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Bad News for Team Perry
Who wouldn’t want to see this guy sitting across from the Iranians?
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has perhaps the best résumé in the presidential field. His state created 1.5 million jobs in the past eight years, he balanced his state’s budget every year, and he lowered taxes 75 times. He’s a veteran, tough on the border, and so pro-second amendment he shoots coyotes on his morning jog. Despite his bad experience with debating on back pain meds in 2012, his compelling history should make him a shoo-in for the top tier of the 2016 race.
But in a 17-person field where media oxygen is dominated by a reality-show blowhard and big donations are hoovered up by a presidential scion, it’s tough for even an alpha candidate like Perry to make headway. Poor polling forced him to last week’s kiddie-table debate which had only a third of the viewers as the main event later that night. Despite Perry’s strong performance, Carly Fiorina turned in an even better performance which attracted most of the post-broadcast attention.
After his campaign raised just over $1 million in the second quarter, times are getting tight around Perry HQ:
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign team in South Carolina is no longer being paid by his presidential campaign, National Journal has learned.
“Pay is only one reason people do this,” Katon Dawson, Perry’s South Carolina state director said in an interview. “We’ll be able to live off the land for a while.”
It is not clear if or when paychecks will start backing up for Perry’s team in South Carolina. Dawson said that Perry staffers in the state “have been paid up to two weeks ago.”
Dawson said core members of Team Perry, including himself, will continue to work, even if unpaid. He said Walter Whetsell and Le Frye, two top Perry operatives in the state, are among those still working.
“We’ll do it whether there’s pay or no pay,” Dawson said. In addition to the pay freeze, at least one Perry staffer was let go last week. Dawson said that move was unrelated to any “financial discomfort.”
On the plus side, Perry’s super PAC has raised about $17 million; certainly not Jeb! numbers, but impressive given the sprawling GOP field. Unless they can use that money to boost Perry’s profile fast, the swaggering Texan might be running out of time.
Published in General
Their most reliable voters no longer need oxygen.
Perry also passed modest criminal justice reforms, which is a plus in my book and unexpected from a Texas Republican. I also prefer to have a governor as the candidate and his military service is another plus (also happens to be useful in staving off the “chicken-hawk” ad hom attacks).
Not that it matters much. I’m becoming more and more convinced that none of the candidates would, if elected, save the country from financial oblivion. President Trump may be the best outcome, not because he would be any more successful than the rest of the field, but because we might as well go out with a bang, not a whimper, and have some laughs along the way. Part of me envied the entertainment value Torontonians must’ve derived from Rob Ford.
Yup. It is disheartening to find so much Ricochet attention being given to the presidential race when it really doesn’t matter that much. There is not much that a president can do to turn things around.
In the right environment a president might be able to do some things, but the right environment of public discourse is not going to be created when all our energies are directed to talking about the presidential campaign.
And the culling begins. Next up: Rand Paul and his Chrysler commercial campaign slogans (“I’m a different kind of Republican!”).
Just as bad, his “a 14 ft fence just means a market for 15 ft ladders” excuse. Curious that Israel didn’t have a problem with 15 ft ladders. Wonder why that is? Hmmm…
This is why I’ve said that Trump is less of a fraud than sitting GOP officeholders. Trump says he’s changed his mind. But the GOP campaigned in 2010 and 2014 on all these great things they’d do if we’d just vote them in. Then we voted them in, and they basically looked for reasons NOT to do the things they promised. The “who else will you vote for?” guilt trip doesn’t work any more. The people spewing it know what they can do with it. America’s going to hell anyway. Don’t tell us how damnation will be slower and better managed under the GOP.
Douglas, do you have an example of Walker doing that?
I don’t think it’s true of Bush, Rubio, Fiorina, or Perry, either, although I’m familiar with the argument for Rubio.
When he’s the front-runner, the GOP will see an upsurge. But after the 2012 shenanigans, that may have to wait until after the convention.
We don’t believe you.
edit: Posted the answer to the inevitable question.
Those are all the frontrunners (counting the term as “people likely to win” rather than “people leading in the polls today”).
