Fellow Nacogdoches County Dems,
Three important reminders-mark your calendars!:
1) Thurs, Aug. 18, Noon — August Dem luncheon at Clear Springs (211 Old Tyler Road). Call Elaine Sanders (560-6436) to RSVP.
2) Thurs, Sept. 8, 5:30 — Executive Committee Meeting at Courthouse Annex. This meeting will feature a speech and a Q&A session for the two candidates for County Chairperson (Walter McCrimmon, Roy Boldon) to finish out my term. All Dems are invited to attend and participate, though any official business will be conducted exclusively by the committee. Anyone with questions is encouraged to contact me at stephen.wright15@gmail.com.
3) Tues, Sept. 20, 5:30 — Open, non-partisan public meeting for all at County Courthouse Annex to conduct Voter Registrar Training and to preview I-69 project. Everyone is encouraged to attend especially those who will be helping with voter registration for next year. Contact County Dems Secretary-Treasurer Claire Martin at claire1130@gmail.com to confirm your attendance.
That’s it for now. I encourage all of you to attend these three meetings. It’s more important than ever before to elect Democrats to office, particularly since our Governor has now thrown his hat into the Presidential ring. In case you’re not motivated enough, check out the Texas Observer articles below.
Progressively Yours,
Stephen Wright, Chairman
Nacogdoches County Democratic Party
(936) 560-0781
stephen.wright15@gmail.com
http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/rick-perrys-army-of-god
On September 28, 2009, at 1:40 p.m., God’s messengers visited Rick Perry.
On this day, the Lord’s messengers arrived in the form of two Texas pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, who called on Perry in the governor’s office inside the state Capitol. Schlueter and Long both oversee small congregations, but they are more than just pastors. They consider themselves modern-day apostles and prophets, blessed with the same gifts as Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles.
The pastors told Perry of God’s grand plan for Texas. A chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was “The Prophet State,” anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government. And the governor would have a special role.
The day before the meeting, Schlueter had received a prophetic message from Chuck Pierce, an influential prophet from Denton, Texas. God had apparently commanded Schlueter—through Pierce—to “pray by lifting the hand of the one I show you that is in the place of civil rule.”
Gov. Perry, it seemed.
Schlueter had prayed before his congregation: “Lord Jesus I bring to you today Gov. Perry. … I am just bringing you his hand and I pray Lord that he will grasp ahold of it. For if he does you will use him mightily.”
And grasp ahold the governor did. At the end of their meeting, Perry asked the two pastors to pray over him. As the pastors would later recount, the Lord spoke prophetically as Schlueter laid his hands on Perry, their heads bowed before a painting of the Battle of the Alamo. Schlueter “declared over [Perry] that there was a leadership role beyond Texas and that Texas had a role beyond what people understand,” Long later told his congregation.
So you have to wonder: Is Rick Perry God’s man for president?
Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot.
The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the prophecies, the results can be catastrophic: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, and economic collapse. On the other hand, they believe their God-given decrees have ended mad cow disease in Germany and produced rain in drought-stricken Texas.
Their beliefs can tend toward the bizarre. Some consider Freemasonry a “demonic stronghold” tantamount to witchcraft. The Democratic Party, one prominent member believes, is controlled by Jezebel and three lesser demons. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. They’ve taken biblical literalism to an extreme. In Texas, they engage in elaborate ceremonies involving branding irons, plumb lines and stakes inscribed with biblical passages driven into the earth of every Texas county.
If they simply professed unusual beliefs, movement leaders wouldn’t be remarkable. But what makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.
In Rick Perry, they may have found their vessel. And the interest appears to be mutual.
In all the media attention surrounding Perry’s flirtation with a run for the presidency, the governor’s budding relationship with the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation movement has largely escaped notice. But perhaps not for long. Perry has given self-proclaimed prophets and apostles leading roles in The Response, a much-publicized Christians-only prayer rally that Perry is organizing at Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Aug. 6.
The Response has engendered widespread criticism of its deliberate blurring of church and state and for the involvement of the American Family Association, labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its leadership’s homophobic and anti-Muslim statements. But it’s the involvement of New Apostolic leaders that’s more telling about Perry’s convictions and campaign strategy.
Eight members of The Response “leadership team” are affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation movement. They’re employed or associated with groups like TheCall or the International House of Prayer (IHOP), Kansas City-based organizations at the forefront of the movement. The long list of The Response’s official endorsers—posted on the event’s website—reads like a Who’s Who of the apostolic-prophetic crowd, including movement founder C. Peter Wagner.
In a recent interview with the Observer, Schlueter explained that The Response is divinely inspired. “The government of our nation was basically founded on biblical principles,” he says. “When you have a governmental leader call a time of fasting and prayer, I believe that there has been a significant shift in our understanding as far as who is ultimately in charge of our nation—which we believe God is.”
Perry certainly knows how to speak the language of the new apostles. The genesis of The Response, Perry says, comes from the Book of Joel, an obscure slice of the Old Testament that’s popular with the apostolic crowd.
“With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God’s help,” Perry says in a video message on The Response website. “That’s why I’m calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel.”
The reference to Joel likely wasn’t lost on Perry’s target audience. Prominent movement leaders strike the same note. Lou Engle, who runs TheCall, told a Dallas-area Assemblies of God congregation in April that “His answer in times of crisis is Joel 2.”
