Perry's Eagle Scout campaign

Time:

Rick Perry has been studying oratory with a former Shakespeare actor, and it showed on Monday, when the former Texas governor paced around a small gathering in a two-stoplight-town farming village in Iowa.

Perry stretched his hands apart like a huge balloon when he talked about Texas’ job growth. He dramatically swung two fingers in a general southerly direction when he recalled his tough border policies in 2014. But it was the subtler speaker’s trick that may have won Perry’s listeners over: know your audience.

“When I look at a resume and I see ‘Eagle Scout,’ I can take that out and put it in a special pile,” Perry told a crowd with plenty of Boy Scouts of America members and U.S. military veterans.

“I may be applying for a job in the future,” Perry continued, “so I want them to know I was an Eagle Scout.”
...

“Because I know something about that young person right off the bat: that at a young age, they started a major project, that had a long process to come to its fruition,” he said. “I know they started a major project and they followed a guide book to its conclusion. And with that discipline, that focus as a 12- to 17-year-old, they most likely have those same characteristics as a 25 or 35 or 45-year-old—or 65-year old individual.”
...

In Holstein, Perry chose as good a place as any to talk about uniformed service. The one-commercial street town, which has at its center a large granary and is in the heart of biofuel country, is predominantly traditional and in Iowa’s conservative West. There are more than 200 Eagle Scouts in the county of 7,000 people, and when Perry thanked “the mothers and fathers” of Eagle Scouts, there was wild applause.
...

There is more.

Perry also stressed his military experience in the Air Force and was cricial of Obama's fiasco in Iraq.  After his speech many scouts in uniforms lined up for pictures with the former Texas governor.