Perry, then 34, served five years as a Democrat in the Texas House. Then, in 1989, he became a Republican, recruited by Karl Rove and other GOP leaders who saw him as a rising star in a state shifting to the right.
Perry’s years as a Democratic lawmaker - during which he voted for one of the largest tax increases in Texas history, backed a pay raise for legislators, and endorsed Al Gore for president - are drawing national scrutiny now that he is a front-runner for the Republican nomination.
But Perry was no liberal. Interviews with people who knew him at the time reveal a man who was conservative and grew more so, and a man who shrewdly anticipated the opportunities he could seize if he became a Republican in a state swinging toward the GOP.
Some in Texas say Perry, now 61 and the longest-serving governor in Texas history, merely changed his lapel pin, so to speak. “I don’t think he ever changed his politics,’’ said Wallar Overton, 72, the Democratic precinct chair in Perry’s hometown of Paint Creek, who has known Perry since he was a mischievous Boy Scout. “I just think he fit better there, and got more money and support there.’’
Perry’s switch to the GOP stunned and upset many in the solidly Democratic swath of West Texas cotton country where Perry grew up and where some hard feelings persist. Some see a changed man openly professing his faith as he courts Christian conservatives - something he never did in his early days.
“He is nowhere the same,’’ said Stenholm, 72, who served in Congress from 1979 until 2005, when a redistricting plan approved under Perry cost him his seat. “He changed philosophically. I don’t remember that he put his Christianity on his sleeve and ran on it. I know he felt more, at that time, that religion was a private affair, and should not be publicized, and he did not do it, and his family did not do it. He did not use that as a political act.’’
Perry, however, is hardly the only Texan to have quit the Democratic Party at the time.
