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Kelly McParland:
Texas has one of the worst education records in the U.S., vying with Mississippi for fewest high school graduates among the 50 states. It has the fewest people with health insurance, one of the lowest literacy rates, an 8.2 percent unemployment rate and 17% of its population lives below the poverty line. But Governor Rick Perry is popular enough with voters that he announced Saturday he will give Americans another chance to put a conservative Texas governor in the White House.
Perry’s arrival, though hardly a surprise, came with the requisite great expectations. Tea partyists are delighted that two of the three favourite candidates — Perry and Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann — hail from the heart of the GOP’s most conservative ranks. Perry has never lost an election, has been in office more than 10 years and leads a state that has produced 40% or more of the country’s jobs since June 2009. Take that, snivelling liberals.
But he also comes equipped with some obvious baggage, and while his candidacy has injected new blood into the anaemic Republican campaign, it’s still not clear the party has found the candidate who can take on President Barack Obama and win, despite all Obama’s problems. The president may not even get a chance to delve into Perry’s liabilities if former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the current GOP frontrunner, does a good enough job of it first.
Though Romney leads the line-up of eight candidates — there would have been nine, but Tim Pawlenty pulled out Sunday after failing to best Bachmann in an Iowa straw poll — he’s seen as too liberal by many Republicans. He introduced universal health care to his state, just as Obama did to the U.S.; he once supported abortion rights before deciding he didn’t really mean it; he isn’t as nearly anti-gay enough for the tea party faction, and is a Mormon to boot.
All that means he’s had trouble putting much distance between himself and the other candidates. Perry will do far better with social conservative, family-value christians, but it’s not obvious that he can be easily sold to the swing voters who decide presidential elections.
His strong point is the Texas economy, which has barely noticed the recession that is squeezing the life from much of the country. Perry has kept it afloat with low taxes — there is no state income tax — and corporate immigration by firms fleeing the red tape and higher costs of states like California. If the U.S. economy continues to lag, or a second recession hits, Perry can promise to administer the same medicine to the rest of the country.
It could be enough. But then again, maybe not. Perry attracted many of the jobs by luring companies from other states with attractive subsidies, which would more difficult if he was elected president of all 50. Pitting states against each other isn’t supposed to be part of the White House job description. And the jobs aren’t necessarily great: Texas is tied — again — with Mississippi for the most minimum-wage jobs in the U.S.
He’s also open to charges of cronyism and opportunism. While Romney is criticized for changing positions on abortion and gay rights, Perry started life as a Democrat, and managed Al Gore’s Texas campaign during Gore’s first run for the presidency (though Gore, admittedly, was a lot more conservative then than he became later as Captain Environment). He gradually shifted to the right as he rose through Texas politics, and while he lays claim to a take-no-prisoners view on family values, in the 2008 presidential race he backed Rudy Giuliani, a curious choice given the former New York mayor is a pro-choice, gay-friendly, social liberal with a history of marital infidelity.
One of the most ambitious projects Perry championed as governor was the Trans-Texas Corridor, a 6,400-km network of road, rail and utility lines worth an estimated $150 billion to $180 billion, which died an unlamented death after being flayed as a land-grab that would shift private property into public hands and pour road tolls into the pockets of Republican-friendly firms. Similarly, the Texas Residential Construction Commission, hailed as a homeowner’s best friend, proved to be a front for the home-building industry and was disbanded after six years of consumer complaints.
The Dallas Morning News has detailed Perry’s “murky” private land deals, including a resort lot on Lake Lyndon B. Johnson that produced a $500,000 profit after political friends helped Perry buy it at an advantageous price and sell it well above the estimated value.
It’s not even entirely clear why Perry is running. In making his announcement he said he realized he could not “sit on the sidelines if my country’s future truly is at stake,” but as recently as June he was still insisting he had no interest in the job. The U.S. is two years into its downturn; what changed about the country’s future since June — other than Congress finally reaching a debt deal — isn’t clear. Unlike Romney, a millionaire businessman with a long record of success in the private sector, Perry has spent most of his life in government. He plans to run on an anti-Washington, outsider platform, but was first elected, as a Democrat, in 1984, after serving in the air force and farming cotton with his father.
There’s also the Bush issue. Though Perry and the George W. Bush camp don’t much like each other — Bush favoured another candidate in the last gubernatorial race — Perry is not only a tax-cutting, socially conservative, pro-gun, family values governor from Texas, he even has a mediocre academic record, Texas twang and confident strut much like the former president. If anything, Perry is even more Bush than Bush: under a bill signed this year, before an abortion can be performed in Texas, a sonogram must be performed; the woman must be allowed to see the images and hear the heartbeat or listen to a detailed description. He has suggested Texas still has the right to secede if Washington persists in trampling on its rights, and supports an organization that argues Muslims have no right to religious freedom.
Perry says he’d repeal the president’s healthcare bill, and, like other candidates, supports a budget plan that would replace Medicare with a voucher system for people under 55. Promising to take away health coverage isn’t usually a formula for winning over the middle class. Fed up as Americans are with the drifting Obama administration, it’s fair to suggest many don’t yet realize the shock treatment they’d be in for from a Perry presidency either.
National Post
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