I’m not asking for trust. I’m asking for examples of instances where this is true. to the extent that the question is advocacy, it’s because those instances don’t exist. Walker, Bush, and Perry pretty much governed as they ran, or even more conservatively. I give Perry flack for campaigning to the polls, but I think that’s mostly because he got burned by 2012 and was persuaded that authentic Perry wasn’t going to work out. He got new glasses, new campaign people, and new efforts to swot up on the issues and learned how to pretend to be different to 2012. AFAIK, this wasn’t a problem when he was running for governor.
Walker, likewise, campaigned on x (eg. stopping light rail, cutting spending, cutting taxes, promoting life, making it easier to get gun licenses, balancing budgets, expanding concealed carry and self defense rights, cutting unemployment, deepening welfare reform, etc.), did x, and also did y (photo ID, right to work, collective bargaining reform, defunding recycling and renewable energy, expanding mining, particularly supporting fracking). That’s not completely governing as promised, but I’d be surprised if the unheralded reforms were the sort of thing Douglas was referring to.
Again, I’m not asking you to trust me. If you think that my claims about gun licenses are conspiracy theories, go ahead and do the research to call me on it.
“he lowered taxes 75 times.”
Texas doesn’t have an individual income tax. I realize that there are other taxes. What taxes have been cut? And by what amounts?
So on the definition of frontrunner… I should just trust you on that? I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. But then, I wouldn’t.
You may be right on all the things you say, and it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t read the whole comment. What matters is the repeated betrayal by the GOP. Debate this, argue that, and for what?
Fool me once… we won’t get fooled again.
It”s a beautiful day here, now that the heat has let up.
Are you disputing my claim that Bush, Walker, Fiorina and Rubio include the frontrunners? I’m not saying that they’re all frontrunners, just that most people who think that someone is a frontrunner think it’s one of those. Who do you think is our most likely nominee? Carson? Santorum? Cruz? Huckabee? Pataki?
Or are you disputing my definition of frontrunner? I think Merriam Webster is with me, but either way I defined my use of the term in the comment, so I don’t think I was misleading.
Oh. Well, I guess that’ll teach me.
James, I’m not calling you a liar. I’m saying that your people over there keep making promises and then calling us stupid when we ask what’s up. I mean, it just goes on. It’s the sort of crazy-making that you expect in a Hitchcock film. Four years is an awfully long time. Long enough for most people to massage their perceptions, adjust their memories, temper their convictions, and try the same failed thing again an hopes of success. And those who make their living in this business are more aware of that fact than any other.
If you choose to believe them, that’s your business. And if you choose to be them, well then that’s your business as well.
To attack the budget, the president needs a cooperative Congress, but the real issue is that we are swamped with unfunded welfare programs that no politician dare touch because the voters of both parties will not allow it. My view doesn’t require any grand conspiracy or even a strong belief in the corruption of government and/or the people, just recognition that the current environment facilitates both sets of actors to act in their own self-interest while dooming all of us long-term.
It’s not impossible America will be set right, but seeing as all the incentives are for politicians to maintain the status quo and all the disincentives are against reform, I’m inclined to pessimism. My real concern is whether KDW is right and it will be awesome.
Emphasis added.
It requires more of a conspiracy than you think. The Ryan Plan does reform those unfunded programs. Not only have some politicians touched them, just about every GOP Congressman has voted for them and those running for 2016 almost all endorse them. It doesn’t require a lot of conspiracy theory; maybe they really are all working on fooling the rubes, but plenty of people have supported the Ryan Plan and gotten re-elected afterward. It’s not as scary as it once was.
Nope. Trump shoots hippies.
So far, I think polls in Texas have actually shown Cruz ahead of Perry.
Geography may yet do some strange things to us this race.
What does this mean? “cultural” I can work with…but ethnic make-up?
Freesmith, you sound like my WASP ancestors, despairing of all the Irish and Italians (not to mention the Jews) pouring in from the Third World…
Maybe Perry isn’t saying the five little words because he doesn’t want to be associated with the idea — apparently fairly close to the surface of anti-immigration anxieties—that the problem is that there are too many brown people in America?
My WASP ancestors would agree—except that they would exclude from the list of natural inheritors of our (that is, their) patrimony all the hoi-polloi, especially those with peculiar last names. Like Fiorina, Rubio, Pataki…
I like Perry and think he has much to offer the debate process even if he ultimately fails. He is a fine manager and I could see him in a conservative cabinet, cutting and slashing wasteful departments from existence.
