A bill to ban “double dipping” by state elected officials, a practice brought to light during Gov. Rick Perry’s failed run for president, has died in committee for lack of support, a top Republican lawmaker said Monday evening.
State Rep. Bill Callegari, R-Houston, chairman of the House Pensions Committee, said lawmakers on the panel did not consider the legislation a priority and wanted to focus on more important bills.
“We didn’t have enough support for it,†Callegari said. “There just wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for it.â€
In late 2011 Perry revealed on federal disclosure forms that he had taken advantage of an unusually generous perk reserved exclusively for longtime state elected officials. It has allowed him to draw both his $150,000 a year state salary and a $92,000 annual pension. The Democratic Lone Star Project, citing a national study of governors’ salaries, said the combined income makes Perry the highest-paid governor in the country.Â
State Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, filed a bill at the beginning of the session to end the practice. House Bill 416Â would not apply retroactively to Perry but would prevent future lawmakers or statewide elected officials from collecting a state salary and pension without ever leaving office.
State officials in the “elected class” who meet the age and service requirements of a state employee can begin collecting a pension, based on their highest salary over a 36-month period. Then they can retire again when they leave office in the “elected class,” which for legislators is based on the salary of a state district judge, or $125,000. They don’t have to disclose the pension income on state ethics disclosures, and the Employees Retirement System considers the information strictly confidential. (Perry was required to release his pension income by the Federal Election Commission).
Turner got a public hearing on the bill, but it effectively died Monday at midnight, the deadline for committees to pass House bills on to the full body for consideration.
Turner said he is disappointed but won’t give up. He’s looking for opportunities to attach the double-dipping ban as an amendment to other bills.
“Clearly a lot of people on both sides of the aisle agree this is a reform that needs to be made,” Turner said. “Politicians shouldn’t be allowed to double dip a pension and a salary at the same time, while they’re still on the job.â€
“I walked with [CBS reporter] Rebecca Kaplan back to our floor, and we both decided this was the most disastrous and yet most entertaining campaign we would probably ever cover. It would never be this good again. From treasonous Ben Bernanke to all those heartless immigrant haters, through the oops moment, the voting-age gaffe, Sonia Monteyamor and Joe Arapahoe, we had been there to chronicle it. We killed it, man!”
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — It’s 3:46 a.m., and I’m in my room at the Sheraton West Des Moines. I would probably be hammered if we hadn’t run out of booze, because that’s the kind of night it’s been.
The governor announced a few hours ago that he is canceling his upcoming South Carolina trip and going home to Texas for some “prayer and reflection†to see if there’s a “path forward†after his ass-kicking tonight in the Iowa caucuses. Everybody knows what that means. No more debates! Oh please, God.
Iowans don’t start voting until evening at these caucuses, which are like hundreds of little popularity contests held at gyms and churches across the state. So we first had to endure an exhausting five public events, beginning with Perry’s address to the Texas Strike Force, otherwise known as the special interest lobby of Austin.
I got started at the Sheraton restaurant, where I caught a rare glimpse of Joe Allbaugh—table hopping, talking to various Texans and Friends of Rick. I always thought the former FEMA director, despite his gruff exterior and large build, was a big ol’ teddy bear inside. But most of the Texans who work for him at Perry HQ seem to hate his guts. I passed by one of the tables where he was seated and said hello in passing. I went through the buffet line, sat down, and swilled a bunch of coffee with my lumpy and mostly dry scrambled eggs. Allbaugh, still making his rounds, came and sat down for a while with me. “I didn’t know you’d be sitting alone,†he said.
He grabbed the USA Today sitting at the table and glanced at a story by national political writer Susan Page. It largely concluded that Perry was on his last leg. Joe told me to tell her he was mad at her for that. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been out on the road, and certainly not anywhere near the moribund Perry campaign, but I promised him I would tell her if I saw her. National attention has dropped off, which is both good and bad. It’s good because I don’t have to wade through a bunch of competitors to get access. It’s bad because nobody cares about the story anymore.
