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She liked Perry. “He’s the most charming person you ever met. The first time I ever met him, I was really stricken, he has this—just this political gift that I’ve kind of heard about and never really seen up close, that everybody says Bill Clinton had. It’s the ability to connect with people immediately, and he does that very, very well. He’s warm and affectionate and he’ll work the room and hug everybody. He’s very good at finding things to connect with people on, if it’s sports or dogs or hunting.”

Perry, she said, liked to keep things at the “fluff/friendly level.” But that approach did not go over so well with some big donors, who expected answers on “big questions” and who felt entitled to spend time with the candidate, quizzing him.

In September, three days before the Orlando debate, the fundraiser took Perry to meet with some big donors in Florida. “They came prepared,” she recalled. “They were savvy, they were smart, and so they would come with lists of questions for him, and that surprised him.” She imitated Perry’s twangy voice asking, with genuine puzzlement, “Why do they need to know my position on global warming? Don’t they just like me?” She added, “Because I think everyone in Texas just likes him.”

The “worst example,” she said, was with Al Hoffman, a North Palm Beach businessman who was ambassador to Portugal in the George W. Bush administration. Twice serving as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, Hoffman had the clout and connections to raise some $5 million for the Perry campaign, and his endorsement was worth even more as a signal to other big donors and fundraisers. “There could not be a bigger get,” said the fundraiser. Hoffman had “stayed on the sidelines and has not been crazy about Perry,” she said, but she persuaded him to meet with the candidate on his swing through Florida for the Orlando debate.

Hoffman came to a meeting with Perry brandishing a four-page list of sixteen questions, expecting a respectful audience and response. “[Hoffman’s] absolutely worth all the time in the world,” said the fundraiser. “Other candidates have said, Hey, come on the plane with me for a week. Let’s really spend time together.”

Perry chafed at even spending an hour with Hoffman. “I think he was tired and just feeling like, I have been in the race a month and I’m really ahead in the polls, and why are these people still demanding answers of me that I don’t have yet?” said the fundraiser.

Usually candidates go to Ambassador Hoffman at his Palm Beach mansion, so the fundraiser was a little embarrassed to insist that the ambassador come meet Perry in a conference room at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach. (It wasn’t even a full conference room, she recalled, but “some little corner of it.”) She maneuvered to get more face time between Perry and Hoffman, making Perry twenty minutes late for a photo op. Perry just seemed peeved. “Sixteen questions?” Perry asked. “Can you believe the nerve? Can’t he go read about my positions on these things?” he said to Dave Carney, who seemed equally put out to have to kowtow to Hoffman.

At the meeting, Hoffman “kind of dropped the idea that, Well, sometimes I travel with the candidate. He didn’t ask, but he kind of let him know that he usually gets more than a thirty-minute meeting at the convention center,” said the fundraiser.

Later, on the plane flying—without Hoffman—from Palm Beach to Orlando, Perry turned to Carney and said, with a laugh, “He wants to come on the plane with us and talk. I don’t think that’s going to be happening.” Carney chuckled and said, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” By this time, the frustrated fundraiser was actually agreeing, because, as she put it, “the more time Ambassador Hoffman could have spent with Perry, the worse he would have come off.” Hoffman stayed neutral.

* * *

Courtship is the nature of politics. Voters, opinion makers, and donors must be wooed. Big donors like Al Hoffman like it that way. “Yeah, you’re always young and beautiful if you can raise the money,