^This. It’s a problem for lots of candidates.
Kate Braestrup
There are a more brown-skinned people in the US than there were 45 years ago, most of them from Mexico and Central America. When did we vote to do that?
Brown-skinned people have fundamentally transformed the ethnic and political make-up of California. Are you pleased with the results? I’m not. Similar population shifts are going on in several other states, many of them close to Mexico. Do you think that portends well for the future of an America built on principles which we share with the Anglosphere, and few other places? Do you think it portends well to empower our domestic left wing political party with new victims and clients? I don’t.
How do you propose to assimilate an endless wave of culturally diverse immigrants, to “make one out of many”? Isn’t it necessary to stop the inflow in order to accomplish integration, as was done from 1924 to 1970? And by the way, was America able to achieve anything notable in that period?
Our politicians owe the brown-skinned world – and the yellow-skinned world and the black-skinned world – nothing. They owe current Americans, the assimilated grandsons and granddaughters of the previous Great Wave of Immigration, everything. They should stick up for them. So should you.
Your ancestors, the folks who built this country, were smarter than you. You should respect them more, rather than disparaging them, like some snarky liberal.
Kate Braestrup
“Are you proposing that, forty-five years ago, there should have been a referendum on: “What color do you prefer Americans to be circa 2015?”
Referendum, no; however, there was a debate in our republic’s legislative bodies in 1965. You should look it up. You’ll find that the proponents of the new immigration bill swore up and down that the changes they were seeking would NOT alter the cultural and ethnic make-up of the US. They lied, and we now bear the consequences of their mendacity – a nation we are informed by triumphalist Hispanics and Democrats, that will not be majority white by 2050…or sooner.
Seeing that you asked though, let’s put the question about the future make-up of America to a referendum today. Agreed?
It’s nice that you’re happy with the fruits of the last 45 years of immigration policy. After all, the culture and mores of America haven’t changed very much in that time – wait, forget I said that.
But when is it enough for you? To repeat my question, how do you plan on assimilating a never-ceasing influx? Or is assimilation just some tired old word your WASP ancestors thought was important? Democrats think diversity is strength; I was taught that strength comes from unity, not diversity.
It’s time for a moratorium from our 45-year experiment in social re-engineering via immigration.
“Today, America needs fewer immigrants.”
Kate Braestrup
“My faith in the strength of the FF’s vision is such that I believe America can be and will be America even if there are no pasty, basal-cell-carcinoma-prone people like me, and we are shades-of-brown from sea to shining sea.”
That’s such an odd thing to write. This hemisphere has been full of nations that are shades of brown from sea to shining sea, yet not one of them has come close to matching America’s achievements. In fact, most are pathetic caudillo states.
But I know – it’s the Constitution. That’s what makes America America.
Like a liberal, like Attlee in Munich and Kerry in Vienna, you believe in the power of a piece of paper.
It must be a difficult year for fundrasing in Texas, competing for donors with the Bush family (I’m sure lots of people in Texas owe favors to GHWB, GWB, or both) and also Cruz.
First, what Kate said.
Second, I was vague because I was curious if it was on your radar already and whether you had written it off or not. Here’s Scott Walker in April, and he’s said this repeatedly since then:
Yes, he won’t offer the rationale you want (again, what Kate said). And yes, it’s not a specific promise — at least not yet — and yes, he can be coy.
I’m not asking if it meets your full approval, I’m asking if it potentially wins your vote. Because I think it’s all you’ll get from anyone serious. Santorum wants to cut immigration. Everyone else — including Trump, including Cruz — is further left.
Freesmith, do you really believe the difference between America and the rest of the world is skin color? Really?
Because I’m having a hard time interpreting your comment any other way — so if that’s not what you meant to say, perhaps consider rewording it.
I thought the clearer error was the suggestion that the Constitution was just a piece of paper. To borrow Freesmith’s point about brown countries not being like America, there are many white countries (whiter than America, even, even than America before any particular date) that have constitutional pieces of paper that are not like America.
There are also some fine people of other ancestry in this country whose loyalty to the Constitution is as strong as any in history. Even some who have given their lives for it.
History and tradition matter, but history and tradition are transferable across ethnic lines. None of my ancestors (at least to my knowledge) sailed on the Mayflower, or signed the Declaration. But that is my history.