The inconvenient political truth seems to be the perfect answer to some kind of trick question: Texas Gov. Rick Perry was his state's 1988 campaign chairman for then U.S. Senator Al Gore's first run at the presidency.
The way their partnership has dissolved and diverged in the last three decades speaks eloquently to the way American politics has been reshaped in the interim. Gore has sailed left, while Perry's political odyssey has seen him tack in the other direction - and into the opposing party. The two men opted for different paths across a dynamic, changing political landscape and, while one man fell short of the White House, the other now contemplates the same prize. (See the top 10 debate flubs.)
The tale begins in 1984, four years before Perry took the helm of Gore's Texas campaign, when Gore, then 36, a congressional wunderkind from Tennessee, followed in his father's footsteps by winning a US Senate seat. That same year, Perry, who was 34 that year and hailed from much humbler roots as the son of a Texas Rolling Plains cotton farmer, won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Both young men were handsome sons of the south and proudly touted their philosophical bearings in the regionally dominant, conservative wing of the Democratic Party.
In 1988, seizing on the opportunity afforded by a lineup of southern primaries on Super Tuesday, Gore announced his bid for the Democratic nomination for President. Ronald Reagan's second term was drawing to a close and Republicans were set to nominate the next in line, then Vice President George H.W. Bush. The Democratic field was wide open, with a raft of candidates to the left of Gore, dubbed the "Southern centrist" by the press. The young senator, described by the New York Times as "solidly built, dark and indisputably handsome," lined up a list of conservative Democratic big name supporters including U.S. Senators Howard Heflin of Alabama, Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Bennett Johnson of Louisiana, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Governors Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Buddy Roemer of Louisiana. (Roemer, like Perry, is another Democrat who went over to to the GOP in 1991 and is now also reportedly considering a Republican presidential run.)
Gore shared the views of his fellow "southern centrists" - he was opposed to the federal funding of abortion, supported a moment of silence in schools for prayer, approved funding the Nicaraguan Contras, and was against the ban on the interstate sale of handguns. It was a platform a conservative West Texas Democrat like State Representative Perry could stand on, and he signed up to chair the senator's Texas campaign. (See "Rick Perry and the Echoes of George W. Bush.")
Several state Democratic party leaders, generally more liberal, cast their lots with two of the other candidates, Congressmen Dick Gephardt and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. But Gore worked the Texas legislative ranks for support, winning the backing of Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis and Lieut. Gov. Bill Hobby. Lewis was especially important to appointing legislators to vital positions on fiscal committees. And so, it was not surprising that 27 members of the Texas legislature, including Perry, a young two term legislator, joined the duo in their support for Gore.
For Perry, picking Gore, an ambitious young senator with a reputation as a hip "Atari Democrat" fond of hi-tech innovation and new styles of communication, was a bold move. He could have chosen to stay on the sidelines and few would have noticed his lack of an endoresement in the race. But it was consistent with Perry's penchant for hitching his wagon to whoever or whatever would move him up the political track, in this case, the statehouse leadership of Hobby and Lewis. However, Perry's Texas elders picked the wrong horse. On Super Tuesday, March 8, Gore came in third behind Dukakis and Jesse Jackson in Texas.
A decade later, Perry said the 1988 presidential primary election helped push him to his party switch. In the fall of 1988, he voted for the Republican Vice President Bush over his party's nominee, Dukakis. "I came to my senses," he told the Austin American-Statesman in 1998. Perry's efforts for Gore left few public footprints and contemporaries on both sides of the aisle have few memories of the alliance. A longtime Hobby staffer suggested it was likely Perry's co-chair title in Gore's 1988 Texas campaign was little more than an honorific, not a recognition of any organizational responsibility. His role was limited to a single appearance, Perry told the San Antonio Express-News in 2001, adding he had served at the request of Speaker Lewis. But it was a fact of his political biography that would be waved in his face in the 2010 Republican gubernatorial primary race by Tea Party candidate Deborah Medina and U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and likely will be raised again if he chooses to run for the G.O.P. presidential nomination. Perry has never denied the association, but has treated it as a road to Damascus moment. "On the surface, Al Gore appeared to be the more conservative of the candidates," said Perry told the Express-News, adding: "Fortunately, we found out who the real Al Gore was, and I was long on the side of the angels by then."
See "Al Gore Attacks President Obama for Failing to Do Al Gore?s Job."
