Herman: With GOP’s Texas-sized win streak on the line, Rick Perry rides again

BULVERDE —There was something potentially bookend-ish going on Wednesday evening on the Hooey Stage at Tejas Ranch, a restaurant/bar/entertainment venue/wedding venue/riding stable/maybe some other things I missed at the sprawling site.

There was ol’ Rick Perry (you remember him) doing what he’s always been best at: stumpin’.

Lithe and limber at age 70, our ex-governor brought the fire on behalf of his longtime friend U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Hays County, and his foe-turned-boss Donald J. Trump.

Perhaps more than any other Texas politician, Perry personifies the political path Texas has been on for a generation or so. He was there playing offense in 1990 when he morphed from a conservative Democratic state rep from Haskell into a successful Republican candidate for state ag commissioner as Texas advanced from solid blue to briefly purple to dependably deep, deep red.

In 1998, Perry eked out a 1.85-point win over fellow Aggie John Sharp to become lite guv. And Perry became gov in 2000 after George W. Bush won a court fight that gave Bush another government job.

Perry then was elected in 2002 (by 18 points), re-elected in 2006 (by 9 points in a four-way race) and in 2010 (by 20 points) as the Repubs continued their undefeated streak in statewide races since the Dems won seven in 1994.

But here — at a Roy rally that started with area resident Ken Dockery’s invocation that began with “I’m here to tell you our God’s bigger than their God” — was Perry, perhaps bookending the start of GOP dominance by playing defense in what Texas Dems believe can be the year The Streak ends.

It’s a notion backed by some new numbers in a Quinnipiac University poll released hours before Perry’s speech. Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are tied in Texas, the poll said.

So, at a rural Comal County outpost of Trump Country, there was Perry on a day when Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy was telling the world that “Biden and Trump find themselves in a Texas standoff, setting the stage for a bare knuckle battle for 38 electoral votes.”

You have to be even older than Perry to remember when anybody with any credibility said anything like that about Texas as voting was underway in a presidential race. But that was the state of play in this state as Perry hit the Hooey Stage.

(Brief interruption: The Hooey Stage is named for Hooey, a nearby apparel company. Hooey also can refer to a knot a cowboy uses to finish tying a calf’s legs. But you, city dweller, adhere to the dictionary definition of hooey as “silly or worthless talk, nonsense, bunk.”)

Perry was urgent about the 2020 stakes as he roused the Grand Ol’ Party crowd of several hundred that looked like something from the Good Ol’ Days, overwhelmingly maskless and socially undistanced in a covered pavilion with no sides.

“If the Democrats take over the presidency, the House and the Senate, you’ll see your Second Amendment rights out the door, folks,” Perry said. “There will be chaos in our streets.”

That, of course, is as opposed to chaos in the White House, a factor that, coincidentally, Perry and former President Barack Obama were talking about at about the same time Wednesday evening.

Obama in Philadelphia: “That’s not normal presidential behavior. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a coach. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. We wouldn’t tolerate it in our family, except for maybe crazy uncle somewhere. I mean, why would we expect and accept this from the president of the United States? And why are folks making excuses for that? ‘Oh, well, that’s just him.’ No. There are consequences to these actions. They embolden other people to be cruel and divisive and racist, and it frays the fabric of our society, and it affects how our children see things. And it affects the ways that our families get along. It affects how the world looks at America. That behavior matters. Character matters.”

Perry in Bulverde: “You know from time to time I'll run into somebody and they'll be, there's a lot of, you know, ‘I just I don't think I can vote for Donald Trump. He tweets bad or he says this or he does that.’ And I told them, I said, ‘Quit it. Stop it. Your feelings aren't more important than this country.’ And that's what people need to understand. Your feelings are not more important than this country.”

Wednesday evening on the Hooey Stage, it was hard not to recall Perry’s role in the GOP takeover of Texas and wonder whether we were seeing him at what could be the beginning of the end of that era.

It’s something many have seen coming for years. Many thought it could already have been here if more people voted.

Post-speech, Perry expressed confidence about 2020.

“I think the Republican Party of Texas got a little bit complacent,” he told me. “When you win every statewide office since 1996, then we need to kind of maybe build our bench back up.”

“I still think it will be a sweep from top to bottom in Texas,” he said.

But why do polls and political scientists now tell us Perry could be wrong?

University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray said it well in a recent Washington Post story headlined: “Texas is the most intriguing political state in the country this fall.”

Murray was talking about how Texas suburbs, long dependable GOP terrain, had come to be in play. One reason, said Murray, is the man whom Perry had called “a cancer on conservatism” and “a barking carnival act” when he and Trump sought the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

“He was the monster built in the basement of Democratic Party headquarters,” Murray said of Trump, for whom Perry went to work as energy secretary. “I think he just accelerated the change in the state so much more than would have happened with any kind of normal Republican.”

Key phrase: “Any kind of normal Republican.”

And that ain’t no hooey.