Rick Perry as Agriculture Commissioner in Texas. From an article in today's New York Times's Sunday Review by Gail Collins, " To Perry, everything comes back to Texas" in which she discusses his arrangement while still a Democrat to take Karl Rove's support and run against Jim Hightower, a liberal, for the post of Agricultural Commissioner: " Perry ran against a Hightower rule requiring farmers to get their workers out of the fields before they sprayed pesticide on them, and won."