She’s staying in Washington, but U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s making time to talk extensively — and at times, passionately — on Texas television. In a twenty-minute interview with WFAA-TV’s Brad Watson and The Dallas Morning News‘ Gromer Jeffers, Jr., gubernatorial hopeful Hutchison defends herself against Governor Rick Perry’s campaign claims that she’s too much a part of Washington.

“I’m not Washington… Perry keeps hitting us as if we’re part of the problem,” Hutchison said. “I’m the conservative,” Hutchison said. “Gov. Perry talks like a conservative, but governs like a liberal.”

She doesn’t hold back when it comes to the tenor of this intra-party struggle.

“It is obscene the things that he has done to me and said to me personally,” she said.

The Perry campaign denies the governor attacked her personally.

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