FORTUNE — Texas Governor Rick Perry, the new front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, faces a serious challenge tonight when he takes the stage at the Reagan Presidential Library for his first national debate.
An unproven debater, Perry will debut as his competition’s top target. It’s been less than a month since he launched his campaign, and he’s already surged to the front of the pack in part on promises to bring about a jobs renaissance.
The governor relies on the Lone Star State’s economic performance under his leadership over the last decade to make his case. But where is his economic plan for the nation? Or, at least, where is the economic team that will help him craft it?
So far, apparently, neither exists. Perry’s camp did not respond to Fortune inquiries about which economic brains the candidate aims to consult. Pressed on Fox News on Tuesday for a clue about when he’ll roll out his jobs plan, Perry said his focus right now is on containing the wildfires ravaging his home state.
The very real threat posed by the fires and his relative newness in the race will buy him a longer grace period — “He just announced his campaign team last week, and it takes a while to put a lot of those pieces together,” says Republican consultant Doug Heye — but the clock is winding down.
Perry’s performance tonight is being bracketed by detailed blueprints from the two men he needs to beat to win the White House.
The rival he just deposed atop the GOP heap, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, dominated the airwaves on Tuesday with the well-received rollout of an 59-point, 160-page economic plan that proposes cutting the corporate tax rate and scaling back regulations. Romney added some more heft by simultaneously announcing an economic team headed by two of the right’s most-respected economists, Glenn Hubbard and Gregory Mankiw.
And tomorrow, President Obama will flex his bully-pulpit prerogative when he presents his jobs plan in a prime-time address to a joint session of Congress.
Perry has talked in vague terms about what his approach would be: low taxes, less regulation, tort reform, and reduced spending. “You won’t have stimulus programs under a Perry presidency. You won’t spend all the money,” he said at recent appearance in Oklahoma. And Perry has embraced a proposal that a collective of multinational corporations is pressing Congress to adopt that would allow them to repatriate foreign profits at bargain-basement tax rates.
As he stands up his campaign, there is evidence Perry is reaching out to private-sector leaders for economic advice. He brought a handful of Washington hands who lead small business trade associations down to Austin last month for a lunch meeting that one participant described as a “pure policy session” on job growth.
And it may be that Perry would like to hold off on hiring economic eggheads for as long as he can. The governor has cultivated an anti-elitist image, distancing himself from his predecessor in the Texas governor’s mansion, George W. Bush, by noting the 43rd president went to Yale, while Perry was a Texas A&M man. On Fox News, he recently blasted Obama for surrounding himself with academics who claim prestigious degrees and no real-world experience. “They are intellectually very, very smart but he does not have wise men and women around him,” Perry said.
Nevertheless, potential supporters eyeing Perry’s campaign in the next few weeks will be looking for the candidate to bring some heavy-hitting advisors aboard.
“When you’re tackling huge problems such as the economy, you’re going to want to have a few name-brand economists that people trust and rely on, that people know are credible in their fields,” GOP strategist Ron Bonjean says. “Supporters want to know this machine is well-oiled.”
An added inducement for Perry to get moving in that direction: the sooner he puts out a detailed jobs proposal, the faster he can change the subject with a national press corps that has focused on the controversial positions he laid out last year in his book, Fed Up!, which was written before he’d decided on a White House run.
“It’s the shiny-ball theory of politics,” Bonjean says.