My daughter and I met Gov. Perry, when he came to the San Antonio Tea Party’s 4th of July bash; his appearance was arranged at the very last minute, and everyone expected that it would be one of those quickly-helicopter-in-hop-up-on-stage-make-a-few-remarks-hop-off-and-helicopter-out; basically come and gone in a cloud of dust. Instead, he hung out in the back-stage area for simply hours. My daughter and I and the husband of one of the other SATP committee members were sitting quietly in a corner, eating BBQ brisket, when “Da Gov” came up and began ragging on the spouse, as he was an elderly veteran wearing an 82nd Airborne ballcap: why on earth, he asked, would you go around jumping out of perfectly good airplanes? Turns out Gov. Perry had been in the Air Force, as a transport pilot. I’m an AF retiree, and my daughter was in the Marines, so we had a very funny, very lively conversation going on there for quite some time. My daughter thinks he stayed so long with us because we were about the only ones in the room NOT talking about politics.
I think he is one of those gregarious people, who actually does seem to enjoy getting out there among the crowd; my daughter said afterwards that he seemed quite gleeful about slipping the restraints for a bit. But I also think he was about the first significant politician to realize exactly what the Tea Parties were all about, and to take them seriously. So, it’s a bit of shrewd positioning on his part, having realized ahead of everyone else, that there is a huge and deadly serious crowd of people out there, and it might be an excellent career move to appear to be out in front of it.