Posted on 08/05/2011 3:05:22 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
If Texas Gov. Rick Perry ultimately decides to run for president, it would shake up the Republican race, directly threatening Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty and the other candidates vying to be the leading alternative to frontrunner Mitt Romney.
But it could also make things tricky for another powerful Texan — Karl Rove.
Rove, who served as George W. Bush’s political strategist in Texas on his way to becoming the GOP’s best known political operative, had a falling out with Perry and his staff when Bush was governor in the 1990’s that has become the stuff of Lone Star lore.
With no signs the two have patched things up — and with some suggestion that Rove, or at least his team, is tilting toward Romney — speculating how their relationship would play out if Perry becomes a candidate has become something of a fixation among Perry supporters and other Republicans in Texas and Washington.
Their interest is not just in the alliances and rifts stemming from a personal feud, but in the possible consequences for one of Texas’s major exports to national politics — money.
As the intellectual spark behind a network of outside groups including American Crossroads and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (or Crossroads GPS, for short), Rove is the unofficial leader of a shadow Republican Party that intends to raise tens of millions of dollars on ads to defeat President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in 2012. But Rove’s network relies to a great extent on a small group of wealthy Texans, including some who have been major donors to Perry.
So, this thinking goes, what happens if Perry becomes a candidate, or even the party’s presidential nominee, and those donors feel compelled — or coaxed by Perry allies — to stop giving to Rove-linked groups and instead to direct their giving to a handful of new overtly pro-Perry groups? Where does that leave the operative once praised by Bush as “the architect” of his reelection victory? And where does that leave the Crossroads groups, which are in the midst of a two-month $20 million ad campaign and are being relied on by Republicans to play such a crucial role next year?
One person who has sent checks to both American Crossroads and Perry’s campaigns predicted that if Perry wins the nomination, his donors will cut off the spigot to Rove.
“Perry winning would be a deathblow for Rove,” said this person, who did not want to be identified talking about political contribution strategies.
Campaign filings show that if even a handful of big Texas donors feel the same way, it could have a major impact. Of the $35 million in reported contributions raised by American Crossroads (Crossroads GPS does not disclose donations), about half (more than $17 million) has come from Texas,according to an analysis of filings with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.
And 11 of the biggest Texas donors to American Crossroads, a so-called super PAC, have also given Perry $4.7 million since 2001, the earliest year for which Texas state campaign filings are electronically accessible.
Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, for example, who ranks as the biggest known donor to American Crossroads at $7.5 million, has also given at least $3.3 million to Rick Perry (no relation) over the years.
And, while associates of Rove and Perry did not deny the feud persists, most downplayed the anonymous donor’s apocalyptic prediction.
“If Perry became the nominee, I suspect that Rove would do whatever he could to help him get elected,” said Jim Arnold, who ran Perry’s campaign for lieutenant governor in 1998, when the tensions between Rove and Perry’s allies first surfaced. “I think it would be one of those things where they would hold their noses and help each other.”
Rove declined to comment, but someone close to him said he has been “very careful about” maintaining his neutrality in the 2012 primaries, and said Crossroads fundraising wouldn’t be significantly affected by either Perry’s possible entry into the race, or by the fact that a top Crossroads official had formed a super PAC to boost Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and establishment favorite.
“Maybe it could hurt a little bit in Texas, but I don’t think it will have much impact overall,” said the Rove associate.
Other close observers of Rove and Perry over the years are not so sanguine.
“The potential is great that Karl Rove will have some desire to undermine Rick Perry’s presidential bid because Perry is not Karl’s kind of candidate,” said R.G. Ratcliffe, a Texas reporter writing a book on Perry.
And, he added, “If Perry wins and he has the sense that Rove was somehow undermining him in the process, then there could be payback.”
Like most things in Texas politics, the relationship between Rove and Perry is complex. Rove was instrumental in launching Perry’s political career, convincing him to become a Republican after he was elected to the state Legislature as a Democrat, then advising his successful campaign as a Republican for agriculture commissioner.
