Mr. McHale, a Perry spokesman said after the initial donation, "understands Governor Perry's leadership has made Texas a good place to do business."
Including, it turned out, for Mr. McHale's business interests and partners. In May 2010 an economic development fund administered by the governor's office handed $3 million to G-Con, a pharmaceutical start-up that Mr. McHale helped get off the ground. At least two other executives with connections to the firm had also given Mr. Perry tens of thousands of dollars.
McHale hardly is alone. Reports The Times:
Over three terms in office, Mr. Perry's administration has doled out grants, tax breaks, contracts and appointments to hundreds of his most generous supporters and their businesses. And they have helped Mr. Perry raise more money than any politician in Texas history, donations that have periodically raised eyebrows but, thanks to loose campaign finance laws and a business-friendly political culture dominated in recent years by Republicans, have only fueled Mr. Perry's ascent.
"Texas politics does have this amazing pay-to-play culture," said Harold Cook, a Democratic political consultant.
Alabama also has been accused of having a "pay-to-play culture," and that supposedly is why the feds went after Siegelman--and still are pursuing an electronic-bingo prosecution. But transcripts in the Siegelman case show that the former governor, in fact, violated no law when he accepted a campaign donation from Scrushy and then appointed him to a state hospital board--one the former HealthSouth CEO had served on under three previous governors. After all, no "explicit agreement" instruction was given to the jury, and no evidence was presented that such an agreement existed.
If the point of the Siegelman prosecution was to discourage interactions between governors and donors, it failed. The message certainly did not get through to Rick Perry:
Mr. Perry is not the first governor to have taken contributions from contractors or appointees to state commissions and boards, which oversee many of the agencies that in other states are controlled directly by the governor.
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