By late afternoon all the reporters had set up shop in a relatively small ballroom, with press risers in the back and a podium and microphone in front. Ben Philpott [of Austin public radio station KUT] had a dedicated high-speed Internet line, which was key because wireless sucks in Iowa and there was obviously a big draw on it here. I let [ABC reporter] Arlette Saenz glom onto my Verizon wireless signal but I was hanging on to the password Philpott gave me as if it were the nuclear launch code. Behind the podium was a large TV screen on the wall where we would watch the returns come in. Perry hit two caucuses himself, and supposedly 1,500 surrogates—the Texas Strike Force plus a bunch of other volunteers—fanned out across the state to advocate for him at the 1,700-plus voting sites.
They had a 15-passenger bus ferrying reporters to the two events but I only went to one of Perry’s appearances. Ann Romney was there, too, speaking for Mitt. Perry spoke first and then hugged her before she went onstage. I skipped Perry’s second caucus appearance and went to the filing room. The results from CNN entrance polls were already coming in. It looked like a very bad night for Rick Perry. There weren’t many people in the dingy ballroom. With hundreds of Texans around I figured there would be more crammed in. I guess the strike force was all out at those far-flung caucuses.
Perry surfaced at around nine o’clock, stood in the middle of the ballroom, and did a live shot with Fox, with all the reporters jammed in around him to record what he said. Arlette typed up a transcript of it and e-mailed it to me. It seemed a little delusional to me. He said it was still early in the evening and there was “a lot of hope and excitement.†He said he would “wait to see in the morning what it looks like.†Wait till the friggin’ morning? Would it take that long to count? “He looks sad/tired,†Arlette texted me. Then Wolf Blitzer started spilling the awful truth. Perry would come in fifth, at barely 10 percent—behind Romney, Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich.
What a collapse. The guy who had raised $17 million in forty-nine days—a bigger third-quarter haul than even Mitt Romney—and who had spent way more on TV here than all the other candidates. The former front-runner who once seemed like the inevitable conservative alternative. Fifth place? Given the damn-the-torpedoes attitude of late, I fully expected Perry to step onstage and give a defiant speech, to proclaim that this was a minor setback. Onward to South Carolina. He’s been saying that repeatedly. But that’s not what happened. Instead he got pretty emotional, started talking about how it was all worth it, how there is “no greater joy†than his experience out there on the trail.
And then: “I’ve decided to return to Texas to assess the results of tonight’s caucuses, and determine whether there is a path forward for myself in this race.†He spent a few minutes working the rope line, and I saw his Iowa director, Bob Haus, wiping away tears and hugging him. Everybody seemed to be feeling the catharsis of nearly five months going up in smoke—the last three of them really god-awful. I saw one of Perry’s top aides milling around and I practically leaped at him. “So this is over, right? I mean, he’s saying reassess, but …†I didn’t get to finish my sentence.
“It’s done,†the adviser said. A couple of seconds passed as we just stared at each other, and he felt like he had to throw in a little caveat: “But you know Rick Perry,†he said. “He’s crazy. You never know what he’s going to do. He might wake up tomorrow and decide he’s back in.†I sent off a Tweet: “Hugs and Tears at Perry HQ in Iowa.†I was dying to get to the bar, where people were starting to gather. Arlette and Ben Philpott had been busily typing away, too, but when I looked up after filing my story I was the only one left in the Sheraton ballroom. I heard a loud cheer rise up from the bar. Damn. Had Perry gone out there to the bar? I stuffed my charger and audio cable into my backpack. Then I heard another loud cheer. My God, what was I missing? I ran into the bar area, which was overflowing, and asked around: What the fuck is happening?
“They were doing shots,†someone said. “For Rob.†They were toasting Rob Johnson, the campaign manager who had been busted down to a lowly surrogate and replaced by Bush-era honcho Joe Allbaugh. It was proof that Rob was the one who still had the loyalty of all the campaign staffers. That set the mood for the night. Everybody was toasting everybody else, and hugging and crying. I invited several people to future lunches in Austin. I promised I’d stay in touch. I gave some unsolicited career counseling. I ran into one senior aide who was very happy to be moving on.
“Dude, no matter how bad you’ve heard it was, it was ten times worse,†he said. He told me that at the end there had been two distinct campaigns at the end: the “zombie campaign,†composed of Texas loyalists walking around in a funk, waiting for it all to end; and the “shadow campaign,†the one with all the power, composed of D.C. consultants running the show from the Stephen F. Austin Hotel across the street from Perry campaign HQ in Austin. Grim. By then, it was practically impossible to get a drink at the bar because the bartenders were so busy. When they closed it down, the party spilled over into Perry policy analyst Sean Davis’s room.
