It takes a village to raise an idiot, too.

Fox News Sunday, today:

Governor Perry, welcome back to "Fox News Sunday."

RICK PERRY (R-TX), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Good to be with you. Thank you.

WALLACE: Let's start with the elephant in the room, I think you'd agree, your embarrassing run for president in 2012.

What happened?

PERRY: Obviously we weren't healthy. I highly recommend anybody running for the presidency, make sure you're healthy. I had major back surgery. And I didn't prepare properly. I think the real issue there was I thought being governor of the state of Texas for 12 years was enough preparation to run for the presidency, and the fact of the matter is, there is nothing like it. Until you've done it, you don't even realize what a challenge it is. These broad array of issues that you have to have more than just passing knowledge of. (1)

WALLACE: What did you learn from it?

PERRY: Well, I learned, number one, you have to be healthy, and secondly, you have got to prepare. And it takes years of preparation, I will suggest to you, whether it's sitting down with real experts on foreign policy, people like Richard Fisher (ph) to James Ricards (ph) on the monetary side of things. Sitting with George Shultz and Henry Kissinger (2) and Brian Hook (ph) at the Hay (ph) Initiative. Individuals who have deep knowledge of what's going on in the world, absorbing it, studying it, and keeping this up for some lengthy period of time. I feel very comfortable now sitting on the stage that I can have those conversations, and regurgitate that information that I know and that I've absorbed in a way that the American people are going to see a very different candidate than they did four years ago. (3)

WALLACE: Let me talk to you about that, because on Friday you were talking about the shooting in Charleston, and you said accident when you meant incident. It was clearly a slip of the tongue. But social media went nuts, which raises the question, which I thought for some time, don't you have to run almost a perfect campaign? Because if you make any mistake that any other candidate, it would be ignored, people will say, whoops, that's Rick Perry again.

PERRY: I don't think they are going to ignore anybody, whether it's Hillary Clinton calling a reporter by the wrong name within the last 24 hours or me calling you Mike instead of Chris. People are going to make mistakes and people know that.

But what people want to see is someone who truly has a vision for this country. Who has a record. And I will lay my record out, 14 years as the chief executive of the 12th largest economy in the world, that economic record. My military history, not only of wearing the uniform of this country but having been the commander in chief of the Texas military forces, the Texas National Guard. My dealing with things like the border, like Ebola, with massive hurricanes. All of that is a record that the people are going to look at. Are they going to say, hey, listen, you said one word when you meant another one? Social media can do what they want to do with that. But when you really get down to it, record is what's going to matter in this election.

WALLACE: One more campaign question, and we'll get into the issues. You're focusing on Iowa, where you have already spent since 2012, 31 days. But in the latest RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, you are now running 11th in Iowa after 31 days at 3 percent, which raises the question, Governor, realistically, do you have a chance to win, or is this campaign more about personal redemption, showing people that you're not the Rick Perry of 2012?

PERRY: Well, I will tell you what the Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa, said as late as 72 hours ago, when he was asked about who was spending time in Iowa. He said let me compliment Rick Perry. Rick Perry has got a powerful organization, and he has spent the time in this state.

WALLACE: So why are you at 3 percent?

PERRY: This is a process. Rudy Giuliani led through '07 and '08. I just try to remind people don't get hung up on today's poll. Let's see what it looks like in January. We're going to spend a lot of time there. We're going to talk about a vision for this country that's positive, that's I think very forward leaning and looking, and people are going to -- people I think are going to get behind that and like that.

WALLACE: You are running on a strong populist message this time. Here's a clip from your announcement statement.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PERRY: The American people, they see this rigged game where the insiders get rich, the middle class pays the tab. There is something wrong when the Dow is near record highs, and businesses on Main Street can't even get a loan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Governor, you sound like Bernie Sanders.

PERRY: I sound like a young man that grew up on a dry land cotton form that understands what it's like to have to really work hard. In today's world, a lot of Americans are out there, and they are going, hey, wait a minute, what are these people on Wall Street getting rich for? Who is going to bail me out? (4)

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: -- class warfare, isn't that what Republicans always --

PERRY: No. That's common sense. What is wrong is Washington bailing out companies that make bad decisions. That's a reason we have bankruptcy laws. And I think the American people want to see fairness in that. They don't want to see somebody that's on Wall Street, somebody that's got connections in that Capitol building over there, be the only ones that have protection in this country. (5) I think they're looking for an individual who grew up in a house that used an outhouse. My mom bathed me on a back porch in a No. 2 wash tub. Someone that's actually had to really work to get to somewhere in life, and it wasn't given to him on a silver platter.

Americans are ready for a great success story, and to know that their kids -- we've got a social compact with one generation to the next. And Americans don't believe that's possible today. And I want to give them hope that it really is possible again by leveling that playing field.

