With all the buzz about Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s late entrance into the presidential race, it seems reasonable to predict that he could emerge as the Republican nominee to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in November 2012.
Perry is surely not lacking in confidence and he has an 11-year track record in Texas on which to run upon. He calls it the “Texas miracle,” which will cause some voters to cringe, remembering the bogus “Massachusetts miracle” that Mike Dukakis touted in the 1988 campaign.
I wonder if the American people will ultimately be willing to elect a governor to lead the union of 50 states who, just two years ago, made some noises about a Texas secession from the union.
In any event, Perry is a multi-layered candidate who certainly requires detailed scrutiny by the voters.
Based on reports from Politifact, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the National Journal and others, here is a list of Perry’s pros and cons. The words are not mine but a mix of what the political spectrum offers in August 2011:
PRO–Texas is home to about 40 percent of the jobs created nationwide since the recession ended. The state’s economy is growing about three times as fast as the national rate. Home prices have remained stable even as much of the country has seen sharp declines.
Texas remains in an enviable position. The state has created more than 260,000 jobs since June 2009, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and the state’s economy is growing by an estimated annual rate of about 3 percent, compared to the national growth rate in the last quarter of 1.3 percent.
“Thanks to our low taxes, reasonable and predictable regulatory climate, fair legal system and skilled work force, we continue to attract companies from around the nation,” said Perry, 61.
Texas is a jobs Mecca. Several of the state’s housing markets were national standouts last year. And Perry is correct that about 40,000 businesses were exempted from paying the franchise tax though he fails to note that more businesses are subject to the revamped tax than before.
The state has created more than 260,000 jobs since June 2009, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and the state’s economy is growing by an estimated annual rate of about 3 percent, compared to the national growth rate in the last quarter of 1.3 percent.
“Thanks to our low taxes, reasonable and predictable regulatory climate, fair legal system and skilled work force, we continue to attract companies from around the nation,” Perry said.
CON — Some economists as well as Perry skeptics suggest that Perry stumbled into the “Texas miracle.” They say that the governor has essentially put Texas on autopilot for 11 years, and it was the state’s oil and gas boom — not his political leadership — that kept the state afloat. They also doubt that the Texas model, regardless of Mr. Perry’s role in shaping it, could be effectively applied to the nation’s far more complex economic problems.
“Because the Texas economy has been prosperous during his tenure as governor, he has not had to make the draconian choices that one would have to make in the White House,” said Bryan W. Brown, chairman of the Rice University economics department and a critic of Mr. Perry’s economic record. “We have no idea how he would perform when he has to make calls for the entire country.”
And if Perry were to win the Republican nomination, he would face critics, among them Democrats, who have long complained that the state’s economic health has come at a steep a price: a long-term hollowing out of the state’s prospects because of deep cuts to education spending, low rates of investment in research and development, and a disparity in the job market that confines many blacks and Hispanics to minimum-wage jobs without health insurance.
“The Texas model can’t be the blueprint for the United States to successfully compete in the 21st-century economy, where you need a well-educated work force,” said Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based liberal research group.
PRO – Perry thrives on a reputation as an exceptional retail politician – a one-on-one people person – who has never lost an election, going back to his days as a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives.
Perry is no flash-in-the-pan candidate, akin to Fred Thompson in 2008 or Wesley Clark in 2004. Just before he entered the race, national polls showed him at the top of the Republican field, narrowly behind Mitt Romney.
He wasn’t even on the Ames ballot, yet managed to tally 718 write-in votes, ahead of Romney’s total. Despite being caricatured as a candidate whose appeal is limited to hard-right conservatives and Southerners, he’s spent much of his early focus in New Hampshire, a state where social conservatism is shunned, but which has a proud libertarian tradition in line with Perry’s message.