Mike Bickle, a jock-turned-pastor who runs the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, a sort of command headquarters and university for young End Times enthusiasts, taught a 12-part series on Joel last year.
The Book of Joel describes a crippling drought and economic crisis—sound familiar?—in the land of Judah. The calamities, in Joel’s time and ours, are “sent by God to cause a wicked, oppressive, and rebellious nation to repent,” Bickle told his students.
To secure God’s blessing, Joel commands the people to gather in “sacred assembly” to pray, fast, and repent.
More ominously, Bickle teaches that Joel is an “instruction manual” for the imminent End Times. It is “essential to help equip people to be prepared for the unique dynamics occurring in the years leading up to Jesus’ return,” he has said.
The views espoused by Bickle, Engle and other movement leaders occupy the radical fringe of Christian fundamentalism. Their beliefs may seem bizarre even to many conservative evangelicals. Yet Perry has a knack for finding the forefront of conservative grassroots. Prayer warriors, apostles and prophets are filled with righteous energy and an increasing appetite for power in the secular political world. Their zeal and affiliation with charismatic independent churches, the fastest-growing subset of American Christianity, offers obvious benefits for Perry if he runs for president.
There are enormous political risks, too. Mainstream voters may be put off by the movement’s extreme views or discomfited by talk of self-proclaimed prophets “infiltrating” government.
Catherine Frazier, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, wouldn’t respond to specific questions but wrote in an email, “The Response event is about coming together in prayer to seek wisdom and guidance from God to the challenges that confront our nation. That is where the governor’s focus is, and he welcomes those that wish to join him in this common cause.”
For the moment, Perry’s relationship with the New Apostles is little known. Few in Texas GOP circles say they’ve ever heard of them. “I wish I could help you,” said Steve Munisteri, the state Republican Party chair. “I’ve never even heard of that movement.”
“For the most part I don’t know them,” said Cathie Adams, former head of the Texas Eagle Forum and a veteran conservative activist.
Nonetheless, Perry may be counting on apostles and prophets to help propel him to the White House. And they hope Perry will lead them out of the wilderness into the promised land.
Listen closely to Perry’s recent public statements and you’ll occasionally hear him uttering New Apostle code words. In June, Perry defended himself against Texas critics on Fox News, telling host Neil Cavuto that “a prophet is generally not loved in their hometown.”
It seemed an odd comment. It’s the rare politician who compares himself to a prophet, and many viewers likely passed it off as a flub. But to the members of a radical new Christian movement, the remark made perfect sense.
The phrase “New Apostolic Reformation” comes from the movement’s intellectual godfather, C. Peter Wagner, who has called it, a bit vaingloriously, “the most radical change in the way of doing Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.”
Boasting aside, Wagner is an important figure in evangelical circles. He helped formulate the “church growth” model, a blueprint for worship that helped spawn modern mega-churches and international missions. In the 1990s, he turned away from the humdrum business of “harvesting souls” in mega-churches and embarked on a more revolutionary project.
He began promoting the notion that God is raising up modern-day prophets and apostles vested with extraordinary authority to bring about social transformation and usher in the Kingdom of God.
In 2006, Wagner published Apostles Today: Biblical Government for Biblical Power, in which he declared a “Second Apostolic Age.” The first age had occurred after Jesus’ biblical resurrection, when his apostles traveled Christendom spreading the gospel. Commissioned by Jesus himself, the 12 apostles acted as His agents. The second apostolic age, Wagner announced, began “around the year 2001.”
“Apostles,” he wrote, “are the generals in the army of God.”
One of the primary tasks of the new prophets and apostles is to hear God’s will and then act on it. Sometimes this means changing the world supernaturally. Wagner tells of the time in October 2001 when, at a huge prayer conference in Germany, he “decreed that mad cow disease would come to an end in Europe and the UK.” As it turned out, the last reported case of human mad cow disease had occurred the day before. “I am not implying that I have any inherent supernatural power,” Wagner wrote. “I am implying that when apostles hear the word of God clearly and when they decree His will, history can change.”
Claims of such powers are rife among Wagner’s followers. Cindy Jacobs—a self-described “respected prophet” and Wagner protégée who runs a Dallas-area group called Generals International—claims to have predicted the recent earthquakes in Japan. “God had warned us that shaking was coming,” she wrote in Charisma magazine, an organ for the movement. “This doesn’t mean that it was His desire for it to happen, but more of the biblical fulfillment that He doesn’t do anything without first warning through His servants.”
There is, of course, a corollary to these predictive abilities: Horrible things happen when advice goes unheeded.
Last year Jacobs warned that if America didn’t return to biblical values and support Israel, God would cause a “tumbling of the economy and dark days will come,” according to Charisma. To drive the point home, Jacobs and other right-wing allies—including The Response organizers Lou Engle and California pastor Jim Garlow—organized a 40-day “Pray and Act” effort in the lead-up to the 2010 elections.
Unlike other radical religious groups, the New Apostles believe political activism is part of their divine mission. “Whereas their spiritual forefathers in the Pentecostal movement would have eschewed involvement in politics, the New Apostles believe they have a divine mandate to rescue a decaying American society,” said Margaret Poloma, a practicing Pentecostal and professor of sociology at the University of Akron. “Their apostolic vision is to usher in the Kingdom of God.”
