Perry’s Merck Donations Raise Questions About Vaccine Mandate
By Alison Fitzgerald - Sep 13, 2011 11:01 PM CT
Texas Governor Rick Perry ‘s decision to require pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against a virus that causes cervical cancer has ignited debate over whether the presidential hopeful used his office to do favors for political allies.
Perry, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, received at least $23,500 in campaign contributions from drug-maker Merck & Co., including $5,000 in 2006, the year before he ordered girls throughout the state to take a new Merck vaccine. The drug-maker also has donated about $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association, a group which Perry headed twice and has been among his most generous campaign donors.
One of Perry’s rivals for the presidential nomination, Representative Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, suggested during a debate two days ago that the governor issued the executive order to help a political donor that also employed a former senior aide as a lobbyist.
“The question is, is it about life or was it about millions of dollars, and potentially billions, for a drug company?” Bachmann asked during the debate in Tampa sponsored by CNN and Tea Party activists.
“If you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended,” Perry responded, implying that was the extent of his support from the Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, company.
Perry spokesman Mark Miner suggested Bachmann was using the issue to get herself back into the headlines.
Misleading Facts
“There are people in this race who are trying to elevate their names and get into the news cycle based on false and misleading facts,” Miner said in a telephone interview.
In addition to the political donations, Perry’s ties to the company have come under scrutiny because he issued the vaccination mandate at a time when his former chief of staff was working for the Texas Lobby Group, which was retained by Merck.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine Gardasil in June 2006. The following year, Perry issued an executive order that Texas girls be vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) by age 12, and Gardasil was the only such drug on the market. Perry said his goal was saving lives by reducing cases of cervical cancer and other diseases.
“The governor erred on the side of life,” Miner said.
The state legislature didn’t agree with Perry and overturned his order. The mandate was never implemented, Miner said.
Successful Fundraiser
The Texas governor has been one of the most successful fund-raisers, bringing in more than $100 million during his decade in Austin and boosting the influence of the governors’ association while in the leadership of that group.
Pam Eisele, a Merck spokeswoman, said the firm “is strongly committed to decreasing the number of males and females impacted by HPV related diseases.”
In 2007, Eisele said, the company’s lobbying became a distraction in several states, including Texas. “So, in an effort to get the focus back to this important issue, Merck suspended its lobbying efforts on state school requirements,” she said.
About 12,000 women are diagnosed with and 4,000 die from cervical cancer each year, and most cases are caused by HPV, she said.
Perry’s own Merck donations date back to 2004, according to campaign finance disclosures compiled by the Helena, Montana- based National Institute on Money in State Politics.
Annual Contributions
The company donated about $500,000 to the RGA since 2003, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, including annual checks for $50,000 from 2005 through this year. Perry served as RGA vice chairman in 2007 and chairman in 2008 and for several months of this year.
The pharmaceutical industry has been a major contributor to the governor’s association, with several companies donating far more than Merck ever did. Pfizer Inc. (PFE) contributed almost $1 million to the group in the 2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) wrote checks totaling more than $600,000 in the 2010 cycle.
In addition, Mike Toomey, a former Texas state House member who served as Perry’s chief of staff, became a lobbyist for the firm after leaving the governor’s office.
Toomey also is a founder of the pro-Perry Super PAC, Make Us Great Again, which is raising money to help get the Texas governor elected to the White House. Toomey didn’t respond to a telephone message seeking comment.
“This is just another shameful example showing Rick Perry putting his special interest friends ahead of the people of Texas,´ said Ty Matsdorf, a spokesman for American Bridge 21st Century, a pro-Democrat opposition research group. “He has built a pay-to-play network during his tenure that represents everything the American people believe is wrong with politics.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alison Fitzgerald in Washington at afitzgerald2@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
The lines between friendship, politics and state business sometimes seem to blur for Perry. AP Photo
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 9/12/11 5:09 AM EDT Updated: 9/12/11 11:32 AM EDT
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s humble origins and down home straight talk are central to his political identity, but for years Perry has enjoyed lavish perks and travel — mostly funded by a group of deep-pocketed supporters — that are allowed under his state’s lax ethics and campaign rules.
Some of the same Texas donors who have funded Perry’s political rise also have footed the bills for Perry and his family to jet around the world, stay in luxury hotels and resorts, vacation in tony Colorado ski towns, attend all manner of sporting events and concerts, and to maintain, entertain — and even pay the cable bill — at the 4,600-square-foot mansion with a heated pool that taxpayers are renting for him at a cost of about $8,500 a month.
