When Rick Perry quietly shook up his campaign on the weekend of October 22, bringing in a number of veteran Republican consultants and giving effective control to former Bush administration disaster management chief Joe Allbaugh, one of Allbaugh’s top priorities was to improve Perry’s poor performances at presidential debates. Perry has had the bad luck of being a weak debater in a campaign dominated by high-profile televised debates. At the time of the shakeup, he had just had his best debate, the October 18 face-off in Las Vegas, and Allbaugh’s job was to keep the improvement going.
Now, after Wednesday night’s GOP debate in Michigan, that improvement has not only not continued but Perry has suffered through the worst debate performance in memory. His inability to remember the third of the three federal departments he proposes to eliminate led to 45 excruciating seconds of onstage fumbling that might well end his campaign. The only question left is why it happened.
There are two reasons. The first is that Perry, for all his success as governor of Texas, appears not to have thought long and hard about why he wants to be president and what he would do if he achieved his goal. It’s the kind of intense thinking that goes on long before a campaign actually starts; once the candidate is on the trail, it’s too late for soul-searching, self-evaluation, and in-depth study. It’s hard for a candidate to have a firm grounding in issues and policy if he has not first done that kind of thinking.
The second reason is that since Perry made the decision to run for president — jumping in at the late date of August 13 — he has not done much of the kind of day-in, day-out, speaking-six-times-a-day campaigning that gives candidates the ability to repeat their positions extemporaneously, backward and forward, and sometimes in their sleep.
Look at Perry’s public schedule for the last month. It was plenty busy, but it wasn’t filled with the town halls and question-and-answer sessions that allow candidates to hone their message. On October 11, Perry took part in the Republican debate in Hanover, New Hampshire, which he followed with a brief appearance at a Dartmouth University fraternity house. On October 12, he gave a speech in Indianapolis. On October 14 it was a speech in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania and, later in the day, a fundraiser in Cedar Valley, Iowa.
On October 18, Perry participated in the Republican debate in Las Vegas. On October 22, he attended a barbecue in Wilton, Iowa, went on a pheasant hunt with Iowa Rep. Steve King, and delivered a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering in Des Moines. On October 25, he was at a private fundraising event in Columbia, South Carolina, followed by speech introducing his new tax plan, and then a news conference. On October 26, he attended a fundraiser in St. Pete Beach, Florida. On October 28, he met with editors of the New Hampshire Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, filed his campaign paperwork in Concord, and then, that night, gave a speech at the Cornerstone annual dinner. (That speech is the one that has gone viral on the Internet because of Perry’s overenthusiastic delivery.)
On November 1, Perry attended the National Association of Manufacturers forum in Pella, Iowa, followed by a meet-and-greet at a Des Moines diner and a brief appearance at an education forum. On November 3, he held a town hall with employees at an Iowa seed company in a Des Moines suburb. On November 4, there was the Iowa Republican Party’s Reagan dinner in Des Moines. And then there was Wednesday’s debate. While Perry had private meetings and other activities going on, his schedule simply wasn’t filled with the kind of repetitive stumping that allows a candidate to perfect his presentation on the issues.
Of course, Perry could have had a brain-freeze moment even if he had had more practice on the stump; such moments sometimes happen to people who do a lot of public speaking. But a lot of Perry’s problems go back to the fundamentals of his campaign. He started late, without the years of preparing that other candidates have done, and hasn’t gotten himself into tip-top campaigning shape with a heavy schedule of speaking and taking questions at town halls. That’s the kind of work that allows candidates to give fluid answers to almost any question. And on Wednesday night, Perry paid a high price for not doing it.