“Where does God stop and they begin?” she asks. “I don’t think they know the difference.”
Poloma is one of the few academics who has closely studied the apostolic movement. It’s largely escaped notice, in part, because it lacks the traditional structures of either politics or religion, says Rachel Tabachnick, a researcher who has covered the movement extensively for Talk2Action.org, a left-leaning site that covers the religious right.
“It’s fairly recent and it just doesn’t fit into people’s pre-conceived notions,” she says. “They can’t get their head around something that isn’t denominational.”
The movement operates through a loose but interlocking array of churches, ministries, councils and seminaries—many of them in Texas. But mostly it holds together through the friendships and alliances of its prophets and apostles.
The Response itself seems patterned on TheCall, day-long worship and prayer rallies usually laced with anti-gay and anti-abortion messages. TheCall—also the name of a Kansas City-based organization—is led by Lou Engle, an apostle who looks a bit like Mr. Magoo and has the unnerving habit of rocking back and forth while shouting at his audience in a raspy voice. (Engle is also closely associated with the International House of Prayer—, Mike Bickle’s 24/7 prayer center in Kansas City.) Engle frequently mobilizes his followers in the service of earthly causes, holding raucous prayer events in California to help pass Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, and making an appearance in Uganda last year to lend aid to those trying to pass a law that would have imposed the death penalty on homosexuals. But Engle’s larger aim is Christian control of government.
“The church’s vocation is to rule history with God,” he has said. “We are called into the very image of the Trinity himself, that we are to be His friends and partners for world dominion.”
“It sounds so fringe but yet it’s not fringe,” Tabachnick says. “They’ve been working with Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Sam Brownback, and now Rick Perry. … They are becoming much more politically noticeable.”
Some of the fiercest critics of the New Apostolic Reformation come from within the Pentecostal and charismatic world. The Assemblies of God Church, the largest organized Pentecostal denomination, specifically repudiated self-proclaimed prophets and apostles in 2000, calling their creed a “deviant teaching” that could rapidly “become dictatorial, presumptuous, and carnal.”
Assemblies authorities also rejected the notion that the church is supposed to assume dominion over earthly institutions, labeling it “unscriptural triumphalism.”
The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms. They refer to the “Seven Mountains” of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.
Asked about the meaning of the Seven Mountains, Schlueter says, “God’s kingdom just can’t be expressed on Sunday morning for two hours. God’s kingdom has to be expressed in media and government and education. It’s not like our goal is to have a Bible on every child’s desk. That’s not the goal. The goal is to hopefully have everyone acknowledge that God’s in charge of us regardless.”
But climbing those mountains sounds a little more specific on Sunday mornings. Schlueter has bragged to his congregation of meetings with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, and the Arlington City Council. He recently told a church in Victoria that state Rep. Phil King, a conservative Republican from Weatherford, had allowed him to use King’s office at the Capitol to make calls and organize.
“We’re going to influence it,” Schlueter told his congregation. “We’re going to infiltrate it, not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing … He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain. Just do it, it’s no big deal.’ I was talking with [a member of the congregation] the other day. She’s going to start infiltrating. A very simple process. She’s going to join the Republican Party, start going to all their meetings. Some [members] are already doing that.”
Doug Stringer, a relatively low-profile apostle, is one of the movement’s more complex figures—and one of the few people associated with The Response who returned my calls. His assignment for The Response: mobilizing the faithful from around the nation. Though he’s friendly with the governor and spoke at the state GOP convention, Stringer says he’s a political independent, “morally conservative” but with a “heart for social justice.”
Stringer runs Somebody Cares America, a nonprofit combining evangelism with charitable assistance to the indigent and victims of natural disasters. In 2009, Perry recognized Stringer in his State of the State address for his role in providing aid to Texans devastated by Hurricane Ike.
Stringer’s message is that The Response will be apolitical, non-partisan, even ecumenical. The goal, he says, is to “pray for personal repentance and corporate repentance on behalf of the church, not against anybody else.”
I ask him about his involvement with the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, which is overseen by Schlueter. Six of the nine people listed as network “advisors” are involved in The Response, including Stringer, Cindy Jacobs and Waco pastor Ramiro Peña. The Texas group is part of a larger 50-state network of prophets, apostles and prayer intercessors called the Heartland Apostolic Network, which itself overlaps with the Reformation Prayer Network run by Jacobs. The Texas Apostolic Prayer Network is further subdivided into sixteen regions, each with its own director.
Some of these groups’ beliefs and activities will be startling, even to many conservative evangelicals. For example, in 2010 Texas prayer warriors visited every Masonic lodge in the state attempting to cast out the demon Baal, whom they believe controls Freemasonry. At each site, the warriors read a decree—written in legalese—divorcing Baal from the “People of God” and recited a lengthy prayer referring to Freemasonry as “witchcraft.”
Asked whether he shares these views, Stringer launches into a long treatise about secrecy during which he manages to lump together Mormonism, Freemasonry and college fraternities.
