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Brett Flashnick/Associated PressTexas Gov. Rick Perry recognizes a face in the crowd during a G.O.P. lunch in Columbia, S.C., Friday, Aug. 19, 2011.Consider the Rick Perry paradox: in a G.O.P. field notably bereft of experience in elected office, he has won nine back-to-back elections and spent the last decade as governor of America’s second-most-populous state. And, though the Thread has yet to see him in person, he is apparently the Red State equivalent of Kal-El. Or so says this rapturous lede from Politico:
It sounds like a political fairy tale: Months of campaigning by nearly a dozen candidates have left Republicans restless and worried. No one quite fits the bill. Less than six months remain before the primaries.
And then a superhero arrives.
He’s not just larger than life, he’s bigger than the Ames Straw Poll. His dramatic entrance alters the whole campaign. He swoops to the rescue and leaves everybody eating his dust.
This is the promise of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who announced his presidential candidacy here Saturday and stole the show from the straw poll 1,200 miles away.
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Perry holds the tantalizing promise of being the candidate everybody can agree on. To tea party die-hards, he’s Ron Paul with electability; to evangelicals, he’s Mike Huckabee with big-state gravitas; to the country-club set, he’s a steady hand with a long record of being someone they can do business with.
He’s got good looks, charisma, experience. So how do you explain his penchant for comments that are, well, a bit out there? Ben Bernanke’s loose-money policy is “treasonous,” and Texans would “treat him pretty roughly” if he came to their state. Global warming is a hoax. Evolution is just an idea “out there.” Social Security is unconstitutional, and the 16th Amendment, which establishes the grounds for federal income taxes, should be repealed. Are these just the words of a newbie to the national stage? Or the future of the Republican Party?
James Fallows picks Door No. 1:
Just after Sarah Palin was nominated three years ago, I argued that anyone who moves all at once from state-level to national-level politics is going to be shocked by the greater intensity of the scrutiny and the broader range of expertise called for. Therefore that person is destined to make mistakes; the question is how bad they will be. For Palin, they showed up in her disastrous first few interviews, especially with Katie Couric. Perry is getting his own introduction to this principle just now.
No doubt Perry will learn to be a little savvier with his soundbites. On other hand, Palin was a first-term governor from a thinly populated state; Perry’s state has more people than Australia, and an economy almost as large. Whether the rest of the country accepts his schtick, Perry isn’t going to change. As John Spong, a senior editor at Texas Monthly, wrote on New York Magazine’s Web site, that’s just the way things go in Texas:
‘Treat him pretty ugly’ is, in fact, the way we talk down here. We’re prone to violent imagery, typically without the intent to actually hurt anyone. Ann Richards’s Republican opponent when she first ran for governor, Clayton Williams, actually survived a campaign-trail rape joke. (She didn’t pass him in the polls until he refused to shake her hand after a debate.) What’s more, we use terms like ‘shitstorm’ in public as naturally as ‘y’all.’ Though Perry has avoided that specific bit of profanity with the press, he was once caught on-camera mocking a reporter at the close of an interview by saying, ‘Adios, mofo.’ He’s also shown an inclination to our trademark Big Talk, as evidenced by his willingness to consider secession at an Austin tax day event in 2009. When people say everything’s bigger in Texas, they don’t mean to exclude the rhetoric.
And that kind of talk will be part of Perry’s game plan going forward, as he said in an interview with Hillary Chabot of the Boston Herald: “The rhetoric will probably get heated. I’m going to be outspoken, I’m going to be passionate, I’m going to be calling it like I see it … And if I hurt the president’s feelings, well, with all due respect, I love my country and I love future generations more than I care about his feelings.”
That may play in Plano, but what about Peoria? Spong thinks not:
In another presidential primary season, that might have been a good thing. The notion of a Lone Star independent streak fueled the Western movies that helped build Hollywood and later propelled George W. Bush into the White House. He relied on it to place himself above the beltway fray. And he could get away with sounding like a gunslinger when he said he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” because he was expressing an anger shared by the entire country. He harked back to a time when the fights were simpler and the guy in the white hat won. Still, some of us cringed. His wording played a little too simple. He sounded like he was borrowing from the stereotype, which is worse than embodying it.
The latter would be Perry’s problem. His cowboy rhetoric, however organic, reads differently when he crosses the state line. It sounds to many ears like he’s come unhinged. But worse for Perry, when he points his tough Texanese at the federal government, he’s not addressing the economic frustration of the nation as a whole, he’s tapping into a populist rage that belongs to the tea party. It’s not clear there are enough of them to win a national election. It’s even less likely that the rest of the voting populace is itching to spend four more years knee-deep in Texas bluster.
Indeed, Perry’s inaugural-week comments quickly drew rebukes from fellow Republicans. Karl Rove called them “unpresidential.” Bruce Bartlett said Perry was an “idiot.” In comments to Politico, several G.O.P. congressmen fretted about what a Perry general-election bid would mean for Republican candidates elsewhere in the country:
House Republicans from heavily suburban districts were particularly uneasy about the Bernanke remark and Perry’s refusal to say whether President Barack Obama is a patriot. These members, some of them facing potentially tough reelection campaigns next year, urged the White House hopeful to stick to core issues of jobs and spending.
‘You can’t be calling Bernanke a traitor and you can’t be questioning whether or not Barack Obama loves America, that type of thing,’ said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and veteran Long Island incumbent. ‘I’ve been with Perry a few times, and I can see how he could project, again, if it’s done the right way. But no, if he continues this, he’ll have a tough time.’
