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Things You Need to Know About Rick Perry

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

From Cosmopolitan

On March 2, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was confirmed as the secretary of energy. In his role, he is responsible for the country's nuclear weapons program, radioactive waste disposal, and energy conservation and production.

Here's what you need to know about Rick Perry:

1. He is the longest-serving governor in Texas state history.

Perry started in Texas politics in 1985, as a member of the Texas House of Representatives. He also served as the agriculture commissioner of Texas and the lieutenant governor of the state under George W. Bush. Perry assumed the office of governor in 2000 when Bush became president. He decided not to seek re-election for a fourth term and retired in 2015.

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

2. He ran for president twice.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Perry was considered a front-runner in the race but dropped out after five months. In 2015, Perry announced that he would be running again. He entered a crowded field. Perry ended his candidacy three months later.

3. He infamously vowed to dismantle the department that he now oversees.

One of his biggest gaffes during the 2012 campaign - arguably the misstep that killed any chances he had of becoming president - happened during a debate in November 2011. "I will tell you, it's three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: commerce, education, and the, uh, what's the third one there? Let's see," he said. He sputtered awkwardly for nearly a minute before admitting, "the third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops."

Later in the debate, Perry remembered which federal agency he wanted to get rid of: It was the Department of Energy.

4. When he accepted the energy secretary nomination, he did not know what the department does.

According to the New York Times, Perry thought the job would mean representing the country's oil and gas industry, not overseeing its nuclear program. A source who worked with Perry on the transition told the Times, "If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, 'I want to be an advocate for energy.' If you asked him now, he'd say, 'I'm serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.' It's been a learning curve."

5. His Texas roots run deep.

Perry is a fifth-generation Texan whose great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy, according to Vanity Fair. The Perrys have been cotton farmers, cattle ranchers, and local politicians of West Texas ever since. Perry himself briefly worked with his father on the family farm after graduating from Texas A&M and serving in the Air Force. "He's expert at Texas bullshit," the lobbyist Bill Miller told Vanity Fair. Miller also recalled Perry once putting out a campaign poster in which he was pictured "wearing chaps, feet up on a bale of hay, his crotch front and center."

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

6. He used to be a Democrat.

Until 1989, Perry was a Democrat, having "never met a Republican" until he was 25. He even organized in support of an Al Gore presidency. At the end of Perry's third term in the Texas House, the state started going Republican. The lobbyist Bill Miller told Vanity Fair that Perry "had gone as far as he could go as a Democrat. He was fucked. Just fucked." With Karl Rove's help, a newly Republican Perry ran against Texas's Democratic agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower, and won. A Republican strategist told Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, "Perry is a really, really good politician. He understood where the state of Texas was going."

7. He criticized Trump during the campaign but later endorsed him.

After Perry dropped out of the 2016 presidential race, he endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz. He was unequivocal in his criticism of Trump. In July 2015, Perry said of Trump, "He is without substance when one scratches below the surface. He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken - Donald Trump's candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded."

In May 2016, Perry grudgingly offered his support to Trump. "He is not a perfect man," Perry said. "But what I do believe is that he loves this country and he will surround himself with capable, experienced people and he will listen to them."

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

8. He has expressed skepticism about the role of humans in climate change.

When he was asked in an interview with Parade in 2011 whether he had read or seen An Inconvenient Truth, about Al Gore's campaign to educate on the impacts of global warming, Perry replied, "I generally don't watch or read a lot of fiction."

"Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice the country, and I believe a disservice to the world," he said in 2014. He is viewed as an enemy of the Environmental Protection Agency.

On June 19, 2017, in an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box, he denied that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of climate change. "[M]ost likely the primary control knob [for the temperature of Earth and for climate] is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in," he said. The Center for Biological Diversity quickly responded that he was wrong. “Perry has the science exactly backward,” Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the center, said. “Far from being climate change’s key cause, the world’s oceans are actually another victim of greenhouse pollution.”

9. He was a birther.

He got caught up in the "movement" in 2011, when he said that the racially motivated question of whether Barack Obama was born in the United States was "a good issue to keep alive" and that it was "fun to poke" the president. Perry also had the below exchange with Parade magazine.