I brought what was left of Arlette’s Grey Goose, which made me a very popular guy. I have this vision of a mildly incoherent Perry spokeswoman, Katherine Cesinger, laughing uncontrollably on the bed, and wondering what new fate might await her back home. Luckily, we ran out of booze about an hour ago. I walked with [CBS reporter] Rebecca Kaplan back to our floor, and we both decided this was the most disastrous and yet most entertaining campaign we would probably ever cover. It would never be this good again. From treasonous Ben Bernanke to all those heartless immigrant haters, through the oops moment, the voting-age gaffe, Sonia Monteyamor and Joe Arapahoe, we had been there to chronicle it. We killed it, man!
“Obviously, the Strong Ad didn’t rescue Perry in Iowa. It’s not clear anything could have at that point. But the attempt to hide [Tony] Fabrizio’s role in the making of a notorious anti-gay commercial — to leak a fraudulent version of internal division to a national publication — is another reminder of how messed up Perry’s campaign became.”
Once the “oops†moment happened, a widespread feeling took hold within Gov. Rick Perry‘s campaign that a comeback was uphill at best. New Hampshire, with its New England sensibilities, was hopeless. The money spigot, which produced about $2.5 million a week when Perry first came out of the chute, had slowed to a trickle. The intense scrutiny he once faced as a front-runner had shifted to Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and, soon, to Rick Santorum. It was all coming down to Iowa, where Perry was in the single digits.
Nelson Warfield, a former top aide to 1996 GOP nominee Bob Dole, was experienced at ginning up social conservatives in past campaigns, and he decided something big and dramatic needed to happen. Something that would cut through the clutter. He proposed a TV ad script charitably described as edgy and viscerally anti-gay.
According to internal campaign e-mails, the idea for the commercial was conceived about a week after the “oops†moment. It would come to be known as the Strong Ad. Here is how Perry read it into the camera: “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian. But you don’t need to be in the pews every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.â€
When the ad was unveiled on December 7, it set off a viral uproar on YouTube, spawning hundreds of sometimes hilarious parodies and outrage from viewers. By the summer of 2012, the Strong Ad had generated more than 8.3 million hits on YouTube, with more than 770,000 clicking on the “dislike†button and only 26,000 having hit “like.†It was the third most-clicked-on political video of 2011.
The ad struck an intensely raw nerve with gay activists. They were particularly angry that it had happened on the watch of Perry pollster/strategist Tony Fabrizio, who had worked alongside Warfield on the Dole campaign. Although he had not publicly come out of the closet, Fabrizio was known in personal and political circles to be gay. He had done lucrative polling work for pro-gay groups, including the Log Cabin Republicans and an organization fighting a gay marriage ban in Florida.
On the day the spot ran, Jimmy LaSalvia, director of the pro-gay Republican group GOPround, wrote a furious denunciation on Twitter. “I’ve just about had it with faggots who line their pockets with checks from anti-gay homophobes while throwing the rest of us under the bus,†he said.
In case there was any confusion, LaSalvia later Tweeted that he was referring to Fabrizio. When the ad hit the airwaves, the Huffington Post contacted the Perry campaign and asked what role Fabrizio had played in the crafting of the anti-gay message. Ray Sullivan, Perry’s communications director, didn’t know the details.
Hardly anybody did beyond Perry’s Washington, D.C.-based consultants — the “consulterati,†as they were known among the governor’s Texas loyalists. Sullivan said HuffPo had told him the news organization was more likely to post a story about the ad if Fabrizio favored it and played a role in its creation, since the spot would clash with his pro-gay political background and was provoking furor from gay rights activists.
Sullivan discussed the issue with Warfield. “I think Nelson took it upon himself to try to inform or convince them that Fabrizio was not behind the ad and in fact didn’t like it,†said Sullivan. In other words, Warfield tried to make the story go away. On that count, he failed.
He was quoted on HuffPo on Dec. 8, the day after the ad was unveiled, under the type of headline no campaign wants to see: “Rick Perry’s Anti-Gay Ad Divides His Top Staff.†Warfield told HuffPo in an e-mail that Fabrizio was “against it from the get-go.†Fabrizio had even sent out an e-mail calling the proposed ad script “nuts,†the website reported.
