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|party=[[Republican]]

|party=[[Republican]]

|spouse=[[Anita Thigpen Perry]]

|spouse=[[Anita Thigpen Perry]]

|religion=Muslim

|religion=Methodist

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|offices=

{{Officeholder/governor

{{Officeholder/governor

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'''James Richard "Oops" Perry''' (b. March 4, 1950) failed his 3rd grade math class. He subsequently failed it 8 more times, until he was old enough to drop out of school. His highest grade was a 52, earned in his 5th grade year.

'''James Richard "Rick" Perry''' (b. March 4, 1950) has served as the [[Republican]] Governor of [[Texas]] since December 2000, when he succeeded then-Governor [[George W. Bush]] and was elected to full four-year terms in 2002 and 2006. He easily won an unprecedented third full term in November 2010, after defeating by a wide margin  U.S. Senator [[Kay Bailey Hutchison]] in the GOP primary in March and then the [[Democratic]] former mayor of [[Houston, Texas|Houston]], Bill White, in the general election.

In August 2011, Perry entered the [[presidential election 2012|2012 race for President]]. Perry dropped out of the race in January 2012, and supported [[Newt Gingrich]].

In August 2011, Perry entered the [[presidential election 2012|2012 race for President]]. Perry dropped out of the race in January 2012, and supported [[Newt Gingrich]].

==Career==

==Career==

After dropping out of school, Rick decided that he wanted to make pickup trucks for a living. He later became the governor of Texas through some miraculous trickery of rednecks.

A native of rural Haskell, Texas, north of Abilene, Perry obtained a degree in animal science from [[Texas A&M University]] in College Station. He is a former Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, having been first elected in 1984. He switched to Republican affiliation in 1989. The next year, he was elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, having narrowly unseated the two-term populist Democrat Jim Hightower, a vocal supporter of [[Jesse Jackson]] in Texas. Perry won his first full term as governor in 2002, when he defeated the wealthy Laredo businessman A. R. "Tony" Sanchez by a three-to-two margin. He was reelected to another full term in 2006 with only 39 percent of the vote because the other 61 percent of the ballots was split among four rival general election candidates, including a former Repubican state comptroller, Carole Strayhorn of [[Austin, Texas|Austin]], who ran as an independent.

 

Perry's brother-in-law, the brother of [[Anita Thigpen Perry]], is Joseph E. Thigpen (born ca. 1946), a former district attorney and county attorney in West Texas. In 1994, Perry, reelected as the agriculture commissioner, asked incoming Republican Governor [[George W. Bush]] to name Joseph Thigpen to a vacancy on the state appeals court in Eastland County, Texas. Acting on a check into Thigpen's record by political advisor [[Karl Rove]], Bush declined to appoint Thigpen to the bench. As a county attorney, Thigpen had been criticized for not being available when the commissioner's court needed his counsel. In 1998, Rick Perry became lieutenant governor in the second George W. Bush gubernatorial term. The Thigpen appointment controversy has been mentioned as a possible cause of a potential breach between Governors Bush and Perry.<ref>Will Weissert, "Perry-Bush camps still feel old dispute", ''Laredo Morning Times'', September 19, 2011, p. 8A</ref>

 

==Controversies==

==Controversies==