Rick Perry, no fan of Mass., to visit state on Tuesday

By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff

Governor Rick Perry of Texas hasn’t shown a lot of love for Massachusetts.

He is challenging Mitt Romney, the state’s former governor, for the Republican presidential nomination. He dismissed President Obama’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard this summer by saying, “I’m not even sure where it is.” And he unloaded on the Commonwealth in his book, “Fed Up!”

“I would no more consider living in Massachusetts than I suspect a great number of folks from Massachusetts would like to live in Texas,” Perry wrote. ”We just don’t agree on a number of things. They passed state-run health care, they have sanctioned gay marriage, and they elected Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barney Frank repeatedly – even after actually knowing about them and what they believe!”

But the tough-talking Tea Party favorite is headed to our fair state on Tuesday, for a speech before a conservative policy group in downtown Boston.

Perry, who has displaced Romney at the front of the Republican field, will headline the Pioneer Institute’s 20th annual Better Government Competition Awards Dinner before a sold-out audience of 350 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, a Republican who endorsed Obama in the 2008 presidential race, is also scheduled to speak, along with state Representative William N. Brownsberger, a Belmont Democrat, who won this year’s Better Government award for his plan to reform the state pension system.

Jim Stergios, the institute’s executive director, and a former undersecretary for environmental policy in the Romney administration, said the invitation to Perry was not intended as a slight to Romney.

Indeed, Stergios said, Perry was invited to the event back in February, before he had launched his presidential campaign, and accepted the invitation three weeks later.

Past speakers at the dinner include Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, Senator Scott Brown, a Republican, and Michelle Rhee, who was then serving as the provocative chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school system.

“I worked for Mitt Romney and I think the world of him, and think he’s a super-smart guy and Pioneer is not a partisan organization,” Stergios said. “What we try to do is get timely speakers and that’s what it’s about, and I think Perry is a pretty good choice.”

Pioneer staffers, Stergios said, got to know officials in the Perry administration two years ago, after helping them toughen Texas education standards, which he said are now “better than Massachusetts’s, easily.”

“Perry will be speaking about the need to make sure we manage our budgets, and ways to reform our budgets and create a climate where businesses thrive and people can have jobs,” Stergios said

Founded in 1988, Pioneer describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan, privately funded research organization” that develops policy ideas “based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.”