“I want to go to the Oval Office and make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential as possible in your life”, Perry said to the roughly 200 people who heard him talk on a cool, overcast day at the fair.
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“The idea that some would say, ‘Let’s just build a wall.’ That may be good political rhetoric, but the real focus is on how are you going to secure the border, ‘ ” Perry said.
Perry recently stopped paying his campaign staff because of a lack of funding. And the stakes are potentially even higher now, with his campaign low on money and whispers circulating that he might drop out before the February 1 Iowa caucuses.
As he made his way to the pork association grill, the dozen or so volunteers and staff members with Perry generally outnumbered those who gathered around him to shake his hand or snap a photo. In a CNN/ORC poll released earlier Tuesday, he got just 2 percent among Republicans and right-leaning independents.
The top strategists, activists and operatives in Iowa and New Hampshire are saying Perry’s attempts to rehabilitate his image are failing, and 40 percent of Republicans and almost half of Democrats think he is on the verge of leaving the field.
Despite his campaign funds running dry, Governor Perry is hitting Iowa hard.
As he took to the Des Moines Register’s famed haybale “soapbox” Wednesday, Perry passionately declared he was “mad as hell” at Washington. “In the state of Texas we think it’s kind of wise not to have too many laws on the books… we don’t need symbolic pieces of legislation jumbling up our code”.
Perry said his record of supporting women “is unparelleled” and “it will be that way as president of the United States”.
“When this country was going through the worst economic times since the Great Depression, between the end of ’07 and the end of 2014, Texas created 1/5 million jobs”.
“We’ve had the best week of fundraising last week that we’ve had since June”, Perry said, vowing to keep campaigning. But, while Perry is preaching a “show me don’t tell me election”, voters are distracted by the pizzazz of this cycle’s enigmatic outsiders.
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“Still, Perry is adept at the retail style of politicking preferred by most Iowans”, she said. “I took his bait and I should have been a little bit more hospitable in my comment”, he said. Nobody on the debate stage has the record of job creation, no one’s got the 14 years of being the chief executive of the 12th largest economy in the world.
