Two of Rick Perry's New Hampshire Speeches

His November 30, 2011 address to the New Hampshire House of Representatives
His October 28, 2011 "Animated Speech"

additional commentary by Timothy Horrigan; December 11, 2011 (revised July 30, 2014)

Rick Perry has made some blunders in his 2012 Presidential candidate— most noteably his amazingly unpopular "Brokeback Mountain" commercial which made him the second-most hated man on YouTube after Justin Bieber. But he does still have some things going for him, his looks, his money, the fact that he isn't Mitt Romney— and he is the Governor of Texas, just like Bush II used to be.

I was at his November 30, 2011 speech before the New Hampshire House, although I missed his entrance because I was roaming around making sure that neither John Wolfe nor Darcy G. Richardson had showed up. Neither of them showed up— although I knew that both lesser-known Democrats had at least been thinking about asking Speaker O'Brien for their own ten minute speaking opportunities. The Speaker had originally invited all Presidential candidates, including President Obama, to come address the House during one of three scheduled fall session days. He subsequently limited the invitation to those candidates who had been invited to debates, and in the end, all the major Republicans showed up except Ron Paul and Mitt Romney.

Perry's November 30 speech inspired a fair amount of bipartisan applause every time he referred to Texas's part-time citizen legislature. This was because O'Brien had unconstitutionally extended our own calendar into the fall. (The Speaker sent us home early at lunchtime: he was so disgusted with us, he cancelled a scheduled December 14 session day, and put off all remaining business till January 4, 2012.)







Rick Perry with then-Deputy Speaker Pam Tucker; October 28, 2011

His October 28, 2011 speech at the annual banquet of Cornerstone Policy Research (New Hampshire's most notorious right wing pressure group) has become legendary. According to who you believe, he was either drunk, on painkillers (after back surgery), dumb as a post, and/or perfectly OK. In any case, it was an amusing speech. The "brother in Christ" he rambles on about at the beginning is Kevin Smith, the President of Cornerstone, who was running for Governor. (Smith's predecessor, Karen Testerman, ran in 2010 and got 10% of the vote in the Republican primary.) The "snow" is the Halloween blizzard of 2010.

A week later, several leading Republicans, including the beloved Speaker Bill O'Brien, felt the need to call a press conference for the purpose of explaining that Gov. Perry was neither drunk nor stoned that night. They vowed to hunt down and unmask the fiends who were responsible for the heinous act of excerpting and posting the most embarrassing moments from the speech.

  [July 30, 2014] I am probably beating a dead horse here, but I did uncover some CSPAN video of Perry, taken a few hours before his Cornerstone speech. He looks a little tired, and he utters a few malaprops, but he is not giddy. He does not seem to be drunk or stoned. The only person who says anything whacky is the Manchester Union leader's managing editor Joe McQuaid, when he makes a lame comment about "National Sandinista Radio" (i.e., National Public Radio):



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