“I think there has been a lot of damage and polarization over decades because of the influence of some areas of Freemasonry that have been corrupted,” he says. “In fact, if you look at the original founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, he had a huge influence by Masonry. Bottom-line, anything that is so secretive that has to be hidden in darkness … is not biblical. The Bible says that everything needs to be brought to the light. That’s why I would never be part of a fraternity, like on campus.”
Why would Perry throw in with this crowd?
One possible answer is that he’s an opportunistic politician running for president who’s trying to get right, if not with Jesus, with a particular slice of the GOP base.
Perry himself may have the gift of foresight. He seems preternaturally capable of spotting The Next Big Thing and positioning himself as an authentic leader of grassroots movements before they overtake other politicians. Think of the prescient way he hitched his political future to the Tea Party. In 2009 Perry spoke at a Tax Day protest and infamously flirted with Texas secession. At the time it seemed crazy. In retrospect it seems brilliant.
Now, he’s made common cause with increasingly influential fundamentalists from the bleeding fringe of American Christianity at a time when the political influence of mainstream evangelicals seems to be fading.
For decades evangelicals have been key to Republican presidential victories, but much has changed since George W. Bush named Jesus as his favorite philosopher at an Iowa debate during the 2000 presidential campaign. There is much turbulence among evangelicals. There’s no undisputed leader, a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson, to bring the “tribes”—to use Stringer’s phrase—together. So you go where the momentum is. There is palpable excitement in the prayer movement and among the New Apostles that the nation is on the cusp of a major spiritual and political revival.
“On an exciting note, we are in the beginning stages of the Third Great Awakening,” Jacobs told Trinity Church in Cedar Hill earlier this year. (Trinity’s pastor, Jim Hennesy, is also an apostle and endorser of The Response. Trinity is probably best known for its annual Halloween “Hell House” that tries to scare teens into accepting Jesus.) “We are seeing revivals pop up all over the United States. … Fires are breaking out all over the place. And we are going to see great things happening.”
Moreover, various media outlets have documented a possible coalescing of religious-right leaders around Perry’s candidacy. Time magazine reported on a June conference call among major evangelical leaders, including religious historian David Barton and San Antonio pastor John Hagee, in which they “agreed that Rick Perry would be their preferred candidate if he entered the race,” according to the magazine.
Journalist Tabachnick says politicians are attracted to the apostolic movement because of the valuable organizational structure and databases the leadership has built.
“I believe it’s because they’ve built such a tremendous communication network,” she says, pointing to the 50-state prayer networks plugged into churches and ministries. “They found ways to work that didn’t involve the institutional structures that many denominations have. They don’t have big offices, headquarters. They work more like a political campaign.”
But if the apostles present a broad organizing opportunity, the political risks for Perry are equally large.
In 2008 GOP nominee John McCain was forced to reject Hagee’s endorsement after media scrutiny of the pastor’s anti-Catholic comments. Similarly, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign nearly fell apart when voters saw video of controversial sermons by the candidate’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. If anything, Perry is venturing even further into the spiritual wilderness. The faith of the New Apostles will be unfamiliar, strange, and scary to many Americans.
Consider Alice Patterson. She’s in charge of mobilizing churches in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma for The Response. A field director for the Texas Christian Coalition in the 1990s, she’s now a significant figure in apostolic circles and runs a San Antonio-based organization called Justice at the Gate.
Patterson, citing teachings by Cindy Jacobs, Chuck Pierce and Lou Engle, has written that the Democratic Party is controlled by “an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure” unleashed by the biblical figure Jezebel.
Patterson claims to have seen demons with her own eyes. In 2009, at a prophetic meeting in Houston, Patterson says she saw the figure of Jezebel and “saw Jezebel’s skirt lifted to expose tiny Baal, Asherah, and a few other spirits. There they were—small, cowering, trembling little spirits that were only ankle high on Jezebel’s skinny legs.”
Those revelations are contained in Patterson’s 2010 book Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform a Nation. Patterson’s aim, as she makes clear in her book, is getting black and brown evangelicals to vote Republican and support conservative causes. A major emphasis among the New Apostles is racial reconciliation and recruitment of minorities and women. The apostolic prayer networks often perform elaborate ceremonies in which participants dress up in historical garb and repent for racial sins.
The formula—overcoming racism to achieve multiracial fundamentalism—has caught on in the apostolic movement. Some term the approach the “Rainbow Right,” and in fact The Response has a high quotient of African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans in leadership positions.
Lou Engle, for example, is making a big push to recruit black activists into the anti-abortion ranks. “We’re looking for the new breed of black prophets to arise and forgive us our baggage,” he said at Trinity Assemblies of God, “and then lead us out of victimization and into the healing of a nation, to stop the shedding of innocent blood.”
Rick Perry is a white southern conservative male who may end up running against a black president. It doesn’t take a prophet to see that he could use friends like these.
There’s one other possible reason for Perry’s flirtation with the apostles, and it has nothing to do with politics. He could be a true believer.
Perry has never been shy about proclaiming his faith. He was raised a Methodist and still occasionally attends Austin’s genteel Tarrytown United Methodist Church. But according to an October 2010 story in the Austin American-Statesman, he now spends more Sundays at West Austin’s Lake Hills Church, a non-denominational evangelical church that features a rock band and pop-culture references. The more effusive approach to religion clearly appealed to Perry. “They dunk,” Perry told the American-Statesman. “Methodists sprinkle.”
