Former Texas governor Rick Perry exuded a mixture of defiance and nonchalance at a news conference in Austin on Wednesday as he said that the latest setback in his attempt to fight felony abuse of power charges will not derail his likely 2016 presidential run.
His mood was consistent with his public demeanor in recent months, but Texas swagger is less useful to Perry’s White House ambitions than the ability of his costly legal team to find a way to make the charges against him vanish by the summer.
The Iowa straw poll, an important momentum-builder for Republican candidates, will take place in August. But on Tuesday a judge refused to throw out the case against Perry, increasing the likelihood that when Republican voters start to think seriously about choosing their favourites, the former Texas governor will still have the shadow of a court case and possible prison sentence hanging over him, draining the sunlight from his campaign.
There is no obvious frontrunner, and other putative contenders such as New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker have themselves been mired in scandal. Still, in a wide field of hopefuls – and bearing in mind that Perry has already tried for the White House and failed – there appears no overpowering reason for Republican primary voters to back a man who might be wearing an orange prison-issue jumpsuit by election day in November 2016.
Steve Scheffler, an influential Republican national committee member from Iowa, said he doubted that voters in the state would hold Perry’s court case against him, even if it drags on throughout this year.
“I think most people, what they know of it, know that it’s a bogus charge. I don’t see that’s a hindrance at all to his potential run here, if that’s indeed what he does,” he told the Guardian.
It has been a strange period of progress and setbacks for Perry since last summer, when he was indicted by a grand jury on charges of abuse of power and coercion of a public servant stemming from his vetoing $7.5m in funding for an anti-corruption unit in an attempt to force the resignation of Austin’s district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, after she was arrested for drunk driving.
Perry has acknowledged that he was ill-prepared for his first tilt at the White House and has said that he was affected during the campaign by back pain. His 2012 bid, already faltering after a show of support for educating undocumented children, went down badly with many conservatives, was finally euthanised by a simple slip-up, when during a debate he forgot the name of one of three federal agencies he planned to abolish.
“I think the people who’ve seen him on the stump have seen a Rick Perry that’s a lot more polished than when he ran for president,” Scheffler said from Iowa. “He’s got a shot here if he sets up a good infrastructure and works hard.”
During his quiet final months as Texas governor, Perry devoted time to laying the groundwork for a second bid: travelling the country to make speeches, surrounding himself with experienced advisors and setting up RickPAC, a fundraiser designed to help like-minded Republicans win elections. He said he plans to formally announce whether he is running or not in May or June.
“It looks like it’s having zero impact on his ability to campaign,” Texas GOP chairman Steve Munisteri told Politico. “Where it becomes problematic is if we have a field of 15 or 20, or even 10 or 12. If you have so many choices to pick from, and none of the other choices have, as a negative, an unresolved legal matter, that’s when it begins to hurt.”
Perry can ill-afford to go on trial. He currently stands in 10th in the Real Clear Politics average of leading opinion polls of the Republican presidential field, ahead of only Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and Ohio governor John Kasich among leading contenders for the nomination.
Ted Cruz, a Tea Party darling and US senator also from Texas, publicly backed Perry this week, but Cruz’s own presidential ambitions represent a problem. If both declare for 2016 they will be fighting for the same sector of the vote, and the same donors: religious, Obama-hating, ultra conservatives who are passionate about border security and limits on the powers of the federal government.
Still, Perry was in bullish form last week at the Iowa Freedom Summit, when he delivered a well-received speech that was disrupted by pro-immigration protesters.
The 64-year-old reworked his image last year. He shelved the cowboy boots, added a smart pair of glasses, and even talked about moving to California – the gun-restricting, gay marriage-legalising, high-taxing state that Texas Republicans love to hate.
The crisis of unaccompanied minors at the Texas border returned Perry to countrywide prominence, as he appeared on national media to denounce the Obama administration’s immigration policies and pledged to beef up security himself by sending in the National Guard.
He even seemed to turn the potential embarrassment of being formally booked at an Austin courthouse into a positive, giving a rousing speech outside the building as supporters cheered and he railed against “a political act” that he called “a chilling restraint on the right to free speech”. Then, after posing for a mugshot, Perry went for ice cream.
Perry has repeatedly argued that he was within his rights as governor to make the veto and has sought to depict the charges as a witch-hunt rooted in the political make-up of Austin, the Democratic-leaning capital of a mostly blood-red state.
But no matter how many tub-thumping speeches he might give, the often snail-like pace of the Texas judicial system is out of Perry’s control. And the longer the accusations linger, the harder it is to dismiss them as spurious and political. Bert Richardson, the district judge who declined to throw out the case, is a Republican.
“Some of the partisan venom has been taken out of this,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science associate professor at the University of Houston who specialises in the dynamics of political scandals. “This clearly implies the judicial system is taking the charges seriously and they are not frivolous and inconsequential.”
Rottinghaus said that while most serious candidates are able to generate buzz and high-profile endorsements and raise copious funds as a race heats up, one of the keys to success is the support of a relatively small number of influential local party figures in early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire: activists who put “the puzzle pieces on the ground” together and sway votes that set the tone and momentum.
And if Perry’s legal problems are not over soon, they may decide that supporting him is more trouble than it’s worth. “I think that point will come probably sooner rather than later,” Rottinghaus said.
