Texas: Sarah Palin brings out crowd for Rick Perry rally near Houston

She urged the crowd to stick with Perry as someone whose conservative policies are succeeding, but she also received a huge cheer from the crowd of about 8,000 when she said she'd heard some mention of Texas seceding.

With early voting in the March 2 primary beginning in just over a week, Perry called on Palin to help rally support in his race against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Debra Medina.

In a race in which the two leaders are well-known politicians, having been in office for decades, endorsements from former President George H.W. Bush, as Hutchison received, or the last GOP vice presidential nominee, as Perry won, are unlikely to make a big difference to voters. But the appearance raised spirits and attention in the final quarter of a long battle.

In the speeches Sunday, all the long bombs were aimed at Washington, and by extension, the senior senator from Texas.

"Washington is broken. But your state under Governor Perry's leadership is setting an example that really a whole lot of other people now want to start following. And, as they say, if it ain't broke, why fix it?" Palin said.

The Hutchison campaign countered that when Palin ran for governor in Alaska, it was with the promise to throw out an old guard and "clean up the favor factory," as she said in her book Going Rogue.

Perry's initiatives on the Trans-Texas Corridor and for a vaccine for girls to prevent some forms of cervical cancer were colored by the involvement of favored lobbyists, Hutchison spokesman Joe Pounder said.

"We welcome Sarah Palin to Texas and hope she conveys her message to Rick Perry that cronyism doesn't work," Pounder said.