He is an extremely astute politician with a keen sense of where voters are, and he has great instincts on message. Perry has ruthless discipline and communication. They say in politics, “Don’t let your boot off an opponent’s neck till Election Day.” Perry doesn’t take his boot off till a year after the votes have been counted and the opponent has faded into oblivion. He is actually a better campaigner than George W. Bush (Perry’s predecessor as Texas governor) was when he first entered the national scene.
Perry has surrounded himself with a very loyal staff. His aides believe in him, and he in them. He is involved in campaign decisions, but he delegates well and doesn’t stop being loyal because a mistake might be made. This is a huge advantage in the ebb and flow of presidential campaigns.
To give one example, at the beginning of the 2010 election cycle, most pundits were expecting a serious primary contest between Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison, the state’s senior senator. Perry suggested that he wasn’t even thinking much about the campaign, predicted that she didn’t really want the job, and anticipated a blowout. He called it right. As for the Perry criticism that he is a far-right ideologue, it’s an comprehensible perception because he talks the talk, but his sizzle-to-steak ratio is rather high.
A prediction: Perry becomes the frontrunner, even ahead of Mitt Romney, for three main reasons.
No. 1, he fires up large chunks of the base in a way Romney does not. Romney has “default candidate” written all over him, but evangelicals and other hard-shell conservatives are never going to love a Massachusetts Mormon. They’ll love Perry.
No. 2, Perry can quickly become the “establishment” candidate because the establishment of today’s GOP is not based on Wall Street or the heartland but in Texas — Karl Rove, the oilmen, the various billionaires who prime those GOP pumps.
No. 3 is speculation rather than fact, but Perry will demonstrate pretty quickly that he’s a better campaigner than Romney. It won’t be hard.
It will take some time, probably, for the polls to reflect all this, but they will. Republicans don’t want a posh, well-spoken Yankee who worked at a place with a name like Bain Capital. In their deepest souls, they want a Texas governor. They want a sh– kicker.
CON — Although he has run many times for both district and statewide office in Texas, Perry has never been fully vetted by the media. He underwent some scrutiny in his races for governor, but he has never endured the full-court press that happens in a presidential race. What the media discovers will not be as important as how he and the campaign handle the intense spotlight for the first time. Perry and some of his staffers are known to have thin skins. They will need to grow calluses if they are to succeed in the show.
Texas remains in an enviable economic position, but it’s questionable whether Perry, who serves in a “weak governor” format deserves much of the credit.
Texas is one of the few states without an income tax. But the question Perry’s detractors raise, however, is whether he has gotten a free ride — and has gone untested — because of the state’s natural resources.
When Perry succeeded Geroge W. Bush, a barrel of oil was worth only $25. Experts warned that Texas’s natural gas and oil fields, which directly and indirectly support about one-third of the state’s jobs, were in steep decline. But during his first term, global market forces began driving oil prices up. They peaked at $147 a barrel in 2008 and have largely remained above $80 over the last two years.
At the same time, a technological revolution in drilling — the combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling of shale rock — has opened up new gas and oil fields throughout the state. In North Texas, companies are drilling under schools, airports and parks. Tens of thousands of rig jobs have been created and many residents have received thousands of dollars in lease sales and royalties.
The oil and gas industry now generates roughly $325 billion a year for the state economy, directly and indirectly. It brings in $13 billion in state tax receipts, or roughly 40 percent of the total, financing up to 20 percent of the state budget.
“He’s been lucky,” said Bernard L. Weinstein, associate director of the McGuire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Obviously, neither the governor nor public policy in Texas has pushed oil prices up, and clearly the technological innovation has created a whole new industry in Texas.”
Policywise, some say he’s too radical, even for Republicans. “Social Security is a Ponzi scheme”‘ goes over well with a certain segment of the Tea Party, but not with most of the country. Nor does most of the country want to get rid of Medicare and turn it over to the states. And despite conventional wisdom, about half of the GOP rank-and-file aren’t Tea Party sympathizers.
Next: Sharp contrast with Obama