And that’s to say nothing of the wide range of sometimes-expensive gifts [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61670.html ] Perry has accepted over the years, including 22 pairs of cowboy boots, Stetson hats, belt buckles, cuff links and at least nine hunting trips.
“He came from a family without means, and coming from a family without means, I think the perks of office can be more important to you, as opposed to if you grew up with means and are more accustomed to it,” said Gary Polland, a Republican lawyer and consultant who worked with Perry during Polland’s three terms as chairman of Republican Party in Harris County.
Craig McDonald, director of the liberal watchdog group Texans for Public Justice, is less charitable.
“He’s enhanced his lifestyle by taking advantage of a wealthy class that supports him and his campaigns and wants to lavish him with favors,” said McDonald. “Even though he may not have their money, he has favors that he can give them, including policy, legislation, appointments, state grants and tax subsidies.”
Perry, who has held elected office since 1985, earns a state salary of $150,000 a year [ http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=565482 ] and lives in a five-bedroom, seven-bath mansion in West Austin that the state has rented for him since 2007, when he moved out of the governor’s mansion, so it could undergo repairs.
“Gov. Perry publicly discloses all gifts and travel in his campaign and personal financial disclosure statements in full compliance with the law,” said spokeswoman Catherine Frazier.
Frazier cast Perry’s ability to tap private cash for his trips, in particular, as a good deal for the state, pointing out “Tax dollars very rarely pay for his travel. In the vast majority of cases, official, economic development and campaign travel are covered by privately raised campaign or economic development funds.”
And Perry’s allies argue that personal gifts to the governor stem from long-standing personal relationships rather than a desire to win favorable treatment from the state.
Under Texas ethics rules, Perry and his family are allowed to accept personal gifts of unlimited value, and the state’s election laws are among the loosest in the country.
Though the law technically prohibits the conversion of campaign cash to “personal use,” it allow campaigns to accept unlimited contributions from individuals and political committees, and to spend the cash with few restrictions. In the past, Texas politicians have used campaign cash for apartment rent and baseball tickets for themselves, among other expenditures that appear more personal than political.
Texas also places some legal restrictions on travel funded by lobbyists or corporations that employ them. But Perry has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in travel funded by such corporations through a privately funded economic development nonprofit called TexasOne with an annual budget of more than $2 million [ http://www.politico.com/static/PPM191_110901_texasone.html ], that has flown him and his family around the world in the name of recruiting business to Texas.
Frazier said Perry’s “working, living and travel arrangements are commensurate with other governors around the nation.” But elected officials in other states are subject to tighter restrictions on the types and values of gifts and travel they can accept (several states cap the value of gifts that can be accepted at $250 or less), as well as spending their campaign cash.
Perry in some ways is uniquely positioned to receive and accept such gifts and big campaign checks, not only because of Texas’s looser rules but also because of his long tenure as governor of a state with a high concentration of conservative money.
He also has a lot of friends.
Famed Houston bootmaker Rocky Carroll, who has given Perry at least 10 pairs of custom boots since 1991, according to Perry’s personal financial disclosure statements [ http://www.politico.com/static/PPM229_110817rperrycy04.html ] filed with the state, (and who told POLITICO he is now working on a pair with the presidential seal for Perry), said he expects nothing in return. He treats Perry to boots which start at $500 a pair for paying customers because “he’s a friend of mine. Been a friend for 20 years, ever since he was agriculture commissioner,” said Carroll.
“I consider (Perry) a close friend and a great American,” said Lanny Vinson, a Perry college buddy from their days together at Texas A&M University, who provided the governor hunting expeditions, and transportation to and from them, in 2008 and 2009, but declined to say why Perry didn’t pay for the trips himself.
With some benefactors, though, the lines between friendship, politics and state business seem to blur.
Insurance company owner Phil Adams of Bryan, Texas, another A&M buddy, over the years has given Perry, his wife and their children tickets to a range of football and basketball games — including the 2007 Big 12 basketball tournament — and picked up the tab for their lodging and transportation to some of the games, too. Additionally, between 2005 and 2009, Adams’s company at times employed one or both of the Perry’s two children, then in their late teens or 20s, to do secretarial work, and Adams has contributed nearly $290,000 to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns.
Adams did not respond to telephone and email messages. But Frazier, Perry’s spokeswoman, said Perry makes appointments “based solely on an individual’s qualifications and ability to carry out the responsibility of the position” and explained that technology fund awards “go through a rigorous, appropriate and thorough vetting process” requiring “unanimous support from the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House, as well as support from the local community.”
