Perry is hoping stronger fundraising networks in New York and D.C. can take him to the top. | REUTERS Perry woos K St. and Wall St.

Rick Perry has directed plenty of scorn toward the Beltway and Wall Street, but for years he’s also been raising money from a small pool of deep-pocketed donors in the Washington and New York metropolitan areas to finance his successful runs for Texas governor.

As his presidential campaign gears up, he has stepped up efforts to broaden his fundraising networks in those two reservoirs of establishment Republican wealth, wooing D.C.’s lobbying community and working to set up operations in the two towns by, among other things, trying to poach key supporters from Mitt Romney, his chief rival for the GOP nomination.


Yet there’s been a bit of caution on both sides.

Some lobbyists and finance types are privately leery about Perry’s sometimes heated anti-establishment rhetoric — his assertion last week that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s monetary stewardship could be “treasonous” and might prompt “pretty ugly” treatment from Texans remains a point of concern.

And Perry also has kept a bit of distance, so far scheduling no fundraising events in either Washington or New York (though he is expected to hold events in the capital towards the end of next month), and instead his allies have summoned donors to Austin, Texas, as well as Aspen, Colo., where he is scheduled to attend a fundraiser today hosted by a major investment banker.

The arm’s length courting is not a strategy Perry’s bundlers, who have been deputized by the campaign to corral big checks from well-heeled friends and associates, all agree on.

Some contend that he needs to move quickly and aggressively to assemble donor networks among Republican elites in Washington and New York in order to be financially competitive with Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who has been seeking the support of major donors in both cities since before his failed bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination and who — partly as a result — leads the GOP field in fundraising.

But others argue that Perry can lean heavily on the Texas fundraising network he assembled during his 11 years as governor to build an outsider campaign consistent with his populist message — even if it risks alienating some influential Washington and New York bundlers.

In a sense, the debate over fundraising reflects a central question facing Perry’s candidacy: whether he should stick to the themes and support base that propelled him to success in Texas or seek to broaden his appeal to a wider range of Republicans and independents.

“He’s not going to shower people in Washington, D.C., with attention because I think he believes that this election is going to be won and lost out in the battleground states, and the fact that he is not looking to D.C. for a lot of answers and support really is in tune with what people want,” said Matt Keelen, a lobbyist who is helping Perry by bundling contributions and trying to drum up support on Capitol Hill.

“There will be some people — the inside-the-Beltway higher-ups — who don’t understand where he is coming from and will be offended by his lack of attention,” predicted Keelen, who attended a July meeting of about 50 potential Perry bundlers in Austin at which there were few — if any — other Washington types. “And they’re just going to have to deal with it because that’s the type of guy he is.”

Another Perry bundler, Dallas investor Lee Blaylock, said focusing fundraising in Washington and New York sends the wrong message to potential supporters. “My perspective is, if lots of money is being raised in highly dysfunctional areas like New York or D.C., I’d tend to look (elsewhere) and think that’s where the smart money will be coming from,” Blaylock said.

At the same time, Perry’s campaign understands the significance of Washington as a source of campaign cash and support, asserted Dirk Van Dongen, an elite lobbyist and fundraiser who is helping Perry build support inside the Beltway.

“D.C. is of priority to the Perry people,” said Van Dongen, who runs the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and was among a handful of leaders of top business lobbying groups who huddled with Perry last week in Austin to discuss small-business issues.

“He needs to be introduced to the city. The city needs to meet him, and he needs to meet the players in this city.”

Despite the risk that it could hurt Perry in the conservative base to be seen as “trolling for cash in Washington,” reaching out in Washington is an important part of running a presidential campaign, asserted former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Association.

“This city remains the capital of the nation. There are many thoughtful, successful, patriotic conservatives here who should be … contacted for support,” said Keating, who supports Romney but agreed to meet with Perry at the insistence of former Bush bundler Peter Terpeluk, a prominent lobbyist and Perry supporter who died this week.

Perry’s spokesman Mark Miner wouldn’t discuss the campaign’s fundraising strategies in Washington or New York, but he dismissed the suggestion that soliciting cash from either city was inconsistent with Perry’s rhetoric.

“The governor has talked about the bad policies coming from Washington — the policies of printing money and out-of-control spending that you see under President [Barack] Obama — that are killing jobs in this country,” Miner said. “And he’ll continue talking about the bad policies that are destroying our economy.”

