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Byline: JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
© 2009 New York Times News Service
HOUSTON – Gov. Rick Perry looks as if he stepped out of a Marlboro billboard: square-jawed, weathered face, a shock of black hair, steely eyes. He even says "howdy" when he enters the room. His public persona is so folksy that many opponents have underestimated his political skills.
But Perry, a conservative ideologue whose recent flourishes include expressing sympathy for secessionists and supporting a failed effort to add a "choose life" logo to license plates, has announced that he is running for an unprecedented third term.
The battle in the Texas Republican Party over whether he deserves another four years mirrors the larger conflict between the Republicans’ moderate and conservative wings on the national level, strategists say.
Perry’s opponent is U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. On most issues, Hutchison is also a steady conservative, but her tone is more moderate, her positions on social issues are more nuanced, her votes on government spending more pragmatic.
Hutchison will open her 2010 campaign with a tour of the state next week. She cuts a patrician figure on the hustings, a slender woman with a mellifluous voice and an easy smile. Her main message is that the party cannot stay in power unless it widens its appeal.
"I do not want a governor who is going to narrow our base, make it dwindle," Hutchison said this week. "That is what has happened at the national level, and that is not going to happen in Texas."
Hutchison argues that Perry’s courtship of conservatives has alienated moderates, independents and minorities. The party lost all the state’s major metropolitan counties in the 2008 presidential election, and its majority in the Texas House has shrunk to a single seat.
Perry enjoys support from evangelical leaders and the voters who usually turn out heavily in primaries: members of a nti-tax groups, religious conservatives, creationists, foes of abortion and opponents of big government.
Hutchison hopes to draw more moderates and independents to the primary. She has painted Perry as a divisive party leader more interested in partisan politics than in solving Texas’ problems. "People want someone who has a vision for the future," she said, "and we are not seeing new ideas."
Perry is betting he can cast Hutchison as a Washington insider with questionable
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