Republicans were an exotic breed when Perry grew up in small town Texas. While national candidates like President Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed Texas support on election day, Texas Republicans had seen their ranks grow very slowly in the decades after World War II. A young Perry had little interaction with the urban Republican salons in Dallas and Houston where the Bush family's power base was centered. And while most of Perry's neighbors and constituents voted Republican at the top of the ticket, West Texans still favored conservative Democrats down ballot.
It is unlikely today's Al Gore would consider voting for the 1988 Al Gore, and certainly Perry has seen fit to distance himself from Gore 2.0. "I've heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I'm starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide," Perry said in 2007, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Two years later, Perry was asked about their diverging paths at a Dallas builders' meeting. "Did you get religion? Did he get religion? What has happened since then?" a member of the audience asked. "I certainly got religion," Perry said, according to the Dallas Morning News. "I think he's gone to hell." (See pictures of Al Gore's American life.)
Gore's loss in the 1988 campaign was another sign southern Democrats were straddling an abyss. The longtime simmering division between liberal and conservative Texas Democrats had reached a boiling point in 1984 as both parties battled to replace the retiring U.S. Senator John Tower, a Texas GOP pioneer. The same year that Perry entered the political arena a "referendum for the soul of the party" in Texas, according to longtime political observer Paul Burka, senior executive editor of Texas Monthly. Conservative Democratic Congressman Kent Hance (he had beaten a young George W. Bush in 1978) was battling liberal Democratic State Senator Lloyd Doggett for the Democratic senate nomination. The winner would take on the Republican nominee, Congressman Phil Gramm, himself a convert from the Democratic Party. Doggett beat Hance, but lost to Gramm in the fall. In a prescient post-election analysis, Burka wrote in December, 1984: "In the long run, ambitious young conservatives in Lubbock and Amarillo and Corpus Christi and Odessa and across Texas will be considering whether their future lies in the Democratic Party."
He might well have added ambitious young conservatives from Paint Creek in Haskell County, Texas, fresh to the game like Rick Perry. After losing to Doggett, Congressman Hance switched parties in 1985, followed by a steady trickle of local and statehouse Democrats. But West Texas powerhouses like Democratic Congressman Charlie Stenholm and his fellow Southern Democrats, dubbed boll weevils, hung on. (Boll weevil, a beetle that attacks cotton crops, was a derisive name now replaced by the more appealing "blue dog" label.) Perry's neighbors liked having a powerful voice like Congressman Stenholm in Washington on agricultural issues and the young state representative, like his congressional counterparts, was not so fast to switch. Even when he did, he did not burn all his bridges. In 2006, when former Texas Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerrero, a longtime Democratic supporter of Gov. Ann Richards, endorsed Perry, she recalled their freshmen days in the statehouse and praised his loyalty. (See "Does Rick Perry Have a Jobs Problem?")
Finally, in 1989, Perry was persuaded by legendary political operative Karl Rove and others to switch to the GOP. The increasing liberal Democratic hold on nominations at the top of the Texas ticket precluded Perry's further advancement in the party. Rove proposed Perry run for agriculture commissioner against the firebrand liberal Democratic incumbent Jim Hightower, journalist and champion of the progressive movement in Texas. (Hightower famously once said there was nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.) Given Perry's Texas A&M college past, his cotton farming roots and his good looks, captured in a relaxed campaign portrait showing the ruggedly handsome Aggie in jeans and boots, the West Texas native was a natural. He won statewide office along with another Rove candidate, Kay Bailey Hutchison who became State Treasurer. She hailed from the old urban Republican ranks; Perry was a parvenu out of the west.
The duo would soon enough become bitter rivals. But at that moment, they were the crack in the dam. While Hutchison took a US Senate seat, Perry ascended to the powerful lieutenant governor's spot in 1998, a vital step in the presidential candidacy of Texas Governor George W. Bush, as Rove recalled in his memoirs Courage and Consequence. Perry would protect Bush's flank back home from any charges that the governor's ambitions would leave Texas in Democratic hands - unforgivable after the long GOP struggle to power. Once again, Perry hitched his wagon to a star, and in campaign literature described himself and Bush as "philosophical soul mates." And so, in 2000, the state was in solid Republican hands as Bush rode off to to take the presidency - after perhaps the most controversial vote in U.S. history and at the expense of Perry's sometime partner, Al Gore.
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