Then there’s James Leininger, a physician and businessman who has been a top donor to Perry’s campaigns and who, late last month, hosted a private meeting at which Perry and his presidential campaign team wooed about 180 influential social and religious conservatives [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62464.html ] over sweet tea and Texas barbecue at his ranch in Hill Country outside San Antonio.
Leininger has flown Perry, an avid hunter, to his various ranches (some of which are stocked with rare African animals) to go hunting several times over the years, given him tickets to see pro basketball’s San Antonio Spurs (of which Leininger has been a part owner) and helped pay Perry’s way on other trips, including one in 2004 to the Bahamas for scuba diving and golf.
Perry’s family often accompanies him on trips to enviable destinations including Key West, China, France, Italy, Qatar and Sweden, where ostensible political or business development purposes mix with stays at five-star hotels and meals at top restaurant — and where the bills are paid in whole or in part by deep-pocketed supporters, either through his campaign or TexasOne.
When the family traveled to the 2006 Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., to watch the University of Texas Longhorns play the University of Southern California Trojans, they flew on a private jet paid for (at a cost of $15,000) by the Texas Motor Transportation Association’s political action committee. Their game tickets were purchased by TexasOne, which hosted a business recruitment barbecue in Hollywood.
Then there were the family’s regular travels to temperate Colorado mountain towns this summer, when the temperatures back in Texas seldom dipped below the triple digits.
Less than one month later, Perry was back in Colorado, this time in Aspen, where the buzz in GOP circles is that he stayed in the second home of a Texas oil magnate whose identity could not be verified while hobnobbing with top donors to the Republican Governors Association, which he chaired, and attending an event hosted by the Aspen Institute think tank.
Now that he’s a declared presidential candidate, Perry is subject to stricter campaign finance rules, which will require his campaign to pay for trips and events that have a political purpose. But until now — under the more lax Texas rules — Perry’s travels could be funded by donors as gifts to him personally, to his campaign or to TexasOne or a combination of all three, and the sometimes blurry lines between the funding pools have in the past prompted complaints from across the political spectrum.
After the 2004 trip to the Bahamas, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the Texas Ethics Commission, alleging that Perry illegally used campaign funds for personal use. But Perry said he and his fellow travelers — including Leininger, Brooke Rollins, the president of a Leininger-funded Texas anti-tax think tank, and Washington anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (who in 2006 told the Austin American-Statesman that Perry “is a very serious scuba diver”) — used the trip to develop “politically viable educational policy,” and the commission dismissed the complaint.
The trip had been organized and partly funded by Irwin Katsof, an international energy financier and Israel backer who also helped fund a 2007 Perry trip to Israel. Before the 2009 trip, Katsof asked attendees what type of scotch they’d like on hand for a “scotch and cigar bar” where they would admire “a starry Jerusalem, according to an investigative report [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCl9bAn7gUA ]
by KTVT, the CBS affiliate in Fort Worth/Dallas.
While the trip does not appear to have been planned initially as a TexasOne venture, the month afterward, Doug Pitcock, a major Perry campaign contributor who runs a road building firm that does millions of dollars in business with the state, revealed [ http://www.politico.com/static/PPM229_110901perryisraeltrip.html ] that he had loaned his plane to the governor to fly to Israel and wanted to donate the cost of the flight — $180,000 — to TexasOne as an in-kind tax-deductible contribution.
Pitcock could not be reached for comment, while Katsof, asked by POLITICO if the trips were junkets intended to curry favor with Perry, hung up the phone.
Perry spokeswoman Frazier said the 2007 trip spurred the formation of the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce and “served as a catalyst to the governor’s support of Texas’s divestment from companies that do business with Iran, a main opponent of Israeli freedom.”
Video of the Day: Rick Perry Bashed Social Security, Medicare in December
Chris Good Sep 13 2011, 12:01 PM ET
Facing criticism from other candidates during last night's GOP presidential debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry rehashed his stance on Social Security, the program he called a "Ponzi scheme" onstage at another televised candidate forum last week.
"First off, the people who are on Social Security today need to understand something. Slam-dunk guaranteed, that program is going to be there in place for those," Perry said. "It has been called a 'Ponzi scheme' by many people long before me. But no one's had the courage to stand up and say, here is how we're going to reform it."