Still, attending an evangelical church is a long way from believing in modern-day apostles and demons in plain sight. Could Perry actually buy into this stuff?
He’s certainly convinced the movement’s leaders. “He’s a very deep man of faith and I know that sometimes causes problems for people because they think he’s making decisions based on his faith,” Schlueter says. He pauses a beat. “Well, I hope so.”
But the danger of associating with extremists is apparent even to Schlueter, the man who took God’s message to Perry in September 2009. “It could be political suicide to do what he’s doing,” Schlueter says. “Man, this is the last thing he’d want to do if it were concerning a presidential bid. It could be very risky.”
http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/the-outsider
The Outsider
Can a camera-shy Dave Carney put Rick Perry in the White House?
by Abby Rapoport
Published on: Monday, August 01, 2011
Dave Carney at a Rick Perry book signing in Round Rock last November Dave Carney at a Rick Perry book signing in Round Rock last November
Before most people had ever heard of Karl Rove, a heavyset, disheveled wunderkind from New Hampshire named Dave Carney was the Republican Party’s top young political consultant.
He had risen quickly through New Hampshire politics and, before he turned 30, followed his mentor John H. Sununu to the White House, where Carney served as special assistant to President George H.W. Bush. At 33, Carney was national field director for the 1992 Bush-Quayle reelection campaign. It wasn’t unusual at the time to see him on CNN debating Bill Clinton’s top lieutenants. When then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole was ready to run for president in 1996, he knew which consultant he wanted on his team.
“Having Dave helps me sleep at night,” Dole told Time magazine. The story, titled “Dole’s Kitchen Magician,” was an ode to Carney. He had become well known in consulting circles for designing creative campaign strategies. Time reporter Michael Kramer wrote, “At 36, Carney is already a legend among Republican operatives.”
And then Carney’s career took an odd turn. The legend suddenly disappeared from public view.
After Dole’s 1996 defeat, Carney left Washington, D.C., and vanished from the national political scene. He retreated to Hancock, New Hampshire, the tiny town where he’d grown up. He focused on building his own consulting firm, flitting around the country between minor local and state races. He remained in the game, but no longer in the major leagues. No more national campaigns. No more magazine profiles. In 1998 he showed up in Texas, where a second Bush was preparing a presidential run. But that wasn’t what brought Carney to the state. The consultant who’d once helped oversee two presidential campaigns had arrived in Austin on a far less glamorous mission: to help a young Texas agriculture commissioner in his first race for lieutenant governor.
Rick Perry’s 1998 run for lieutenant governor wasn’t a high point, at least for the man who would later become Texas’ longest-serving governor. There was tremendous pressure, with then-Gov. George W. Bush eyeing the White House and Republicans desperate to have one of their own ready to step in as governor. Perry faced a formidable opponent in Democratic Comptroller John Sharp. Even with the overwhelmingly popular Gov. Bush winning a landslide reelection at the top of the ticket, Perry, with Carney’s help, barely squeaked by.
But the 1998 campaign marked the beginning of something unusual in politics: a true partnership. For the last 13 years, Carney has been integral to every Perry campaign. He molded the candidate and crafted the strategies that sometimes stunned onlookers. Over three gubernatorial races, Perry and Carney have become a much-feared political duo, fending off well-funded Democrats, a sitting Republican U.S. senator, a Tea Party primary challenger and even Kinky Friedman.
Carney, the chief strategist and innovator on Team Perry, doesn’t lust for the spotlight. Unlike many consultants-turned-celebrities, Carney is camera-shy. He refused an interview request for this story, as well as a recent request from Texas Monthly. While he speaks frequently on Perry’s behalf, he rarely talks about himself.
But anyone who studies Carney will find an innovative and nimble tactician. He’s spent much of the past 15 years experimenting with different approaches to campaigning, testing myriad strategies in state and local races nationwide. Though a Republican, he’s not ideological. His candidates have ranged from moderate to hard-core conservative. If there is a hallmark of a Carney race, it’s his creative strategies. He’s also dabbled with unscrupulous tactics, having once run a corporate-funded nonprofit that spent untold amounts of money criticizing certain candidates in the name of “voter education.” What’s clear is that he’ll try almost anything that will give him good odds to win. “If he can beat you, he will, and he’ll think of an imaginative way to do it,” says Carney’s friend, former New Hampshire GOP Chair Steve Duprey.
Perry is by far his most visible and well-known client. The two have become so close that when Carney signed on with the Newt Gingrich 2012 presidential campaign, many insiders wrote Perry off as a potential presidential candidate. Without Carney, they assumed, Perry wouldn’t run. Much like the famous political partnerships of the last two decades—George W. Bush and Karl Rove, Bill Clinton and James Carville, George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater—Perry and Carney are practically symbiotic. So when Carney resigned from his post with Gingrich in early June, national speculation about a Rick Perry candidacy re-ignited.
Now the duo that has dominated Texas politics for more than a decade appears likely to take the show national. They’re reportedly organizing in early primary states, and an official Perry campaign kickoff seems imminent. It would be Carney’s third run for the White House—this time with his hand-picked candidate. Fifteen years after he departed the national scene, Carney seems poised to unveil his masterpiece: a Rick Perry presidential campaign.
