JOHNSTON, IA — At least one Iowan who voted for Rick Perry in the Aug. 13 Ames Straw Poll said seeing the Texas governor speak at a town hall forum wasn’t enough to re-gain his support.
“The thing that is frustrating is the presentation,” said Chad Schmitz, 35, of Granger. “There’s some hesitations in there. He starts drifting off; where’s he going to go with this? And then you combine that with the accent. There’s a little bit of (former President George W.) Bush in there where you’re rooting for him. He’s looking for that last word, you’re rooting for him to finish.”
Perry touted his executive experience and stuck to his main campaign theme of less government regulation during a visit Thursday with about 150 employees here at Pioneer-Hi Bred. The company is the world’s leading developer and supplier of advanced plant genetics, agronomic support and services to farmers.
“The way that you become a strong economic power is not by printing more money or by handing out government money and saying that that’s going to create jobs,” he said. “You do it by lowering the disincentives to those of you in the private sector who are the job creators.”
Perry touted his plan for an optional 20 percent flat income tax. He also asserted that Wall Street and Washington, D.C., have been in bed together too long, and people with too much money invested in Wall Street end up in the nation’s capital.
“One of the reasons that the establishment really doesn’t like me, and really doesn’t like my tax plan, is because they know that I’m going to show up in Washington, D.C., with a sledgehammer, and they’re not going to like it,” Perry said.
“That’s exactly what I think this country needs in Washington, is somebody that’s not afraid to go in and really crush that system that is in place that has cost this country trillions of dollars,” he said.
Schmitz said he thought Perry did “pretty well” Thursday by sticking to his basic point of less government regulation. He also said that as Texas’ governor, Perry could relate to the importance of agriculture.
But Perry’s speech and question-and-answer session with Pioneer employees wasn’t enough to convince Schmitz that Perry is ready for “prime time” and can pull it all together in the two months before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. Schmitz supported former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2008,
“I was leaning toward (Perry) when he announced,” Schmitz said. “He didn’t really shine in the debates at all. I kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt, because Mitt Romney has been running for six years, and (Perry’s) been running for six months. He needs to figure this out real quick if he’s going to have a chance.”
Instead, Schmitz said “if you put a gun to my head,” he’d probably vote for Romney today, despite his questions about whether Romney is a true conservative and can be trusted.
Perry’s visit Thursday came on the heels of former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain accusing the Perry campaign of leaking to the media allegations of sexual harassment against Cain when he ran the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.
“We now know and we’ve been able to trace it back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up in order to discredit me, my campaign, and slow us down,” Cain said Wednesday night at TheTeaParty.net’s Tele-Townhall. “Members of his campaign have direct ties with Politico. The fingerprints are all over the Rick Perry campaign, based on our sources.”
Perry declined to answer any questions from the media at Thursday’s event, despite at least one national reporter asking whether Cain owed him an apology.
Perry topped Iowa and national polls after entering the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Aug. 13. Since then, he’s seen his support decline. He tied for fifth place with former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a poll of 400 likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers released Sunday.
Cain was the top choice with 23 percent, followed by Romney with 22 percent and Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul with 12 percent. Minnesota U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann placed fourth with 8 percent, followed by Gingrich and Perry, who both had 7 percent; former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum with 5 percent and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman with 1 percent. Huntsman decided early not to participate in Iowa.
The poll was taken Oct. 23-26 by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, a public opinion research firm, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
Lynn Campbell covers government and politicis for IowaPolitics.com, which is owned by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.
