Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [18]
A former campaign aide recalled: “Look, the guy is in extreme back pain all the time, and everybody could see that [at the disastrous debate in Orlando]. It’s a real physical problem for him.” For photo opportunities at fundraisers, aides were allowed to schedule just fifty “clicks” (individual photos with donors), rather than the seventy-five to a hundred that they would have preferred, “so that he doesn’t have to stand for more than thirty minutes,” the former aide recalled. “Because it’s standing still that hurts. If you watch him make a speech, he moves around a lot—he’s like an evangelical preacher, and part of that is because of his back. It’s more comfortable to be moving, but if you have to stand still and upright, it hurts like hell after about thirty minutes.” Most debates ran ninety minutes, posing a constant challenge of endurance as well as of oratory.
“I could even see that at the end of the photo ops. [He was saying,] Get these people in and out of here quickly, like I’ve got to move. I just think he was in excruciating pain having to stand for more than thirty minutes,” recalled the aide.
Perry was also suffering from insomnia. The fundraiser thought he should be taking sleeping pills, but was told he was not. (Perry later publicly admitted he had been tired, but Carney denied to us that the governor was having back trouble.)
The night after the debate, the fundraiser was sitting at the bar in the Peabody Hotel, nursing her wounds, when Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, approached. “Rough night last night?” asked Scott. The fundraiser tried to rally by saying that “Perry knocked it out of the park at CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference] today, so hopefully that helped a little bit.” Governor Scott just shook his head and said, “He lost a lot of votes last night. He lost a lot of support here last night.” The next day, Perry was surprised in the straw poll, losing badly to Herman Cain. It was the beginning of Cain’s unexpected surge in the national poll.
A presidential candidate has to make hundreds, if not thousands, of calls to potential donors. Less than two months into his campaign, Perry had made a total of twenty calls. “I think the governor was talked into running,” the fundraiser told us. “And I think he was also promised he wouldn’t have to work all that hard to get it.” In early October, she left the campaign “by mutual agreement.” Her biggest regret—and vexation—was, as she put it, “just spending lots of time with him and traveling with him and not seeing a real burning desire that I’ve seen with every other candidate I ever worked with.”
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Perry’s frequent gaffes led to gallows humor around his campaign. One night, when we asked one adviser how his day had been, he replied slyly, “We didn’t have anything to correct by 3 P.M.” The Perry campaign now operates out of a former steam laundry at Eighth and Congress Streets, near the capitol in downtown Austin. Carney and the campaign manager, Rob Johnson, share space in what used to be a bank vault, within the same building. The door, combination lock and all, is still there, but it stays open because no one knows the combination. Mark Miner, the national press secretary, penned a sign over the door that says, “PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BEARS.” The office is decorated by a sword and golf clubs, and all eight of the chairs around the low conference table are mismatches. Poking fun at themselves, the operatives have left the big dry-erase board empty except for the words “Secret Plan,” then an arrow to “JOBS.”
Within weeks of Perry’s announcement, his small headquarters staff was distressed