New York Times – by MARK LEIBOVICH
“Boys, I am going to bless this meal,” Rick Perry said, ducking his head and folding his hands under his chin. We were sitting at Nate ’n Al, the Jewish Deli in Beverly Hills, and the governor of Texas was looking every bit the regular customer in a tight black polo shirt and designer glasses. His face was nicely tanned; his hair, as ever, was coifed and TV-ready. He had just ordered a corned-beef Reuben (“I worked out this morning”) and a Diet Dr Pepper (“you got those critters?” he asked the waiter). But before diving in, Perry took a moment to appreciate his surroundings. “I’m more Jewish than you think I am,” he told me. “I read the part of the Bible that said the Jews are God’s chosen people.” He boasted that he has been going to Israel since 1992. Then Perry got down to business, thanking the Lord for His many blessings, and asking Him to be with “our men and women who defend our freedom, bring ’em home safe, be with the president, give him wisdom.”
Perry was in town to speak to a group of Jewish Republicans in Los Angeles, promote the economic benefits of Texas, drop in on local Republican candidates, drive a Tesla in Sacramento and “take meetings,” as they say out here, at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford. He also drew boos and hisses at a talk in San Francisco when he compared homosexuality to alcoholism — both resistible urges, he seemed to suggest.
Perry told me that he loves California, vacations in San Diego annually, visits the state about six times a year and might even move here in January when he’s done with his 14-year stint running Texas. That is, if he does not somehow decide to run for president. Perry’s standard answer about 2016 is a simple “I dunno.” But he is spending a great deal of time outside Texas, positioning himself to do so if he decides to or, if not, at least improve his job prospects. He is clearly in a self-improvement phase — doing things like attending the World Economic Forum in Davos and meeting with conservative economists and foreign-policy experts like John Taylor and George Shultz at Hoover. “All of that makes me a better person,” Perry said. “I don’t want to say property.” Property, after all, suggests a piece of merchandise, a dehumanized existence — which is how Hillary Clinton described the insane whirlwind exposure of public life in a speech she delivered in Oregon earlier this year.
At the core of this dehumanizing is the process by which a candidate can instantly become a caricature. Rick Perry understands this better than most. On paper, he remains an attractive candidate for today’s G.O.P. — cowboy, conservative, connected (and occasionally Jewish). But this was also true during the last election cycle, when he entered the race as a fast front-runner in August 2011, only to fizzle into a sad punch line by January. “Pretty much a blur from start to finish,” Perry said, describing his dismal performance. The moment frozen in memory was Perry standing helplessly on a Michigan debate stage as he failed to identify the third of the three federal departments he said he would eliminate as president. After naming the Department of Commerce and the Department of Education, he struggled for 45 halting seconds before giving up and saying, “Oops.” (It was the Department of Energy.)
Perry’s next campaign, if he pursues one, would be as much about the willingness of the electorate to grant second chances as anything he himself would bring. Republican voters have been generous to second-timers in the past, Perry pointed out to me. Mitt Romney, Bob Dole, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, among others, all ran for president and lost before securing their party’s nomination. “Americans don’t spend all their time looking backward,” Perry said. They do, however, spend a lot of time watching television and assorted other screens, which is where the oops fiasco will live in viral perpetuity if he runs again. Even if everyone over 35 has had that sort of blanking moment, Perry’s timing was awful. “Ron Paul walked up and said: ‘I’ve done that before. But I’ve never done it in front of four million people,’ ” Perry told me.
Perry has been self-deprecating about the episode from the outset. “I’m glad I had my boots on tonight, because I sure stepped in it out there,” he said in the post-debate spin room that night. He read an oops-themed Top 10 list on Letterman the next night. At a dinner speech in Washington after the campaign ended, Perry summarized his experience thus: “Here’s the hardest part for me: the weakest Republican field in history — and they kicked my butt.” Even so, Perry is a figure of substantial ego and pride, and it clearly bothers him to be trapped in such a humiliating “Groundhog Day.”
In person, Perry is commanding and confident and hardly comes off as a YouTube buffoon. He is playfully profane at times and careening in conversation. He apologizes for interrupting himself with asides and tangents (“sorry to get all A.D.D. on you again”). When I asked him why he likes California, Perry told me a stemwinder about how he met and became close friends with Marcus Luttrell, the retired Navy SEAL and co-author of “Lone Survivor”; he then yammered on for about 12 minutes before saying, “Make a long story short,” and explaining that Luttrell’s struggle to receive proper medical care from the V.A. underscored the need for new methods of treating PTSD and traumatic brain injuries (much of that research is being pioneered in Texas, he noted). “Somewhere in New York Magazine, that story needs to be told,” Perry said. I told him that I worked at The New York Times Magazine. “I meant New York Times Magazine,” Perry said sheepishly. Oops.
One thing he has learned, the hard way, is that running for president requires an inhuman level of mental and physical stamina. Perry said he lacked both last time. The scrutiny is brutal and getting worse with every election cycle. “I won’t tell you the company, but I had some people come into the office recently,” Perry told me. To his chagrin, he learned later that the visit had been videotaped. “Every meeting that you go to, you have to operate on the assumption that it’s being recorded,” he said.
It is difficult to gauge exactly how much stomach Perry would have for another presidential campaign. Keeping his options open — at least publicly — can only enhance his stature as a candidate for one of those, say, very well paying executive, consulting or board positions that would allow him to visit some very nice places in California and maybe even relocate there. “When I step out of my current job,” Perry said, “and I have 15 or 20 productive years left in my body, I want to be able to have as in-depth an understanding about this world as possible.”
As a general rule, those sweet gigs that former governors (and senators and congressmen) get are considerably easier than being a future president — or, more likely, a future former losing presidential candidate. They tend to be much better paying, less demanding and less debasing. And if you are Rick Perry, private citizen, you would be much less likely than Candidate Perry to endure the inevitable barrage of oops-themed humor. Does he really need this? Perry said he was not sure, but for what it’s worth, he would still eliminate some federal departments if he becomes president. “Yes, more than three,” he told me to conclude our lunch, setting an even higher bar for himself going forward.