NEW ORLEANS — In an audition of their nascent presidential themes, the two titans of Texas politics performed as top acts of the Republican Leadership Conference on Saturday.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Rick Perry played to 1,500 conservative activists, blasting Washington and laying out their scripts of how to change it.
But on this platform, the younger Cruz upstaged the political veteran, winning the conference’s presidential straw poll and radiating the excitement and promise that Perry had ignited three years before.
“I believe in my heart that Ted Cruz is a Ronald Reagan reincarnation that we need to right the course of the nation,” said attendee George Peterson.
The dual performances before the GOP activists come at a time when Cruz has risen as a hero of movement conservatives and Perry has succeeded in repairing some of the damage done by his humiliating performance in the last presidential contest.
Both Texans burnished their strengths before bedrock conservatives, stopping in Louisiana as part of their increasingly national tours.
Perry was fresh from Iowa, the third trip this year to the state with the first presidential contest. In the past three weeks, Perry has been to Florida, New York and Pennsylvania, and last week he met in Austin with a contingent of 13 conservative leaders from New Hampshire.
Cruz was just back from tours of Israel, Poland and Ukraine, where he met foreign leaders and dove into national security issues. Soon after his speech, and before Perry spoke, Cruz jetted to New York to appear as a guest Sunday on This Week on ABC.
In other ways, the two men arrived at the conference from different places.
At the 2011 conference, two months before he announced his campaign for president, Perry gave a fiery speech that was interrupted by chants of “Run, Rick, run.”
Saturday, Perry found himself in a pack of presidential also-rans: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum. And his speech, instead of trumpeting the righteousness of fiscal and social conservativism, was more about solving the nation’s problems with big ideas.
“Americans are looking for the type of leadership that transcends bipartisanship,” Perry said.
He credited states with engineering answers to health care, jobs and the environment.
“They are sick and tired of the same old Washington food fights that we see too often. That people are scoring political points and they think that’s more important than policy solutions,” Perry said.
In his speech, Cruz placed himself as a happy bull in Washington’s china shop, upsetting the status quo and working to represent tea party conservatism.
“There’s a tradition in the Senate that freshmen should be seen and not heard. I haven’t entirely managed to comply with that,” he joked, referencing a filibuster and his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act through a government shutdown.
He said he would continue such efforts, drawing his power not from the Senate but from movement conservatives.
Cruz told the crowd that the Reagan revolution “didn’t come from Washington. Washington despised Ronald Reagan. If you have a candidate that Washington adores, run and hide.”
Regardless of their national ambitions, Cruz dismissed talk of any intrastate rivalry between the two.
“I am a big fan of Governor Perry’s,” he said.
“I understand it’s more interesting to write stories about battles between people than common ground. But Rick Perry and I agree on a good many things,” he said.
Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak said Cruz and Perry probably don’t see each other as their main rivals to the presidency.
“They’re both delicately throwing brush-back pitches,” Mackowiak said, but they’re also appealing to different constituents.
Perry is running as a long-time executive who has managed a state with the best economy in the nation. Cruz is firing up the grass roots and leading a conservative movement, Mackowiak said.
The conference is a good testing ground, he said.
“You rarely see these opportunities where presidential candidates compete head-to-head, see what messages they’re testing,” Mackowiak said.
Cruz will still need to show voters he’s ready, with limited experience, to be president, and Perry will need to convince supporters that he won’t falter at important times, he said.
For GOP activists, they have both made headway.
“I really would like to see him run again,” attendee Cheryl Blanke said of Perry after the governor posed in a picture with her.
In the least, she said, “I see him in a cabinet position.”
But the candidate to watch, she said, is Cruz.
“Ted Cruz has that something you can’t teach,” she said. “He just resonates.”
Follow Christy Hoppe on Twitter at @christyhoppe.
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