In 1998, however, when Bush was running for reelection as governor and Perry was running for lieutenant governor, the two campaigns clashed over whether Perry should go negative against his opponent. Rove argued against it, insisting that Bush campaign polling showed Perry comfortably in the lead.
But Perry’s pollster Mike Baselice forecast a much closer result, and the feeling in Perry’s camp was that Rove’s real motivation was concern that negative ads would cut into Bush’s margin of victory, particularly among Hispanic voters, and undermine his efforts to build momentum for Bush’s planned 2000 presidential campaign.
After one particularly contentious phone call, an infuriated Baselice punched a hole in a wall in Arnold’s office. Perry’s campaign eventually went up with negative ads, and squeaked out a narrow victory. Rove offered a “most memorable” election night apology, Baselice told the Houston Chronicle in 2006.
But that did little to end the animosity between the camps.
In 2007, Perry was captured on video at an Iowa event for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign, declaring “George Bush was never a fiscal conservative — never was.”
Soon thereafter, Rove and other Bush allies began aligning themselves behind Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a longtime Bush family ally, in challenging Perry in last year’s Texas gubernatorial primary. It was in the context of that bitter race that Carney in a 2009 interview with The New York Times Magazine disparaged the Bush crew — and Rove specifically — as “country-club Republicans” and “not conservatives.”
In an email exchange with POLITICO last month, Carney conceded “Karl and I disagreed about some issues in the 1998 race,” but said “the Rove-Perry deal is simply a staff issue and it’s become a huge overblown almost urban myth. Much to do about nothing, other then it comes up with media folks from time to time.”
But it wasn’t just the media that paid attention when it was reported in June that Carl Forti, the political director for the Crossroads groups — a man Rove once described as “one of the smartest people in politics you’ve never heard of” — had formed a pro-Romney super PAC called Restore Our Future, along with one of Crossroads’s go-to ad-makers, Larry McCarthy, and the top in-house campaign lawyer from Romney’s 2008 campaign, Charlie Spies.
The super PAC raised an impressive $12.2 million in the first half of the year from a group of major donors who overlapped substantially with American Crossroads’s disclosed donors, including Bob Perry, who contributed $500,000.
While Crossroads officials have stressed that their groups will not get involved in the 2012 presidential election until after the GOP nomination is decided, Perry backers saw the hand of Rove in Restore Our Honor, and detected what they regarded as bias towards Romney and against Perry in a couple of Rove’s appearances on Fox News Channel, where Rove is a paid commentator.
Within weeks after Restore Our Future’s pro-Romney mission was revealed, no fewer than five super PACs had registered with the FEC with the goal of raising money from Perry supporters to boost a prospective presidential campaign.
“If the folks who came out of Crossroads with the Romney super PAC attack Perry in an unfair way, that, I think, could have some repercussions,” said Bob Schuman, the California strategist running one of the super PACs, Americans for Rick Perry, which already has raised $400,000, including $100,000 from Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, a wealthy Perry backer who contributed $2 million to American Crossroads last year.
But Carney brushed off a suggestion that Perry’s donors might steer away from the Crossroads groups if Perry entered the race.
“Our donors have given to lots of national groups who have been fighting the good fight and helping to restore fiscal sanity in D.C. and elsewhere,” he wrote, asserting “I don’t think 10 people care about something that happened 12 years ago.”
Meanwhile, Perry has stepped up his outreach to big donors with the resources to fund independent expenditure efforts, attending dinners with top national donors in Austin, and a June retreat in Aspen, Colo., with donors to the Republican Governors Association, which he chairs. He also scheduled an Aug. 9 fundraiser for his Texas campaign committee for which he is soliciting $100,000 contributions — reportedly his biggest ask ever. Plus, he paid a surprise visit late last month to the annual summer donor conference hosted by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch near Vail, Colo.
That appearance also had Republicans talking, since the Kochs’s network has emerged as a more libertarian-leaning ideological counterweight to the Crossroads groups conceived by Rove and fellow Bush-era GOP operative Ed Gillespie before the 2010 midterm elections.