The two men couldn’t be more different in appearance and demeanor. Rick Perry hails from the West Texas town of Paint Creek—a long way from New Hampshire in every sense. He has charm, charisma and folksiness to spare. The governor is a well-known fitness buff with movie star looks and a friendly twang. In many ways he resembles a cowboy who wandered off the set of a John Wayne movie.
Carney, meanwhile, is bull-doggish and heavy-set. One 1996 article described him as “bear-sized.” His thick New England accent and cutting wit offer sharp contrasts to Perry. He has an “ability to understand someone’s weakness right away and make light of it,” said former U.S. Sen. John Sununu, before adding: “In a nice way.”
“I wouldn’t vote for me,” Carney once told The Boston Globe, “and I don’t know anybody else who would.” He made headlines in The Dallas Morning News in 2010 when he offended Sarah Palin, calling the logistics of a joint Perry-Palin event “the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.” He’s not exactly polished.
“He can swear like a trooper,” one of his former clients told me. “I’ve never heard a man say ‘fuck’ so many times in a minute.”
But beyond the superficial differences, the two men are more alike than not. They’re both small-town boys with intense political ambition. Both have fashioned themselves as political outsiders. And both have an apparent aversion to Washington, D.C.—the place they may ask voters to send them.
Perry has built much of his current political brand around dislike for D.C. and its people; between challenging the Environmental Protection Agency and criticizing the Obama administration, the governor has turned the word ‘Washington’ into almost a slur. Carney, meanwhile, clearly avoids the city by choice. He still lives in Hancock, New Hampshire, the town of 1,600 residents near where he grew up. He serves as an alternate on the town’s Transportation Zoning Authority. When that isn’t isolated enough, Carney can retreat to the private island he and his wife co-own with Texas lobbyist and former Perry chief of staff Mike Toomey on nearby Lake Winnipesaukee.
The pair’s outsider identities contrast starkly with the last Texas president. George W. Bush, of course, was the scion of a political dynasty, and the Bush and Perry camps have had a famously testy relationship. Bush consigliere Karl Rove helped bring Carney to Texas in 1998 to aid Perry, but the two campaigns soon soured on one another. Rove and the Bush team refused to let Perry go negative in his tight race. The Bushies wanted to make sure nothing depressed voter turnout; they wanted to highlight their man’s broad appeal and national electability.
Over the 13 years since, the resentment only worsened. Carney never endorsed Bush in the 2000 GOP primary. He is also often credited by political insiders for sculpting Perry’s public break with Bush. In 2007, Perry said Bush “has never ever been a fiscal conservative.” During Perry’s 2010 primary battle against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Perry-Bush split was clear in Rove’s widely observed influence on Hutchison’s campaign. In a New York Times story, Carney dismissed Hutchison and her ilk as “country club Republicans.”
The blue-blooded Bush camp disliked Perry’s brand of politics, its hard-ball flavor and backwoods feel. But liked or not, Perry and Carney have repeatedly proven how formidable their outsider brand can be.
The 2002 governor’s race gave Carney and Perry their first chance to prove themselves without Bush at the top of the ballot. Perry was finishing out the remainder of Bush’s term as governor and working to get elected in his own right. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Perry was up against Tony Sanchez, a Laredo businessman with very deep pockets. Sanchez would eventually outspend Perry by a 3-to-1 margin. In the world of politics, those numbers amount to daunting odds. But unleashed from the Rove-Bush dictates, Carney conducted a nasty, negative and stunningly effective campaign. Perry decimated Sanchez, winning more than 57 percent of the vote.
The Perry campaign famously aired ads linking Sanchez’s bank to money laundering by drug cartels. The racially charged ads infuriated Democrats. Carney didn’t seem to care. What mattered most was figuring out how to win the election. Mike Baselice, Perry’s longtime pollster, says Carney identified which messages would beat Sanchez early on, but waited until the end of the race to deliver them. Carney also wasn’t interested in guesswork. “My job was to figure out from the polling which messages worked the best,” Baselice said. “And there’s a reason, when we ran against Tony Sanchez, we talked about his failed savings and loans and drug kingpins laundering money through his bank. Because those were the best two messages in the poll we did.
“But we couldn’t put that on the air in June when Tony Sanchez was already attacking Perry. We had to wait until August when we finally had money to do it. Because once we went up, we wanted to stay up in a big way.” This, he says, is one of Carney’s greatest strengths—his willingness to hold off, to wait for the opportune moment and then go all in. He finds an opponent’s weakness and then exploits it with devastating effect.
Negative television ads are only part of Carney’s playbook. Those who have worked with him are in wide agreement that there’s no single mark to a Carney campaign. “When it comes to Carney’s campaign strategy, it’s ever-evolving,” says Reggie Bashur, a veteran Republican campaign consultant in Texas who’s known Carney for more than two decades. “No campaign is the same as the past. It always evolves.”
Tom Eaton might be the anti-Perry. He’s mild-mannered, averse to negative campaigning and, when he first met Carney in 1999, ran a successful funeral home in Keene, New Hampshire. Polite and well-liked, Eaton was a favorite among local Republicans, who recruited him to run for the New Hampshire state Senate in a special election. The stakes were high: Democrats held a two-seat majority over Republicans. A win in Keene would evenly divide the chamber. Eaton, Republicans decided, was the man to do it.
