By Jim Rutenberg, New York Times
Published November 11, 2011
Ramping up his effort to recover from his embarrassing debate performance on Wednesday, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas purchased nearly $1 million in advertising time on Fox News Channel, an extraordinary commitment of resources intended to jolt his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination back on track.
The purchase was an unusual move at this stage of a presidential nominating season, when most campaign advertising resources are devoted to broadcast stations in the early voting states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, not to national networks.
Rival campaigns and media analysts took the move as a sign that Mr. Perry’s advertising team believes raising his standing nationally with Republican opinion makers and donors — many of whom have their office televisions tuned to Fox News all day — is as important as doing so in critical states. Requests for comment from two of Mr. Perry’s aides drew no response.
The two-week campaign will cost four times as much as Mr. Perry has spent on commercials in Iowa and New Hampshire in the last 14 days, according to data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG, a private firm that tracks political advertising.
“You would think that the only thing that matters for Rick Perry now in terms of voters is Iowa,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, the president of Kantar Media/CMAG. “But the fact that they bought a national buy at this stage of the primary leads one to believe that they need to buttress their national numbers if they’re going to fight in the early states.”
The new campaign is in keeping with promises by Mr. Perry’s aides that they would increase his advertising considerably in the wake of his Wednesday gaffe, when he spent 53 seconds trying to finish a list of three government agencies he would cut as president. (He later remembered it was the Energy Department; the other two were the Departments of Commerce and Education.)
A rival campaign monitoring advertising sales said Mr. Perry’s campaign had purchased exactly $975,000 worth of advertising time on the network.
Another person briefed on the Fox News purchase said that Mr. Perry would be focusing mostly on the network’s daytime programming, rather than its far more expensive prime-time programs like “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Even before Mr. Perry’s debate performance on Wednesday, his campaign’s hopes that commercials would help propel him toward the top of polls had been disappointed. This, in spite of help from a “super PAC,” Make Us Great Again.
The moment came back to haunt Mr. Perry on Friday when Terry Branstad, the Republican governor of Iowa, likened it to when a Democrat, Howard Dean, after losing the Iowa caucuses in 2004, took to the stage and offered a guttural howl that contributed to his candidacy’s end.
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