Perry supporters in New York and Washington say that — unlike his leading rivals for the anti-establishment tea party vote, Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Ron Paul of Texas — Perry has a record of creating jobs and cutting regulations that inspires confidence from big business.

While Democrats have challenged the role Perry played in Texas’s job growth, the business community’s embrace of him is borne out in fundraising reports filed by the Republican Governors Association, which he chaired until stepping down to run for president, and three gubernatorial campaigns for which he raised a total of $102 million.

The overwhelming majority of that — $92 million — came from Texas, including huge sums from oil and other business interests. About $6.5 million came from Washington, New York and their suburbs, according to a POLITICO analysis of data compiled by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group Texans for Public Justice.

The Washington-based RGA accounted for most of that, contributing $4 million to his campaigns. But aggregate contributions of $100,000 or more came from New York industrial investor Ira Rennert and the Washington-based political action committees for Union Pacific railroad, Koch Industries and the Teamsters.

The RGA, meanwhile, raised $22 million in the first half of the year, including $1 million each from Koch Industries co-owner David Koch of New York and steel pipe and fence maker Terry Stephens of Kentucky.

But Perry backers acknowledge he needs to expand his donor base to adjust to the more restrictive federal campaign finance laws, which cap donations at $2,500 per person or $5,000 per PAC per election, and bar the types of unlimited corporate, individual and union donations accepted by both the RGA and Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns.

Most of the money Perry raised for the RGA came from “Texas and the west,” said Fred Malek, a prominent Republican bundler who spearheads the group’s major donor program and who is remaining neutral in the GOP presidential nomination fight.

“Having said that, (Perry) certainly has come into contact with a lot of people who think highly of him in Washington, New York and a lot of other places, so I do not think he’ll have a hard time raising the money to needs to be successful,”Malek said, adding that it makes sense for Perry to focus initially on his core donors in Texas because “you get the low-hanging fruit first.”

And, though he conceded, “I don’t think anybody felt that the Bernanke comment was helpful,” Malek contended that Perry’s “record at creating jobs, which is phenomenal,” is more important to business donors than concerns over any populist rhetoric.

In a recent appearance in Iowa, Perry was dismissive of Romney’s experience leading the private equity firm Bain Capital, which Romney has used as a selling point in building big donor networks in New York.

Talking about his life on a farm before entering politics, Perry told reporters at the Iowa State Fair, “I wasn’t on Wall Street, I wasn’t working at Bain Capital, but the principles of the free market — they work whether you’re in a farm field in Iowa or whether you’re on Wall Street.”

And anti-Washington digs have been a staple of his rhetoric for years, becoming particularly prominent during the 2010 Texas governor’s race, during which he branded his GOP primary challenger Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison as an out-of-touch Washington insider.

A line from Perry’s presidential announcement speech — “America is not broken. Washington, D.C., is broken” — has become a regular for him on the hustings.

But it’s the Bernanke jab in particular that has kept at least some major uncommitted New York donors from aligning with him, according to one donor who called the remarks “over the top.”

It was roundly condemned by establishment Republicans, including allies of former President George W. Bush, some of whom harbor grudges against Perry and were disparaged by his top adviser Dave Carney in a 2009 interview with The New York Times Magazine as “country-club Republicans” and “not conservatives.”

Lingering enmity for Perry among Bush’s allies poses another hurdle in the money chase — especially in New York, where the Republican fundraising world is dominated by Bush’s network.

Perry’s allies hope to offset any impact from the Bush rift by leaning on Perry’s connections to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose failed 2008 bid for the GOP presidential nomination Perry endorsed.

There is a cadre of major Giuliani bundlers who remain uncommitted — Paul Singer, Ken Langone and others — but they have yet to show a sign of moving toward Perry so far. And Giuliani himself has yet to definitively rule out a 2012 presidential bid.

Nonetheless, Carol Reed, a Dallas-based GOP-allied political consultant, said Perry “developed a lot of contacts being with Giuliani, and these contacts he met through Giuliani will pay off.”

And she predicted Perry’s surge in the polls would help him win over big donors as well.

“Donors from New York or wherever are looking to put their money behind a winner,” Reed said.

Democrats such as Jason Stanford, an Austin-based political consultant who ran former Rep. Chris Bell’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign against Perry, can be expected to allege hypocrisy if Perry is successful at raising big bucks in Washington and on Wall Street.

“When has hypocrisy ever counted against you in fundraising?” mused Stanford, who’s writing a book on Perry due out next year. “He’s going to take as much money as he can get from anywhere.”