Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced his presidential campaign in South Carolina last August, but now his campaign may soon come to an end in the same state where it started. Ben Philpott of KUT News reports on Morning Edition that with the clock ticking down to the Jan. 21 primary, Perry is polling in single digits.
That means Perry has just over a week to convince South Carolinians to vote for him. Philpott spends some time on the campaign trail with Perry, reporting that those attending stops, like Lexington resident Glenn Gainey, know the deal.
"Today, I guess, with being down in the polls, he's got an uphill battle to fight," Gainey says.
According to Philpott, the candidate shows no stress or concern in public appearances on the campaign trail, packing rooms and getting plenty of applause. Any desperation comes in the form of attacks on front-runner Mitt Romney, as Perry has been focusing on the former Massachusetts governor's time running Bain Capital, the venture capital firm he co-founded.
"I happen to think that companies like Bain Capital could have come in and helped these companies, if they truly were venture capitalists, but they're not. They're vulture capitalists," Perry said.
Conservative commentators criticized the line of attack, Philpott reports, and by Perry's second campaign stop Wednesday, he had stopped using the line.
That pleased Columbia resident Colleen Morrow, an undecided voter who came to hear Perry at Doc's Barbeque.
"In capitalism there are some winners and some losers. And it's unfortunate, but that's how our system works. And I'm not going to condemn Romney for that. I frankly don't know enough about it," she says.
And when Perry stopped by her table after his speech, she let him know she had decided to give him her vote.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.