On the flat patch of the Texas Plains where Rick Perry grew up, the years are measured in harvests and rainfall. Rustic is putting too high a gloss on it. Until he was 7 years old, there was no indoor plumbing and the family used an outhouse. Bathing consisted of filling a galvanized metal tub on the screened-in back porch. When the wind blew, the dry dust from the fields seeped through the cracks in the planks and settled, much to his mother's dismay, on the couch and chairs. "It was a really old house. But it was home," Perry...