Rick Perry's Son Emerges, a Tweet Off the Old Block
By EMILY RAMSHAW
Mitt Romney has a traveling band of look-alike sons. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. has his ever-tweeting daughters. The latest addition to this political kids' club is Rick Perry's son Griffin, 28, who has propelled himself into the headlines — and injected some much-needed energy into his father's decidedly downtrodden candidacy — with his Twitter missives from the campaign trail.
He has played attack dog to his father's opponents, poking fun at former Senator Rick Santorum's sweater vests and calling Mr. Romney a "bottom-tier job creator."
"Ron Paul doesn't remember saying those crazy things at the debate, bc he took off his aluminum hat," @griffperry tweeted in late December.
"Mitt Romney knows how to lead lead people straight out the door with a pink slip," he wrote Tuesday.
And Griffin has offered up his own brand of humor, suggesting that Republican candidates have a shooting contest in Iowa to win gun owners' support and calling for quarterback Tim Tebow of the Denver Broncos to join his father's ticket with "Chuck Norris as secretary of defense."
Interviewed at the Perry campaign's Austin headquarters days before rejoining his father in South Carolina, Griffin said he wanted to act as his father's surrogate on the campaign trail "to do whatever I can do to help Dad get elected."
But he stressed that the Twitter feed is his own. It often devolves into college football talk, Griffin, a Vanderbilt graduate, said jokingly, and he intentionally chose the handle "@griffperry" instead of "@griffinperry" because it took the news media "a few months to figure out if it was really me."
But Griffin, who was forced to quit his Dallas investment banking job — via federal election regulations, his small-government parents are quick to point out — to join his father on the campaign trail, does not underestimate the power of a candidate's child with a social media presence.
"You can say things in jest and have a little fun and deliver it a little different, and it seems to get more attention," he said. "Dad's been vetted pretty hard. If it takes a kid to draw some attention to some things, then so be it."
As a recent college graduate, Griffin was a leading force behind Governor Perry's foray into Facebook during his 2006 re-election bid. Griffin said social media was "humanizing" — a way to feed the news media's appetite for minutiae and details about the candidates' families.
It has been a big year for candidates' children — and for pushing the social media envelope. Though Griffin has not met the three Huntsman daughters who have taken this strategy to new heights with their @Jon2012Girls tweets and their viral videos, he gave them a friendly shout-out on Twitter last month. He has not connected personally with the five Romney sons either, though he once sat next to Tagg Romney, the Republican front-runner's oldest son, at a debate.
Griffin, who has hit the trail in several early primary states, said campaigning for a parent was no small decision because it opened up the child to public scrutiny. (His younger sister, Sydney, has chosen to be less visible, he said.)
Griffin said he had calluses to such criticism. He took to Twitter to defend his father's job creation record, brandishing the hashtag "#perryantisocialist." He offered an Iowa prophecy, predicting that any candidate to finish in the top three there would have a shot at the Republican nomination. (His father finished fifth.)
And he scolded the news media for the attention reporters gave to the now-infamous "oops" debate, in which the governor could not name the third agency he wanted to close. "Dear #MSM please read John 8:7 before attacking Dad about forgetting something," he tweeted the day after the debate.
Griffin said he sometimes sounds like a politician because he has been around them his whole life. He would not rule out running for office someday — "if it was O.K. with my wife," he said.
In a way, the governor took a cue from Griffin when he used Twitter on a frigid run the morning after the Iowa caucuses to announce that he would forge ahead to South Carolina. Griffin was not on that run.
"I don't run in 30-degree weather and 40-mile-per-hour winds," he said, giving that special eye roll children reserve for their parents.
eramshaw@texastribune.org
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