The problem was that Eaton had never even considered running for public office. Carney began calling Eaton’s office, trying to get an appointment. Eaton—who had no idea who Carney was or what he wanted—finally agreed to meet. “This vehicle pulls in and it has a two-digit license plate,” Eaton recalls. “This great big guy gets out and this other shorter guy get out. They kind of looked like Mutt and Jeff coming across the yard.”
This was Carney and his consulting firm partner James McKay. They tried to convince Eaton to run. Finally, Eaton, who needed to leave for a meeting, agreed to think about it. When he arrived back at his office he had three phone calls—one from the newspaper, one from a radio station, and one from Congressman Charlie Bass, congratulating Eaton on his decision to enter the race.
“Dave Carney ran the whole race and he made all the difference in the world,” Eaton says. “He was prepared for everything. He foresaw the future and was prepared for it. And prepared you for it.” Carney was prepared when Eaton’s opponent began airing a blisteringly negative ad, only a few days before the election, arguing the funeral director’s education plan would leave citizens bankrupt and homeless.
Carney hit back fast. He had to respond without employing an attack ad that would undermine Eaton’s mild-mannered image. “We basically were going to lose the race,” Eaton says. “Dave Carney put together an ad program in just two days time and played it, and we won.” The ad attacked Eaton’s opponent for going negative. “It was a woman’s voice and it was basically, ‘How do you build yourself up just to tear somebody else down?’”
It was perhaps a little odd coming from a consultant known for tearing opponents down, but Carney played to Eaton’s strengths and won the race. Within a few years, Eaton had risen to the presidency of the New Hampshire Senate—a position Carney helped him attain. “He was very good at molding me,” Eaton says. “He was tough, he was straightforward, he was thorough.”
Carney began experimenting with Internet campaigns early. In 2001, three years before Howard Dean’s website exploded, Carney started DraftSununu.com. The site was part of a larger effort to clear the way for then-Congressman John E. Sununu (the son of Carney’s mentor) to enter the U.S. Senate primary race in New Hampshire against controversial Republican incumbent Bob Smith. Carney bragged that the site received more than 1,000 views in its first two weeks—big numbers for 2001. Right-wing activists mobilized around Sununu, who went on to win the Senate seat in 2002. It was an example of Carney’ s willingness to try anything to win.
Occasionally Carney’s approach has landed him in legal trouble. He has long been affiliated with the group Americans for Job Security—a corporate-funded nonprofit whose attack ads strike fear in the hearts of Democrats and moderate Republicans alike. (The group reported Carney as its “chief executive” in 2002. More recently, he’s been identified as a “consultant.”) As a nonprofit, the group enjoys an enviable position—it can run incredibly negative ads against candidates without disclosing who’s paying for them. That’s because the group calls its ads “issue advocacy,” exploiting a legal loophole that allows corporate front groups to meddle in elections under the guise of education. Little is known about Americans for Job Security. The group began in 1997 with a million-dollar donation from the American Insurance Association. The group claims its goal is simply to inform voters, not to change electoral outcomes.
Voters get quite an education. In 2004, then-Texas state Rep. Tommy Merritt, a Longview Republican who occasionally voted with Democrats in the state House, found himself targeted by Americans for Job Security in his bid for state Senate. It was one of several Texas races that Carney’s nonprofit has waded into during Perry’s decade as governor. The group aired negative television ads that ended, “That’s Tommy Merritt. Stupid bills and higher taxes.” Merritt lost the race to a young Republican mayor of a nearby town. The ads skirted close to the legal line. Third-party groups and nonprofits can legally advocate for issues, but they can’t engage in electioneering for or against a candidate.
“I think [Carney] plays very close to the line and sometimes crosses the line without being penalized,” said Kathy Sullivan, the former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair and a longtime Carney foe. “To me it’s pretty obvious they are engaged in political advocacy. They seem to break the rules with impunity.” The group’s ads have only once led to legal consequences. In 2002, the Alaska Public Offices Commission fined Americans for Jobs Security, saying the group improperly tried to influence Alaska elections.
That wasn’t the only time Carney was accused of breaking the rules. In 2005 Carney narrowly avoided charges from the Federal Election Commission. He, his wife, and his partner James McKay had worked to get Ralph Nader on the 2004 New Hampshire ballot, hoping to rob votes from Democrat John Kerry. The question was whether Carney’s firm, Norway Hill, had paid for the signature drive to put Nader on the ballot, which would have violated campaign finance law. The federal agency’s general counsel report concluded that Carney had “knowingly and willfully” violated the law. Ultimately, however, prosecutors chose not to pursue the case, and by August 2005 the complaint had been dismissed.
Such run-ins have earned Carney a reputation for bare-knuckle politics. He’s willing to try whatever works and, perhaps more impressively, to scrap those things that don’t work. “We don’t do it enough after elections,” Baselice says. “We sit around the next day and say ‘I bet this worked’ or ‘that worked.’” Carney’s brilliance, the pollster says, comes from his willingness to discover what does work and let go of what doesn’t. Carney cares only about what will win votes. His colleagues already knew that. But it wasn’t until 2010 that they saw just how willing Carney was to throw out many of his assumptions about campaigning simply to win a race.
