Texas Governor Rick Perry turning G.O.P. heads as prepares to announce candidacy

While other Republican candidates clawed and hammered each other in last night's Iowa debate, the best G.O.P. candidate might have been waiting on the sidelines to suck the wind from their battered sails.

See Claws come out in Republican debate ahead of Iowa poll (VIDEO)

Texas governor Rick Perry will enter the presidential race Saturday with big appearances in South Carolina and New Hampshire, the Washington Post reported. Gov. Perry will not enter the Iowa straw poll and is thus viewed as a big gun who may steal the political oxygen from other G.O.P. candidates campaigning in Iowa for the poll.

“He’s going to immediately change the entire dynamic of the Iowa caucuses,” Iowa state Sen. David Johnson told Politico.

Perry's strategy is a calculated one. "He’s really focusing the campaign on himself and taking it out of Iowa,” said Prof. Brian Smith, of Saint Edward’s University. “It’s forcing people to come to him," KVUE news reported.

His team believes that his support among social conservatives is strong and that he helped himself last week by hosting a national prayer rally. It drew 30,000 people to a Houston arena and the attention of more than 1,000 churches nationwide. See Rick Perry leads national prayer rally in Houston

Perry is working quickly to assemble a network of operatives nationally and in key early-voting states Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He’s attracting staff from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s imploded campaign as well as the aborted presidential bid of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the Washington Post reported.

Many believe he has true Tea Party credentials as well.

"Perry has never been the kind of popular governor Bush was, either inside the state Legislature or with the general public. But his political instincts and his understanding of how power works have made him the most powerful Texas governor perhaps ever," NPR reported.

Perry has always been known as a fiscal conservative who was anti-regulation for banks, businesses and the oil and gas industry. But in the past few months, Perry has begun to describe the way he sees world events through the prism of the Bible. "I think we're in a time of great revival in this world," Perry said in an interview with televangelist James Robinson in April. Perry saw the world economic crisis as a necessary trial that must be endured to teach a biblical lesson.

It's too early to tell what kind of impact Perry will ultimately have on the race, but he seems to be assembling a formidable campaign.