GOP Turns Its Eyes to Bush III

Texas Gov. Rick Perry takes a break from executing the innocent to liven up the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

It was a wild weekend for the race for the Republican presidential nomination this weekend, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry officially throwing his 10-gallon hat in the ring. (Michelle “Pray the gay away” Bachmann also won the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, but we can pretend, for now at least, that she stands no real chance of nabbing the GOP nomination, right? RIGHT?) Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal declares that Perry is now the Republican front-runner, setting up a tilt over the next year between him and Willard “Mitt” Romney. So who's this Rick Perry, then? He's basically the anti-Obama, as he “grew up in rural Paint Creek, Texas, farming cotton in his early years, and attending the state’s land-grant university, Texas A&M,” before ending up in the governor's office and presiding over three terms of economic growth and job creation (more on that in a minute) during some of the U.S.' rougher patches. “The Texas governor's blunt advocacy of conservatism and faith-tinged rhetoric couldn’t be any [more] different from Obama’s nuanced rhetoric and cautious governing style,” says Kraushaar. In other words, he's a more Texan version of former prez George W. Bush, but maybe with even fewer scruples. He did oversee the execution of a man who was almost certainly innocent, after all.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum believes that the wheels will fall off Perry's campaign before too long, enumerating 10 reasons that ought to handicap the brash governor. Variously, Drum argues that Perry is “too dumb”, “too Texan”, “too smarmy”, “too mean”, and “too religious” (qualities that were all thrown at W., too, and that didn't really hurt him, we might add). Bush, at least, was able “to soften his hard Texas edge with a genuine passion for education,” while Perry, well, “looks like a tent revival preacher or a used car salesman” who calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and global warming a hoax. Worried? “Just wait a few months for Perry to get beat up by his opponents, for the oppo research to kick in, for all the big profiles to start appearing, and for a gaffe or two to get some play,” says Drum. Given what's already in the public domain on the man, we can't wait to hear what skeletons are lurking in his closet. (Oh, he was an adviser to Al Gore during his failed 1988 presidential bid, you say?)

Finally, in The New York Times, Paul Krugman, America's personal accountant, demolishes Perry's claim that the “Texas miracle” saw his state emerge from the recession unscathed with jobs and a stable housing market to boot. As far as job growth goes, Krugman notes Texas' population has grown faster than much of the rest of the country, which in turn spurs more job creation, albeit mainly low-paying ones (one in 10 Texan workers makes the minimum wage or less). “What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states,” says Krugman. These “Perrynomics” don't work so well on the national scale, though, as “every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.” Job creation is bound to be one of the biggest themes of the next election, but Krugman advises that anything Perry comes up with will “work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.” Rick Perry, you just got Krugged. Hard.