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Roskam sounded a similar note. ‘I think he’s got to make a decision largely around what’s good for his family – his family comes up frequently in these conversations,’ said the three-term Republican. ‘But Paul Ryan is a real thought leader. His getting into the race changes the dynamic. A guy like Ryan sells in suburban Chicago.’
Others, however, were more supportive. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote in his syndicated column:
You could be mistaken for thinking that Perry set out from his infancy to trample on certain eastern sensibilities. Born in nowheresville Texas to a family of cotton farmers. An Eagle Scout. Attendance at Texas A&M, where he was a ‘yell leader’ — basically a male cheerleader — and in ROTC. After earning a degree in animal science and serving in the Air Force, he entered politics and eventually ascended to the governorship in the wake of another hated Texan — George W. Bush.
Perry makes Bush look like a sniveling elitist, what with his patrician, highly credentialed family. Perry went to Paint Creek Rural School in Haskell, Texas; Bush went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and then on to Yale and Harvard.
Perry is a great partisan of Texas and has mused about its leaving the union. He’s an evangelical Christian who unembarrassedly prays in public and for his state. He’s a tea partier who extols the Constitution and seeks a drastically limited federal government. He’s a law-and-order conservative in a state that still executes people.
It’d be almost impossible to come up with a background and cluster of affiliations so provocative. Texas has all the negative charge for liberals that Massachusetts does for conservatives. Perry will be branded as a backward, dimwitted, heartless neo-Confederate. A walking, talking threat to the separation of church and state who doesn’t realize people like him were supposed to slink away after the Scopes trial nearly 90 years ago.
The odd thing is, for all his posturing, Perry is actually considered a moderate by Texas Republican standards. Remember, this is a state where Ron Paul, who believes that NAFTA is part of a plot to force America into a European Union-style arrangement with Canada and Mexico, is regarded as a statesman. And it’s true that Perry has been more of an old-school Whig, willing to open the revenue faucets on infrastructure and other business-friendly development, than a small-government purist. As the staunchly right-wing Web site The American Dream argued,
Supporters of Texas Governor Rick Perry are not going to like this article at all. Right now, Republicans all over the United States are touting Rick Perry as the “Republican messiah” that is going to come charging in to save America from the presidency of Barack Obama. Many believe that if Rick Perry enters the race, he will instantly become the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Perry certainly looks the part and he knows how to give a good speech, but when ordinary Americans all over the country take a hard look at his record, they may not like what they see. The truth is that Rick Perry is a big-time globalist, he has raised taxes and fees in Texas numerous times, he has massively increased the size of government spending and government debt in Texas, he has been trying to ram the Trans-Texas Corridor down the throats of the Texas people and he tried to force young women all over Texas to be injected with the Gardasil vaccine. No, Rick Perry is not going to save America. In fact, he would likely be very, very similar to both Bush and Obama in a lot of ways.
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#4 Rick Perry has spearheaded the effort to lease roads in Texas to foreign companies, to turn roads that are already free to drive on into toll roads, and to develop the Trans-Texas Corridor which would be part of the planned NAFTA superhighway system. If you really do deep research on this whole Trans-Texas Corridor nonsense you will see why no American should ever cast a single vote for Rick Perry.
#10 Rick Perry attended the Bilderberg Group meetings in 2007. Associating himself with that organization should be a red flag for all American voters.
But it’s not just the tinfoil-hatters who have been criticizing Perry’s Tea Party credentials. As the Texas Observer’s Dave Mann noted in the New Republic,
For anyone who’s closely followed Perry’s tenure in Texas — as I have, covering the governor for The Texas Observer since 2003 — it’s no secret that some of the state’s conservatives and libertarians dispute his conservative credentials. It’s true that Perry has trafficked heavily in anti-Washington rhetoric, especially in the run-up to his candidacy to become president. But the closer you look at Perry’s record in Texas, the harder it is to discern any coherent ideology at all. When GOP primary voters in other parts of the country examine his signature legislative accomplishments and policy stances, some won’t like what they find.
There’s even been some backlash among the red-meat red state commentariat. Michelle Malkin wrote that
Texas, we have a problem. Your GOP governor is running for president against Barack Obama. Yet, one of his most infamous acts as executive of the nation’s second-largest state smacks of every worst habit of the Obama administration. And his newly crafted rationalizations for the atrocious decision are positively Clintonesque. … Trusting Rick Perry’s tea party credentials is a perilous shot in the dark.
Not that the Tea Party is listening to Malkin: in an Aug. 16 Rasmussen poll, Perry took the plurality of Tea Party supporters — 39 percent to Michele Bachmann’s second-place 21 percent.
Of course, stripped of its yee-haw bluster, Mr. Perry’s comments are not all that different from the sort of positions we’ve heard from Bachmann, Herman Cain or even Mitt Romney. In other words, this isn’t the Republican primary; it’s the Tea Party primary, and the various candidates are struggling to understand the lay of the new course. Perry has simply been more brazen about it. Whether he moves into the pole position or fizzles out, his candidacy will have clarified just how far the right’s center of gravity has tilted.
All of which means that the real winner, at least in the ideas primary, is Representative Ron Paul. As one of his aides said in an e-mail to Politico’s Ben Smith after the dustup over Perry’s anti-Bernanke comment, “Anyone who doesn’t get Ron Paul’s impact on the process or the fact he is gaining support in Iowa was sleeping through yesterday back and forth.”
Indeed, Representative Paul may have the last laugh in more ways than one. As he told a New Hampshire crowd, Rick Perry “makes me sound like a moderate.”
Peter Catapano is on vacation.