WALLACE: But is it right or fair to bash the rich? Do you want to limit what people on Wall Street make? Do you want to tax them more? Are you saying that we want to somehow limit the gains in the Dow? You talk about the Dow being at an all-time high. There are a lot of working folks who have their retirement investments, their savings in the stock market.

PERRY: I think people want to see fairness. When you see the rules that are in place nowadays, when you see all the exemptions, I think people want to see a fair tax rate, they want to be able to keep more of what they work for. In the 12th largest economy in the world, state of Texas that I had the privilege to be the chief executive of for the last 14 years, we made a state that allowed people to have jobs, an environment that allowed them to keep more of what they worked for. And that's what Americans want. They would like to see the same thing, and they don't see that today. They see Wall Street getting bailed out. They see General Motors getting bailed out.

WALLACE: You keep saying Wall Street is getting bailed out. They got bailed out during a specific time when we had this huge financial crisis.

PERRY: Let me explain --

WALLACE: Would you have let all of Wall Street collapse? People say the financial system would have collapsed.

PERRY: Let me explain to you where people really feel that what's happening in Washington is hurting them out in middle America. Dodd-Frank regulations. We got 41 percent fewer community banks today than we had in 2007. There are people all over this country, middle Americans, farmers in Iowa, who use those community banks. And you see these regulations that are strangling their ability to get a loan. That's what I'm talking about. That's what people see as Washington being disconnected with what's really going on out there on Main Street.

WALLACE: One more question about Main Street or looking out for the little guy. When you were governor of Texas, your state had the highest uninsured rate in the country. One in five, more than one in five Texans didn't have health coverage, and yet you refused to set up a state exchange under Obamacare. You refused to expand Medicaid. Is that looking out for the little guy when 21 percent of Texans didn't have health insurance?

PERRY: If how you keep score is how many people you force to buy insurance, then I would say that that's how you keep score. That's not how we --

WALLACE: But the flip side of it, how many people don't have health insurance.

PERRY: Let me explain what we do in Texas. This is a state by state decision. We make access to healthcare the real issue. We passed the most sweeping tort reform in the nation. We got 35,000 more positions licensed to practice medicine in 2013 than we did a decade before that. This is an issue for me, it's about access to healthcare. And it's not about whether you force somebody to buy insurance. It's whether Texans have access to good healthcare.

We have got the Texas Medical Center, and physicians are showing up in places that literally we didn't have physicians to do those subspecialties ten years ago that we do today. (6)

WALLACE: I understand that, sir, but don't you, as the governor for 14 years, don't you feel some responsibility when 21 percent of the people in your state didn't have health insurance?

PERRY: That's not how we keep score. I think it's a fallacy to say access to healthcare is all about insurance (7). What we happen to say in the state of Texas is we're going to try to make as accessible as we can good, quality healthcare. And that's what we've done in the state of Texas.

Do you think all those people moved to the state of Texas because somehow know they couldn't get healthcare? 5.6 million people added to the population rolls, oh and by the way, 1.5 million jobs created between 2007 and 2014. That's what people care about. They know they can come to the state of Texas and have access to really good healthcare, and government was not going to force them to buy insurance.

WALLACE: Finally, at the end of these interviews, we try to get off the issues and try to get some personal insight into the person, man or woman I'm talking to. At your announcement a couple of weeks ago, Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor was there alongside you. I bet a lot of people don't know that long before the book or the movie and all of his fame, that he showed up on your door at the governor's mansion in 2007 and he was in trouble.

PERRY: He was. He had separated from the service. He had some real challenges physically, mentally. And he was looking for a safe harbor. He found it with Rick and Anita Perry.

WALLACE: What did you do for him?

PERRY: We brought him. We intervened. He had been separated, but not given full medical discharge. He wasn't eligible for Tricare. I intervened all the way up to the secretary of the Navy. Secretary Mabus, and Secretary Mabus, to his credit, engaged in this process, and we were able to get him eligible for Tricare so he could have the surgeries, he could have the intervention that he needed. (8)

WALLACE: But if I may, because we're running out of time here, more than that, you said in your announcement he's a second son.

PERRY: We became and still are incredibly close to him. We brought him in. My wife is a nurse. So we worked very closely with him. I mean, he literally lived with us for two plus years, and we took care of him, and we've seen him now become a very healthy, very successful dad and a great American.

WALLACE: Governor Perry, thank you. Good to talk with you again.

PERRY: Always a good interview with you, sir.

WALLACE: Thank you. We'll see you on the campaign trail.

PERRY: Lord willing.

________________

(1) So now he has two more years of being governor. How is he better prepared?

(2) Shultz, who is 94 years old, left office in 1989. Kissinger, who is 92, left office in 1977.

(3) We love those Animal Planet shows of mama birds feeding their babies, too. How will voters see him differently, other than the glasses?

(4) It depends on who's doing the redistributing, we suppose. See also, "Flood Relief."

(5) See note 8, below, re connections and influence.

(6-7) Anyone want to try and diagram these sentences?

(8) See note 5, above, re influence.