Bushies Take on Perry

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"This has a lot to do with what happens when you have succeeding governors. They have different teams," said Bush 43 media strategist Mark McKinnon. "Perry is perfectly within his rights to establish his own identity." Bush loyalists see their time in their governor's office as a golden age for bipartisanship — a time when they did right by Texas. Some of them believe Perry crassly squandered that compassionate conservative age by steering his administration and the state's politics farther to the right.

Perry's team sees that view of Bush's leadership as idealized; they blame President Bush for massive electoral losses and the tainting of the GOP brand. Perry, they insist, is the one who's truly led the state. They dismiss Hutchison and her Bushworld backers as "country-club Republicans," the phrase used by Perry campaign consultant Dave Carney in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine story. The beneficiary of the bad blood is Hutchison, whose closer ties with Bush loyalists who worked in D.C. and more subdued personal style sits better with the family and its friends.

2. It's a moderate-conservative thing.

Most of the ink spilled about the GOP primary paints Perry and Hutchison as avatars in the battle for the soul of the GOP. It's not a bad theory to explain why the Bushies are backing Hutchison. The senator, while conservative by national standards, has been wedged into the "moderate" slot in Texas, with Perry occupying the terrain to her right. It would be natural, then, that Baker, the ultimate noblesse oblige Washington dealmaker, and Bush 41, the eldest of the elder statesmen and the biggest bulb in the Thousand Points of Light, find themselves aligned with the candidate who's offering a return to the days of the big tent.

"I would argue this is more about the electorate and where Texas has gone politically," says Ken Luce, who ran Perry's first campaign for agriculture commissioner.