But while Perry stood by his critique that the program is bankrupt, he has condemned the concept of Social Security and Medicare more forcefully in the past. In a speech in December at the American Legislative Exchange Council's National Policy Summit (video above [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jp47AcFTHJg ] ), Perry called those programs instances of "excess and overreach" that violate constitutional limitations on the federal government:
The New Deal's legacy is a glut of federal programs ... Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. It is a Ponzi scheme on the [scale] that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. You know, unfortunately the New Deal and its beloved programs have essentially become the third rail of American politics. You know, anyone who even thinks about criticizing one of those programs will be evaporated by the criticism particularly of those on the left.
Layered on that foundation of excess and overreach, then came along President Johnson and his Great Society, and it further eroded our Founding Fathers' boundaries that they had put on the federal government. Medicare, Medicaid. When you add Social Security to that, it is 106 trillion dollars of unfunded liability and not one dime put back to pay for it.
Wooing companies to Texas with lower wages and less regulation is not a model that can be replicated at the national level
Jill Lawrence Sep 12 2011, 11:27 AM ET
Rick Perry's campaign is publicizing a series of quotes from Meg Whitman [ http://www.rickperry.org/news/meg-whitman-in-her-own-words/ ] intended to vouch for him as Mr. Job Creator. But her words, posted on his website and emailed to reporters, in fact paint him as Mr. Job Poacher, an economic marauder who raided other states for the greater glory of Texas and pursued a growth agenda that would be impossible to replicate on the national stage.
According to the Perry campaign, Whitman said last year: "Texas Governor Rick Perry says he comes on hunting trips to California. ... And I said, 'Really? What are you hunting out here?' He said, 'Companies.'"
Perry bragged to her about the "virtually zero percent corporate income tax" and "lightning speed" permitting process in Texas, she said. She praised the state's tort reforms and "ombudsmen for every industry." If she were launching eBay right now, Whitman says, "probably Texas" is where she'd do it.
That's all really great for Texas, but it's hard to see the benefit for anyplace else -- and even harder to see how it can be a model for the country at large.
Let's say that every state streamlined its permitting, added industry ombudsmen, lowered its corporate income tax rate and offered incentives to companies to expand or relocate.
Michigan still wouldn't have Texas assets like oil and gas reserves, a warm climate, NASA and huge military installations. It would still be saddled with the heartbreaking decline of its major city, Detroit. It would still be seeing an exodus of people and the consequent loss of teachers, firefighters, cops and other government workers needed to serve them -- just as Texas has gained public employees as its population has surged.
Furthermore, before we head down the road of "We are all Texans now," those outside the Lone Star State need to ask ourselves: do we really want the Texas model? The safety net there is seriously frayed. Texas may be No. 1 in job growth, but it's also No. 1 in people without health insurance (more than a quarter uninsured), No. 1 in high school dropouts [ http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=&-ds_name=ACS_2009_5YR_G00_&-_lang=en&-mt_name=ACS_2009_5YR_G00_GCT1501_US9F&-format=US-9F&-CONTEXT=gct ] (more than 20 percent don't have a diploma or GED) and the nation's No. 1 emitter of carbon pollution. It's among the top states in child poverty, teen pregnancy and low-paying jobs, as well.
But say Americans are so desperate for change that they are okay with risking a race to the bottom. The next question is how to turn Perry's zero-sum job strategy into one where America, not just Texas, wins. Where are states like Michigan and Nevada going to poach jobs from? Mexico? Ireland? China? You can't undercut their wages. And if the answer is to be smarter, how do you take away $4 billion from education -- as Perry just did in Texas -- and still make that happen?
Back in 1991, the New Hampshire economy was in such bad shape that competitors in its pivotal primary, including Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas, issued full-blown plans to revive that one state's economy. Maybe Perry could start with job plans for a few of what you might call donor states. What would he do in Nevada, which already has zero corporate income taxes [ http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/corp_inc.pdf ] -- even lower than Texas? How about California, which is hamstrung by union clout and voter mandates that make it nearly impossible to fund the government?
On a national scale, will he concede that not all regulation is bad for an economy? Texas is living proof. In 1998, before Perry was governor, it began requiring a 20 percent downpayment on mortgages, or mortgage insurance if you put down less. That helped shield Texas -- and Perry's record -- from the housing bubble and bust that is ravaging states like Nevada, Arizona and Florida. Would Perry recommend that all states emulate Texas?
Will his only proposal on health care be to let states do whatever they want with federal money? Besides "getting out of the way," does he see any federal role in reviving the economy?
A national economy can't grow by some states sucking jobs from others, based on which tax the least and let corporations off the hook on the widest range of societal responsibilities. Odd, then, that Perry's campaign would advertise him as being so skilled in this respect.
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