts governor. They were still shopping for an alternative, and the final weeks of 2011 would show they were prepared to grasp at almost any shiny object that caught their eye. That produced high drama and low farce, beginning with the rise and fall of Herman Cain.
Without the Tea Party, Herman Cain might not have become a presidential candidate in 2012. Cain was a businessman, a radio talk show host, and a charismatic speaker. He graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, did graduate work at Purdue University, and went to work in the food industry. He worked for Coca-Cola and later Pillsbury, where he became a regional vice president for its subsidiary Burger King. With his success there, he was named president and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza in 1986 and turned around the failing chain. A decade later he joined the National Restaurant Association as chairman and CEO. Along the way he served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and as an economic adviser to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. In 2004, he waged an unsuccessful Senate campaign in Georgia.
The rise of the Tea Party fueled Cain’s presidential ambitions. His motivational speeches drew enthusiastic audiences. In March 2010, speaking at a forum sponsored by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, he put on his cowboy hat and said, “I have a message for President Obama. Mr. President, in 2012 there could be a new sheriff in town.” Shortly after that appearance, Mark Block, a longtime Wisconsin Republican operative, and fellow strategist Linda Hansen met Cain for dinner in Las Vegas. They asked him how serious he was about running. “I just want to see what kind of buzz I can create,” he told them. A turning point came in the fall when several thousand people showed up in Dayton, Ohio, to hear him. On New Year’s Day 2011, Cain spoke at a restaurant in Milwaukee, where he got another big reception. He returned to his hotel. “He sat in the atrium, called the producer of his radio show,” Block said, “and I’m listening to him and [Cain says], ‘Pete, I’m calling to resign.’ We all were thinking, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’ve made my mind up.’ And he gave his notice, he quit.” A few weeks later, Cain formed a presidential exploratory committee and was off and running.
Few took Cain seriously as a candidate. For all his charisma and his talents as
a motivational speaker, he was woefully unprepared for the presidency. But he pursued an energetic travel schedule, while courting conservative bloggers and Tea Party followers, and soon enough was drawing positive notices from Republican activists. He was a hit at the first Republican debate in South Carolina, though the more he was exposed to questioning, the more it became clear he had plenty of rough edges as a candidate, particularly on foreign policy. The day after he formally announced his candidacy, he appeared on Fox News Sunday. When the interview turned to Middle East issues, host Chris Wallace asked him, “Where do you stand on right of return?” Cain stared blankly. “The right of return?” He paused. “The right of return?” He paused again until Wallace explained the issue of whether Palestinian refugees who were forced out of their land in the 1948 pact that created the state of Israel should have the right to return to Israeli territory as part of a Middle East settlement. Cain should have known this and would have if he had taken time for a briefing before the program. He was not easily embarrassed by what he didn’t know.
By late summer, he had come forward with the signature policy of his campaign, a tax reform plan he called “9-9-9”—a 9 percent individual income tax rate, a 9 percent corporate income tax rate, and a new 9 percent national sales tax. The plan was a huge hit with the party’s grassroots economic conservatives and gave Cain something no other presidential candidate had, an easy-to-understand policy that could fit on a bumper sticker. When Perry stumbled at the debate in Orlando, Cain’s candidacy took off. In the first post–Labor Day poll by the Washington Post and ABC News, Cain had been in sixth place with just 5 percent. Little more than a week after the Orlando debate, he had leaped into a tie for second with Perry at 17. By the first week of November, at 23 percent to Romney’s 25 percent, he was in a statistical tie for the lead.
