Rick Perry Launches New Bid for the Presidency
Former Texas governor Rick Perry is running for president again. Four years after his first run for the office—the one that made him best known for forgetting his own proposed policies in the middle of nationally televised debates—Perry is back, hoping to remake his image into one far more presidential.
In addition to his official, in-person announcement at Dallas’s Addison Airport, Perry’s team quietly put up his campaign website early Thursday morning. In a video filled with swelling strings and rhetoric, Perry speaks of being a president who brings America together and erases political divides. Against a visual backdrop of images shifting from the American suburbs to the busy streets of Washington DC, and featuring Perry mixing with civilians and servicemen, dressed in his Air Force uniform (he served five years), and in perhaps the most Reagan-esque shot, on an actual horse, Perry offers a vision of himself as a uniter.
“If we’re going to revive this American dream again, we need a president who provides leadership that transcends the petty partisanship that we’ve seen in the last few years,” Perry says. “Someone that’s been tested. Somehow who tells the American people the truth. We have the power to make our country new again…You see a lot of candidates will say the right things, whether it’s about the border, whether it’s about taxes, whether it’s about spending. But we need a president who has done the right thing. We need a president who bridges the partisan divide rather than widens it—who brings people together. We must do right and risk the consequences.”
The suggestion, of course, is that Perry—whose new look includes black frame hipster nerd glasses—is that president.
According to CNN, at Perry’s announcement he’ll “be flanked by a list of military veterans, including several Navy SEALs and Taya Kyle, the widow of American Sniper Chris Kyle.” From there, he’ll head to Iowa.
For more about Perry’s newest presidential bid, check out the below video, a humbling look at Perry’s salt-of-the-Earth “roots”:
