According to On My Honor, Perry and Michael Dukakis once had a conversation.
Is there anything for a liberal to love in this Eagle Scout? Well, sure. Pretty typical of what keeps conservatives up at night. Even the whole math movement has apparently run roughshod over, you know, normal arithmetic. Psychiatrists are overdrugging America’s kids. Everywhere, Perry sees an assault on his wholesome Scouts the judiciary and the ivory tower are both stacked with liberal relativists. His biggest bugaboo might be the American Civil Liberties Union, the individual-rights organization, which has been particularly litigious when it comes to the Scouts. Atheists and gay activists are the most threatening. Besides that turncoat Romney, there are bullies everywhere. He’ll vigorously defend the Scouts no matter who the perceived enemy might be. Perry’s view of the outside world hasn’t changed too much since then. Rick got along with the foreigners, as we called them.” “I remember the first night there-Rick wasn’t in my tent-New Mexico Scouts started throwing things at us. Needless to say, the Texas Scouts weren’t too popular,” says Couch. President Lyndon Baines Johnson went, too.
In 1964 Perry joined the Scouts’ National Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pa. They went to College Station for football games, where Perry fell hard for Texas A&M, Overton’s alma mater. Couch and a couple of buddies sneaked into a hotel, where they rode an elevator for the first time. Overton not only helped Perry and his friends earned their badges he also opened up a world outside Paint Creek. “He had a board of education,” Couch says. Riley Couch, a Dallas banker who came up with Perry, recalls how Overton administered justice. Overton could have descended from Mount Sinai.
On the Overtona’ 500-acre farm, Rick and the boys would run ragged. The man to see in Paint Creek was scoutmaster Gene Overton, a “cigar-chewing, pickup-driving, cow-counting, tractor-driving farmer,” his son Mike Overton, a veterinary doctor, tells The Daily Beast. His father called the place Big Empty, and Scouting filled the void. Perry is from the fly-speck town of Paint Creek, Texas. “You may be wondering,” Perry writes, “‘why would the governor of the second largest state choose to write his very first book about the Boy Scouts?” Yes, why? Because if you want to understand Rick Perry, the man, you'd better get to know Rick Perry, the Boy Scout.
From the book’s beginning, Perry’s horse sense is on full display. Rick Perry is the first, and I’ll bet my bugling badge the last, presidential candidate ever to write a whole book in praise of Scouting. But it’s safe to say we’ve never had a presidential wannabe with such affection for the outdoors program. See Democrat Dick Gephardt, who earned his medal in 1955. We’ve had Eagle Scouts scarf down corn dogs in Iowa mud patches, too. Kennedy was a member of Bronxville, N.Y.’s Troop 2 when his family lived there. Young Jerry Ford earned the honor in 1927. We’ve even had an Eagle Scout in the White House before. Perry isn’t the first candidate to go from Scouting to stumping. Those millions make for a good start to a grassroots campaign, even if most of the Scouts aren’t old enough to enter the voting booth. Many of those families likely appreciate Perry’s rectitude and his steadfast defense of their uniformed youth. Today, there are 2.7 million Boy Scouts and more than 1 million adult volunteers involved in 115,000 units. Perry writes in the book: “Whether pressure from gay rights groups caused Olympic organizers to resist volunteer assistance from Scouts, we know that Romney, as a political candidate in the politically liberals state of Massachusetts, has parted ways with the Scouts on its policies over the involvement of gay individuals in Scout activities.” Adding insult to injury, neither Perry nor any other Scout booster heard a peep from Romney about the dis, Perry says in his 2008 book, On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For, an ode to America’s Scouting youth.Įven worse? Romney had the same squishiness into his first campaign, a 1994 run against Sen. In 2000 the Supreme Court had ruled that the Boy Scouts could legally exclude open homosexuals from their ranks. In Perry’s account, Romney, a fellow Eagle Scout, nixed a plan to allow Olympic workers to stay at a Scout camp because the Olympic bureaucrats were scared of protest. You don’t get in the way of America’s Tiger Cubs or Cub Scouts-not if Rick Perry has anything to do say about it. Their first spat was over a cause near and dear to the Texas governor’s heart-when Romney rejected the services of the Boy Scouts for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games. But the 2012 campaign isn’t the first time the governors have found themselves in a disagreement. The fight is still fresh for Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.