Governor, do you believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States?
I have no reason to think otherwise.

That's not a definitive, "Yes, I believe he" -
Well, I don’t have a definitive answer, because he’s never seen my birth certificate.

But you've seen his.
I don't know. Have I?

You don't believe what’s been released?
I don't know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night.

And?
That came up.

And he said?
He doesn't think it's real.

After briefly playing the birther game, Perry stated Obama was an American citizen: "I have no doubt about it."

10. His family's hunting camp was said to have an extremely racist name.

The Washington Post reported in 2011 that in front of the entrance to Perry's family hunting camp in West Texas stood a large rock painted with the camp's alleged name, "Niggerhead." The camp was called that before the Perrys got there, according to the Post, but it "did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor." Perry stated that the camp's reported name was an "offensive name that has no place in the modern world." He claimed that his parents painted over the rock in the '80s, but seven other people from the area remembered otherwise.

11. He has expressed homophobic views.

Perry, a Baptist, said in a 2011 campaign ad that "there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." When questioned by a bisexual teen about his position, Perry said, "This is about my faith, and I happen to think, you know, there are a whole hosts of sins. Homosexuality being one of them, and I'm a sinner and so I'm not going to be the first one to throw a stone."

He also compared homosexuality to alcoholism and suggested that being gay was a lifestyle choice. "Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that. I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way." Facing criticism for his statements, Perry said, "I readily admit - I stepped right in it."

12. He has authored two books.

Perry wrote his first book, On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For, in 2008. He was a Boy Scout and achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, an achievement so great that in 2015, he said, "I may be applying for a job in the future, so I want them to know I was an Eagle Scout." In the book, according to the New Republic, Perry targets the ACLU, which has criticized the Boy Scouts of America's discriminatory practices, such as excluding openly gay members from leadership roles.

His second book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington, written in 2010, was meant to appeal to Tea Party Republicans. Perry had to backtrack on some of his positions during the 2012 campaign - such as his assessment that Social Security was a "failure" - and was ridiculed for his flip-flopping.

13. He has been accused of corruption and cronyism.

Perry was indicted in 2014 on felony charges of abuse of power. Perry was accused of threatening to veto funding for the public corruption unit in district attorney Rosemary Lehmberg's office unless she resigned after her arrest on a drunk-driving charge. A year and a half later, all the charges against him were dismissed.

Additionally, Perry heavily favored donors during his tenure as governor. "Over three terms in office, Mr. Perry’s administration has doled out grants, tax breaks, contracts and appointments to hundreds of his most generous supporters and their businesses," wrote the New York Times in an investigation of contributions to Perry's campaigns. "Austin has undergone an old-style revision to 'pay-for-play' government; there is a widespread perception that anyone who wants something from government must contribute to Perry," wrote Vanity Fair. Rolling Stone went further, calling Perry "The Best Little Whore in Texas," and citing Texans for Public Justice data that showed that "Perry appointed 921 of his donors and their spouses to government posts over the past decade. All told, those appointees gave a staggering $17 million to his campaigns - 21 percent of the entire amount he raised during that time."

14. He is on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, which is constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Like Trump, Perry is invested in the DAPL. Perry's connections could be seen as a conflict of interest but that did not stop Trump from selecting him for the energy secretary post.

Perry has long been a friend to big oil and the feeling is mutual. According to Think Progress, the biggest donors to Perry's first presidential campaign were from the oil and gas industry.

15. He was a contestant on Dancing With the Stars.

"Rick has never danced before in his life so we're building his dancing up from the bottom up," said his partner, Emma Slater. "People are probably watching this going, 'What a dumbass,'" Perry said. His first routine, a cha-cha choreographed to "God Blessed Texas," earned him a total score of 20 (he got five out of 10 from each of the four judges). Len Goodman called the dance "pedestrian."

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

He was kicked off early in the season but returned for the holiday-themed finale, where he danced in the opening number in a bright red jacket.

16. He serves on the National Security Council.

On April 5, 2017, the big news was that White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was removed from the National Security Council. But the same day, it was also revealed that Perry had been added to the council's principals committee. The national intelligence director Dan Coats, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, CIA director Mike Pompeo, and the UN ambassador Nikki Haley were also added to the NSC.

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