COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — A swaggering Rick Perry parachuted into Iowa last summer at the top of the GOP presidential field with a job-creation message, an off-the-cuff speaking style and a fledgling campaign organization. He quickly nosedived.

Lately, a more humble Texas governor has been trying to claw his way back into contention with a much different approach.

He has tailored his pitch to tea party activists and religious conservatives, replacing a bus emblazoned with “Get America Working Again” with one carrying the slogan “Faith, Jobs, Freedom.” He is more disciplined and less free-wheeling when he talks with voters than he was when he suggested, on his first visit here, that the Federal Reserve chairman may be committing treason. And he’s beefed up his campaign staff with presidential veterans and targeted his travel to key conservative regions.

“I ask you to do more than just attend this rally and I ask you to do more than just sign up for my campaign at tables in the back of this room. I ask you to brave the weather on Jan. 3,” Perry pleaded during a recent stop here — his second to this conservative, western Iowa town in as many weeks. In a new TV ad, he says: “As we’ve traveled across the state, I’ve been humbled by your dedication” and asks voters for help.

Perry has repeated that plea over the past few weeks in breakfast diners, town squares and coffee shops, planting himself in parts of Iowa filled with religious voters in hopes that a retooled campaign message that sells him as the only candidate who is a Christian conservative and a Washington outsider will resonate with a chunk of the electorate that’s still undecided or willing to change their minds before the caucuses Tuesday night.

“If we replace a Democratic insider with a Republican insider, do you think we’re really going to change Washington, D.C.? No way,” Perry says everywhere he goes. “I am the anti-establishment outsider who goes to Washington with a sense of purpose. And that purpose is to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can make it.”

Used to comebacks

Maybe it’s because he’s used to being counted out _ so much so that longtime Texas journalist R.G. Ratcliffe (whose blog is called “Rick PerrySphere”) has called him “the forever underestimated candidate.”

Maybe it’s because despite what polls or pundits or even the public may say, Perry has shown he can face any opponent and win. He hasn’t lost an election in his 26 years in public office.

Or maybe it’s because he never really expected to be where he is today. He’s ad farm kid who went on to become the longest-serving governor of Texas and has a shot at winning the Republican nomination for president.

“I mean, I’m a boy from Paint Creek, Texas,” he says.

Yes, underdog seems to suit him just fine.

Perry’s roots

They call it the Big Empty for a reason, that quiet slice of rolling plains in north-central Texas where Perry was born and raised. It’s a place of farms but few people, characterized by hard work and close families, football and faith.

It’s the kind of place that shapes a boy but makes a man want more, out of determination or boredom or, in Perry’s case, a bit of both.

Ask those who know Perry well what not only drives him but defines him, and all fingers point to Paint Creek.

He lived there as a child and an adult, bookends of his years before politics. For Perry the boy, he would later write, it was “paradise.”

“I had thousands of acres to explore, a dog I called my own, and a Shetland pony.” He did what boys do without the diversions of city life: School, chores, church, Boy Scouts and football (Perry played quarterback on a six-man team).

But “paradise,” in reality, was arduous. Perry’s father was a dryland cotton farmer whose livelihood depended upon Mother Nature’s mood. The Perrys didn’t have much in the way of money, especially early on. Their first house didn’t even have indoor plumbing.

“You’re going to an outhouse until your 5 years old? That tells you everything you need to know,” says Bill Miller, a Texas political consultant who has known Perry some 15 years.

“This is a guy that grew up poor and looked at every opportunity as, `I’d better grab it.’ If you put a plate of food in front of a hungry person, they get after it,” says Miller. “The metaphor is: He’s been hungry, and he looks at opportunity as something he needs to grab.”

 

In Paint Creek, Perry found men to emulate, who taught him about honor and service. His beloved scoutmaster was a Texas A&M graduate, an ex-Army officer and served on the Paint Creek school board. Perry would follow in his footsteps to the same college and his own stint in the military before turning to politics.

Back home, he also found love with a girl named Anita. As children, they sat next to each other at a piano recital. As teenagers, they went on their first date to a football game. Over time, they would fall in love. Many years later, in 1982, they would marry. “His smile,” says Anita Thigpen Perry, “won my heart.”

More than anything, Perry found himself in Paint Creek _ when, at 27 years old, he returned home from traveling the world as an Air Force pilot to work with his dad on the farm.

He’d been gone almost a decade, spending four years at Texas A&M University, a conservative school deeply rooted in tradition and focused on the military and agriculture.

Perry served in the Corps of Cadets, the student military organization where freshman with scratched belt buckles were ordered to drop and do pushups. He was also one of five “yell leaders” _ chosen by a vote of the entire student body _ who guided Aggie fans in spirit yells during athletics events.

Perry wanted to be a veterinarian, but his grades weren’t up to snuff, so he joined the Air Force after graduation and flew C-130 tactical planes to South America and Saudi Arabia. It was the first time he’d really experienced life outside of his sheltered existence.

In 1977, once his commission was up and Perry was still trying to figure out what to do with his life, it made returning home to Paint Creek that much harder.

Of that time, Perry writes in his book “On My Honor,” “Dad still thought I was there to do chores. I reminded him that I had just finished commanding a multimillion-dollar piece of government equipment. … He reminded me that the chores still needed tending to.”

It happened to also be a drought period, and so Perry interviewed for a job as a pilot at Southwest Airlines. When the rains finally came, Perry passed on the pilot’s job and stayed on, working with his father for several more years. Then boredom and happenstance _ the retirement of the state representative in his rural district _ drove him to a new calling.