For his part, Mike Duncan , the former Republican Party chief who is president of the Crossroads groups, has taken pains to emphasize that Forti’s association with Romney does not in any way reflect on the neutrality of his groups. “Crossroads and Crossroads GPS will not be involved in the Republican presidential primary,” Duncan told reporters at a June breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor.
As for Forti, Duncan said “Carl is a contract employee with American Crossroads. He has other clients. We knew that he had other clients. But clearly, none of us are gonna be involved personally in the presidential campaign.”
-- Story in today’s Austin American-Statesman by R.G. Ratcliffe : Plenty of ties between Team Perry and Response, super PAC
Well, then, maybe Perry's not so bad after all.
No way Rove does anything but help defeat Obama.
As far as campaign money, if I had to choose between giving to Rove to spend or Perry to spend, I’d give it to Rove - unless I see some better strategists appear on the Perry side.
You can argue Perry’s and Rove’s (and Bush’s) conservative credentials, but for planning and executing winning campaigns, my money’s on Rove.
Was it on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in her 2009 GOP primary challenge against Gov. Perry that Rove was involved in?
No, it was almost a Hobson’s choice. Perry has been blessed with opposition worse than him.
But, in my memory, I don’t think we have a better campaign strategist than Rove.
hoefully, no cronies will survive primaries
Remember,it was Bush,McCain AND Rove who gave us Obama.
I was a Steve Forbes supporter myself (though I supported the GOP nominee with gusto after Bush won).
Sorry, but "Tokyo Rove" was/is a RINO in addition to being not the brightest bulb in the pack in his PR strategery of "Bush the RINO".
Lee Atwater, OTOH, was a brilliant strategist - heck even Dick Ozero's handlers were better than Tokyo Rove.
I liked Forbes, and thought Bush would be better on federalism, domestic spending.
I worry that Perry is not as solid and tough as Bush (for all his policy failings). And it will still take a tough smart campaign to beat Obama.
2012 may be our last chance (at least in my lifetime), so I’ll be a broken glass GOP supporter, no matter who it is. I really pray it’s someone good.
IMHO, Atwater was not a grand strategist. His talent was in converting middle voters - and in the media part. That’s important, but only one piece of the puzzle.
Rove doesn’t have the brilliance of Atwater, but he has the big picture, knows darn near every precinct in the nation as well as its history, and knows how to put all the pieces together - given a good candidate.
Rove made sure Lisa Murkowski beat Joe Miller in Alaska. Now Murkowski is siding with the Democrats on many issues, including the recent debt ceiling battle.
Why in the world would Rove care if Perry had a run-in with Bush? That kind of loyalty would be counter-productive and just plain stupid for the kind of work he does. There’s too much at stake to let such a minor thing get in the way.
I think Rove is the one actually pushing Perry. He knows Romney is not palatable to the Tea Party, and he surely doesn’t want a real Tea Party candidate to be nominated, so he will back Perry as the compromise.
Rick Perry is an opportunist, a fake Tea Party supporter, and a fake candidate in general.
He is George Bush warmed over who will move to the fiscal center if he wins the nomination, and won’t push hard for Tea Party initiatives if he wins the election. It will be politics as usual.
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Bottom line - Tokyo Rove is a big govt RINO which is indicative of a less than stellar intellect.
The RIN twins, TR+Bush43, helped to pave the way for Comrade Dick Ozero.
Tokyo Rove should NEVER be defended...unless you’re a big govt RINO like him.
The Tea Party does not equal the Republican Party. The Tea Party is not a branch of the Republican Party. The Tea Party should not support any candidate who is not deeply committed to their fiscal goals.
I don't think Mitt Romney or Rich Perry are committed to Tea Party goals. They are typical slick politicians who will tell us what we want to hear, but govern as Establishment Republicans, who will refuse to take political risks if they are elected. They will be in that office primarily to support the special interests of Karl Rove and the Republican Party.
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I think you are ignorant.
I second that.
Where has Rove been lately? For a while, he was on Fox daily. Now, he hasn’t been there for some time.
We need some NICE PITBULLS and Rove comes up short on both!
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