In 2010, Carney and Perry faced their toughest race yet. U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, one of Texas’ most popular elected officials, challenged Perry in the GOP gubernatorial primary. Early polling showed Hutchison leading Perry by 20 points. She had not only popularity, but the ability to raise money in Washington and Texas. (She would end up raising more than $22 million for the primary, according to Texans for Public Justice.) The presence in the race of Tea Party candidate Debra Medina meant Perry faced challengers from both the left and right in the same primary. Consensus among politicos posited that the only way Perry could win would be an overtly negative campaign leading to a low-turnout primary. Even then, most experts expected a run-off.
But Carney had his own plan, and it meant turning the conventional wisdom on its head. He was confident it would work. He had the data to prove it.
He’d run the experiments four years earlier. Heading into Perry’s 2006 reelection campaign, Carney picked up a book to read on a plane—Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. When he finished reading he promptly ordered copies for everyone he worked with. Then he called one of the authors, Yale political scientist Donald Green. Like many others who read the book, Carney was shocked by its findings: That old-fashioned, door-to-door campaigning is the most efficient way to turn out voters. Volunteer phone calls are pretty good too. But television ads, mailers and robocalls—the mainstays of modern campaigns and moneymakers for political consultants—have virtually no impact on voter turnout.
Carney wanted to test the book’s conclusions. He invited Green and his co-author Alan Gerber, as well as the University of Texas at Austin’s Daron Shaw and the University of Maryland’s James Gimpel to come experiment on Perry’s campaign. First they ran some minor fundraising experiments. “At the end of 2005,” Green says, “our ambitions grew larger.” The professors were invited to test the impact of the Perry campaign’s strategies.
Up close, Green saw the inner workings of the campaign, and just how central Carney was. “It is a very interesting leadership style,” the academic noted. “He can be very acerbic. Very funny. He has a long memory for all of the missteps of the people around him. He doesn’t mind reminding them of things they’ve done in the past that didn’t work so well. He’s able to get quite a lot of work out of them by continually reminding them that they could do better.”
By 2010, Carney’s team had completely transformed its approach. The professors’ experiments had convinced Carney that grassroots organizing was well worth the money. Television ads, the professors found, had short-lived impact. Robocalls had no impact at all. Carney suspected that campaigns used television ads, mailers and robocalls simply out of habit, not because they were particularly effective. So Carney and his team began to craft an enormous grassroots network of Perry supporters.
Green called it a “a bold new model” that “essentially reinvented the precinct captain model of the 1890s.” The Perry campaign invited supporters to become “home headquarters,” which basically meant volunteering to get 12 pro-Perry voters to the polls. The campaign website offered tips on how to attract these 12 voters. There was no direct mail. The campaign didn’t even seek editorial endorsements. “We actually found out that newspaper endorsements—particularly in the Republican primary—would make people less likely to vote for a candidate than more likely to vote for a candidate,” Baselice explained.
Some were skeptical; the Perry campaign was altering much of the political playbook. But on primary day an unprecedented 1.5 million people turned out. and Perry won with more than 50 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff and reversing much of what political consultants thought they knew about running a successful campaign. The general election wasn’t much closer—Perry walloped Democrat Bill White by more than 12 percentage points.
The 2010 race demonstrates just how much trust Perry has in Carney. The plan was risky. “Putting quite a lot of money into grassroots organizing, especially early grassroots organizing, is something that was not done in years past,” Green said. But Baselice says that at this point Perry has total faith in his team. He doesn’t second-guess. He doesn’t interfere. Perry “relies on the campaign team and he trusts us. That’s a relationship that’s built up over the years with Dave.”
If he runs for president, Perry will have to rely on Carney like never before. Time is running short for Perry’s 2012 presidential ambitions. An August announcement is late in the game, leaving scant time for fundraising and organizing. Perry has never run a national campaign, faced a national press corps or suffered broad scrutiny. But Carney has. And anyone familiar with Carney’s work can guess that the strategic decisions have already been made, a plan is in place, and Perry has only to give the word.
Some Texas political insiders believe that Carney has been plotting a Perry presidential run since 2006. He’s certainly steered his candidate into an enviable political position. Perry can credibly run as an anti-Washington outsider. He literally wrote a book— Fed Up!—about his distaste for the federal government. And Perry holds wide appeal within the Republican Party. He is deeply religious and will hold a “day of prayer and fasting” in Houston on Aug. 6, and he also has longstanding ties with the Texas business community. He might bridge the divide between Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney—the leading GOP contenders of the moment.
The next stages of Carney’s plan are already becoming clear. Perry’s team has reportedly begun recruiting organizers in Iowa, and Americans for Job Security has started running ads in New Hampshire—a state Carney knows well—lauding the governor’s Texas record.
The rest of Carney’s game plan may not be evident just yet, and it may not even be successful. But Carney undoubtedly has it mapped out six moves ahead. As one Texas political operative told me, most good consultants play a good game of checkers. They have a general strategy and react to each move one by one. But that’s not Carney. “Dave Carney,” the consultant said, “plays a superior game of chess.”
I wish the leader of the nacogdoches Democrats would identify himself with the DEMOCRAT party there is not a democratic party.