Texas Gov. Rick Perry may have just entered the presidential race, but there is already something familiar about the man — and it’s not necessarily something that’s going to help him.
Perry is already being compared with the last Texas governor to ascend to the White House, George W. Bush. Besides being Republicans and Texas governors, the two men share a military veteran’s status, an anti-elitist viewpoint and a cowboy swagger. Perry, in fact, was Bush’s lieutenant governor and rose to the governor’s office when Bush made his first presidential bid in 1999.
“At first blush, especially if you are not from Texas, they certainly sound a lot alike and look alike,” said Michael Franc, vice president of government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “In reality, they couldn’t be more different.”
Franc cited candidate Bush’s landmark campaign proposal in 1999, later named “No Child Left Behind,” which imposed federal educational standards on states. Perry, who is hanging his campaign on the promise of a smaller government and fewer regulatory burdens across the board, would never support such a program, he said.
At the same time, both men served in the military, both were wildly popular as governors of the Lone Star State and most notably, each carries that indelible Texas drawl that leaves “g’s” hangin’ in the wind. Perry and Bush also talk freely about their religious faith, though Perry is far more reluctant than Bush to discuss conservative social issues like abortion and gay rights, according to longtime Texas GOP consultant Royal Masset.
But Perry clearly sees no advantage in linking himself to Bush, who left office with record low approval ratings. Indeed, Perry said, any similarities to his former boss are only skin-deep. If anything, Perry has been portraying himself as the true Texan, a man raised on a cotton farm, and Bush, a Connecticut blueblood transplanted to Texas, as something less than authentic.
“You know, they’re not all carbon copies in Texas,” Perry said. “I tell people — I say one of the quick ways you can tell the difference is that he’s a Yale graduate; I’m a Texas A&M graduate.”
It was just one example of how Perry is trying to distinguish himself from an unpopular president without appearing to be running from his past. The latter could be politically damaging, as it was for Mitt Romney, the front-runner who has been backpedaling on health care reforms he instituted as governor of Massachusetts.
Although Bush’s ratings have climbed in recent months — up to 50 percent, according to an Associated Press poll — the former commander in chief scored the lowest final approval rating of any outgoing U.S. president when he was in office.
“When you ask people about who is more to blame for the economy, people say Bush is more to blame than Obama,” said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute. That’s why “the Democrats are going to want to try to tie [Perry and Bush] as closely together as much as they possibly can,” she added.
But voters won’t be fooled, according to former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon.
“Rick Perry will rise or fall on his vision for the country,” he said, “not because he is from Texas or reminds people of George Bush.”