The Miami Herald also reported on Warfield’s and Fabrizio’s supposed disagreement over the ad. The newspaper ran what was said to be the Nov. 18 email exchanges about the ad between the two, presumably provided by one of them.
The paper published an email from Warfield about his desire to test the Strong Ad script as an “aggressive values question†in a poll of Iowa voters, to see how they’d react to a candidate who thinks it’s terrible that gays can openly serve in the military, while public schools can’t stage Christmas celebrations.
Fabrizio responded to Warfield’s email five minutes later: “We already tested the taxpayer funding of abortion and planned parenthood. Nelson — your question is nuts, just nuts.â€
Once those emails were leaked and Warfield publicly described the campaign’s deliberations over the ad, news outlets widely reported and re-reported that Fabrizio had condemned the ad internally. But the single email exchange concealed the real story.
Numerous internal emails and interviews with key players indicate that Fabrizio not only favored testing the ad script, he expressed awe at the number of voters who responded positively to it. Then, once it was turned into a TV commercial, emails show that he agreed it was a “good idea†to use the anti-gay ad as a Perry fundraising tool.
The only Fabrizio email exchange that got leaked to the media was the one in which he referred to the proposed question from Warfield as “nuts.†It was sent at 11:33 a.m. on Nov. 18, 2011. There was more, though. Here’s what came next:
Warfield (11:39 a.m.): “So nuts we could lose our 6%? Heaven forefend. Let’s not test it. Better not to know. Let’s just argue our econ plan is about 7 millimeters better than all the rest. Yep, that’ll make ’em forget about all those Mexicans in study hall at Texas A&M.â€
Fabrizio (11:41 a.m.): “Didn’t say I wouldn’t test it, just said it was nuts. LOL! Touchy today, huh?â€
At the exact same moment, Perry’s longtime Texas pollster, Mike Baselice, sent an email urging the two to tone down the question. But Fabrizio sided with Warfield and argued against taking out the reference to gays in the military.
Baselice (11:41 a.m.): “How about this: Rick Perry will end the Obama Administration’s war on religion because he knows his faith and this nation’s Christian heritage can make us stronger (strong again).”
Warfield (11:46 a.m.): “I would test it the way it was written. If you take the gay stuff and the Christmas stuff out of it, it loses its punch.â€
Fabrizio (11:47 a.m.): “Mike — Nelson is right. (As much as I hate to admit it.)â€
After results of the poll of GOP voters about the Strong Ad language were tallied and reported inside the campaign on Nov. 21, Fabrizio’s response can only be described as gushing: “WOW!†he wrote in an email to the top Perry hierarchy. He said he had never seen so many people in a survey agree with a polling question, adding: “Nelson — I bow to you. You were right on your question!â€
By the time the ad got cut, the Texas loyalists had been marginalized and were no longer in the loop. Even speechwriter Eric Bearse and Perry political director Wayne Hamilton, who had deep experience with evangelical voters not only in Texas but also in Iowa, didn’t know about the ad until it was put into rotation to be aired.
Senior Perry advisers say the data showed the “top lines†were high, meaning people said when prompted that they look more favorably upon a candidate who took the position being articulated in the survey questions. But a deeper “regression analysis†showed it didn’t move people.
“Out of the six or eight things we tested, the weakest was the gays-in-the-military thing,†said a top Perry aide who reviewed the data. “The best thing was still just the generic Perry position on faith and the constant onslaught against people of faith.†Obviously, the Strong Ad didn’t rescue Perry in Iowa. It’s not clear anything could have at that point. But the attempt to hide Fabrizio’s role in the making of a notorious anti-gay commercial — to leak a fraudulent version of internal division to a national publication — is another reminder of how messed up Perry’s campaign became.
There was internal division over the Strong Ad, alright, but it wasn’t between Fabrizio and Warfield. It was between the Washington consultants who would probably never work for Perry again and the Texas loyalists who thought the governor was harming his legacy by embracing a harsh view of gay soldiers, who, after all, were risking their lives right alongside their straight counterparts.
Mind-boggling dysfunction had reached the highest levels of the Perry campaign. Ray Sullivan offered an apt description of Warfield’s attempt to stop HuffPo from writing a negative story about the campaign’s partially closeted pollster. The same thing might be said of Perry’s entire campaign: “It was a risky strategy that didn’t work.â€
