Perry Picked to Head GOP Governors and Will Focus on Expanding Their Ranks

DANA POINT, Calif. — A year ago, Rick Perry narrowly won re-election as governor of Texas. Next year, he'll help guide Republican gubernatorial elections nationwide.

Perry on Friday was named chairman of the influential Republican Governors Association at the group's annual meeting in this seaside resort town.

In his new role, he will help oversee party spending and support of gubernatorial campaigns throughout the country. For the GOP, it's an increasingly important role, especially given the party's recent setbacks in Washington and in statehouses nationwide.

Under Perry's leadership, the immediate goal of the group is to keep five incumbent Republican governors who are seeking another term in office next year.

But even though his chairmanship lasts only a year, Perry plans to continue positioning the group to have a major influence on elections years from now.

By 2010, Perry and others said, the group's goal is to have Republican governors in 32 states. Currently, there are 22 Republican governors.

"We're in this for the long haul," Perry said Friday. "This ... is an effort to truly put a plan in place to deliver immediate results in the 2008 election, but also in 2009 and in the big year, 2010."

While his new role will give Perry more time in the national political spotlight, he has repeatedly said he has no plans to seek higher office. Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has mentioned him as a potential running mate, but Perry has said he has no desire to go to Washington.

"I think we can do more as governors — and as Republican governors — than they can do in Washington," he said in a brief interview.

Increasingly, Perry and other Republican governors view themselves as their party's best hope for rekindling connections it lost with voters in recent elections.

It's a role Republican governors have played before.

In the 1990s, after suffering major setbacks in Washington, the GOP heavily touted the successes of Republican governors as it tried to convince voters that they should return Republicans to Washington, said Haley Barbour, who then was chairman of the Republican National Committee and now is governor of Mississippi.

The result, Barbour said, was the start of the 1994 "Republican Revolution" that returned the party to the majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

"Republican governors became symbols of getting the job done," Barbour said. "We didn't have anybody else to do it."

Banking on their 1990s successes, some Republican leaders already are looking to the 2010 gubernatorial elections as a potential turning point for national politics.

"The way these 32-plus states go I think is the way America goes," said Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, whom Perry replaced as chairman. "It will have a great emphasis on shaping national policy."

Under Perdue's year-long chairmanship, the Republican Governors Association has been on a fundraising binge to help pay for those future fights.

In the first half of 2007, the association raised more than $12 million — more than twice the amount raised by the Democratic Governors Association. By the end of the year, it expects to have a war chest of more than $20 million, said Nick Ayers, executive director of the group.

Perry's election to chair the group isn't without controversy.

A lawsuit filed by Perry's Democratic challenger in the last election claims that the Republican Governors Association and Perry's campaign violated Texas laws when the group help funnel $1 million to Perry's 2006 re-election campaign.

Ayers of the governors association called the lawsuit by Democratic challenger Chris Bell "a joke" designed to make Perry look bad in advance of governors association meeting here.

Robert Black, spokesman for Perry, has admitted that campaign staffers made a "clerical error" in the way they recorded the donation that's in the process of being fixed. He too called the lawsuit frivolous.

"This is the same type of thing you see all over the country when Democrats lose elections," Black said.

Perry narrowly won a second term in November 2006 in a race in which he got only 39 percent of the vote.

Friday, Barbour and other governors said that Perry's slim margin of victory didn't make him any less capable of running the group.

With Perry's selection by his peers to run the group, "I think we've already answered that question," Barbour said.