It’s Just a Texas-Governor Thing

Perry’s chief strategist, Dave Carney, accounts for the dearth of support among Bush alumni differently. “They’re not conservatives,” he said. “They’re country-club Republicans.” When I asked if he really believed Rove was a “country-club Republican,” Carney replied: “Yeah, absolutely. It would be impossible to deny that there are Reagan Republicans and there are Bush Republicans.” To the Perryites, then, the future of the G.O.P. — in Texas and beyond, next March and thereafter — requires buying into Carney’s assertion that yesteryear’s “Reagan Republicans” and today’s “movement conservatives” are one and the same.

The Texas Republican gubernatorial primary is thus shaping up to be a public airing of that national party’s internal discontents. The issues and cultural references in the race are unmistakably Texan. But the contest’s central question — whether a highly popular general-election Republican (Hutchison) can defeat a less-popular Republican (Perry) who nonetheless knows how to excite conservative primary voters — goes to the heart of the party’s overall vitality. In an effort to reclaim Reagan’s scepter, both campaigns are aggressively ignoring the Gipper’s 11th Commandment to not speak ill of fellow Republicans. The mounting ugliness between “Slick Rick” and “Kay Bailout” seems destined to turn off independent voters because, as the veteran political handicapper Charlie Cook observes: “in a primary, shrillness matters. It’s a race to the fringe.”