Rick Perry is actually, and I hate to make predictions this far out, a dream candidate for the Obama campaign team.
Let’s look at Perry’s strengths:
-He can get the GOP base extremely fired up
His weaknesses:
-He is a lunatic extremists and will scare the vast majority of independent voters; even ones who may be dissatisfied with the Obama Presidency will be turned off by his 1840s style firebrand reactionary extremism.
-Arguably one of President Obama’s biggest fears in 2012 is that his base stays home, or fails to get super excited about reelecting him. With Perry in the race I think the base will be afraid enough that they’ll go out in droves to make sure Mr. Obama gets reelected–even the ones who are pissed they aren’t getting Universal Healthcare, taxes raised, immediate withdrawals from Afghanistan/Iraq, closing of Guantanamo and etc are going to go to the polls to deny someone like Perry the White House.
If the GOP has any hope at all of retaken the White House it will be with a candidate like Mitt Romney. This is because the level of vitriol I’m seeing from some parts of the right, especially the Religious fundamentalists and the Tea Party (not necessarily synonymous, remember) is significant enough that I don’t think we need a Rick Perry to get those people out to the polls. Some of them won’t like Romney for not being as insane as they are, and the Tea Party will especially hate Romney because he actually understands how capital markets work (TP showed they did not with their debt ceiling behavior), but these are people who have been wanting to see Mr. Obama out on the street since January 2009. Whoever the GOP runs against Mr. Obama will receive the lion’s share of their support in the election. So the candidate we need to nominate needs to be one who isn’t so objectionable that he energizes Mr. Obama’s base for him, and who can at least take a decent portion of the independents in the key swing states (the meat of where elections are decided.)
Despite the fact that Mr. Obama has alienated the extreme left, has terrible approval ratings (Gallup says 39% this week), the Presidency is still very much his to lose. Fifteen months is eternity, and that is a long time for the Tea Party Express to alienate more and more independents and remove them from the table by pushing them into the arms of the Dems. It’s also a long time for the economy to improve, or at the least continue this anemic recovery, 15 months of “not recession” would be enough to at least have the economy looking “okay” come Nov. 2012. As seems to be always the case, it really does come down to “it’s the economy, stupid” even though all evidence is Mr. Obama is not meaningfully responsible for any of our economic problems, and there is scant evidence anything he did would have altered the economic trajectory we have seen so far. Presidents do not control the economy, but they always receive credit and blame for its behavior.
Yes. I’m open to hearing other suggestions, though. I can’t think of anything about Rick Perry that will get old school traditionalists like myself fired up, or moderates.
I’m old enough to remember when the Carter re-election team thought Howard Baker was the potential GOP nominee that posed the greatest threat, but they’d eat that dingbat Ronald Reagan for lunch. And we know how that worked for them.
Not sayin’ this will be a repeat, but if I were on the Obama team, I’d be far more worried about Perry than Romney.
I don’t know why this nation puts so many TX governors in the White House. I suspect it has to do with oil, and that people think their policies will give this nation more of it and at a lower rate.
I’m a lifelong resident of TX, and I’m also amazed how Perry continually got reelected in our state, despite the record deficits, and the special way he cooked the books to where these problems are going to get passed on to the next governor.
I guess I could almost smile while looking at Rick Perry’s grades too, while he was at A&M, but gosh, getting a D in economics, and rarely managing anything better than a C doesn’t make for a serious presidential contender. But this too, isn’t a stumbling block for a conservative base, nosirre; God, guns and gays are higher up on the agenda. I know that bad grades don’t necessary mean lower intelligence, but I also know most of the nation isn’t going to buy into his TX miracle. He will be under better scrutiny on a national level now, and most will realize it for the myth that it is. For some reason though, I still don’t think that matters much to conservatives.
If it came down between Obama and Perry, I can’t picture hardly any moderates going to Perry.
He appears to be an extremely clever politician, has a personal likeability factor Obama doesn’t, can credibly convey two simple messages (“jobs” and “get Washington off your back”), has several times more executive experience than Obama does even at this point, he comes out on the correct side of the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck political dichotomy, and he’s got a compelling life story.
And all of that is not to say I even necessarily like the guy. All of the above could have been said of Caesar, another fellow people misunderestimated to their extreme detriment. If y’all think Perry will be the disastrous chief executive you’re making him out to be, for the sake of the country you need to step up your game and stop whistling past the graveyard.
And everyone you know voted for McGovern?
Umm . . . so far, just one? Unless that’s a Freudian slip . . .
Thanks for the correction. I guess it just seems more born or raised in TX getting to the White House than any other state; no necessarily being TX governors.
One big difference: Unless Jeb jumps in, it is unlikely that the election will be decided by a Supreme Court filled with appointees of the father of one of the candidates.
As a Texan who’s voted Republican for every governor with the exception of Ann Richards and Bill White, let me just say that I absolutely despise Rick Perry. The Trans-Texas Corridor, talk of secession, the pre-abortion ultrasounds, the forced HPV shots for teenage girls, he’s not managed to impress or inspire me once in all the years our population has inexplicably decided to put and keep him in the Governor’s mansion.
His rhetorical generalizations and fluff won’t stand up to national inspection. He’s going to get eviscerated and just like the entire time I’ve been aware of his existance I’ll again be left wondering “Dude, what in the hell were you even thinking?”
Distinction without a difference. Either way, intellectual Gore was going to demolish frat boy Dubya. The fact that it was even close enough to make the Florida Flim-Flam an issue was a practically inconceivable.
News to me. Polls going all the way back showed Bush beating Gore. PollingReport doesn’t have anything earlier than January 2000 on its website, but the 14 polls they show from that month favored Bush by anywhere from 3 to 19 points, with an average of 11 points.
Anybody who thought Gore would win in a walk wasn’t paying attention. Not to mention, as Bob Somerby documented ages ago, the press was magnifying Gore’s every minuscule fault or inaccurate statement (including some that weren’t inaccurate at all), while largely giving Dubya a free pass. In retrospect, what’s impressive is that Gore came within a butterfly ballot of pulling it out.
If Perry becomes president then all we’ll need is to discover oil in every state that is not currently an oil producer and we’ll become financially successful. Actually, we’ll become a Christian version of Saudi Arabia where Liberals become the Shi’ite minority.
I see Perry/Bachmann (or Bachmann/Perry) as a ticket that would drive this Board absolutely nuts. If I was a more conservative Doper I’d like to see it just for the fun of it.
I don’t know that Rick Perry is more likable than Barack Obama among all voters, or most importantly with independent voters. I’d like to see some polling on that, although I doubt any on that specific issue exists at this point in the cycle.
Executive experience is an argument Perry could have made in 2008; but the assumption in my opinion is always that an incumbent President essentially has a monopoly come election time on most relevant executive experience in terms of holding the Presidency. The only example where this would not have been true is when Grover Cleveland defeated incumbent President Benjamin Harrison in 1892. In that singular case the challenger and the incumbent President had equal experience with the Presidency.
From the pit. Gv. Goodhair thinks the government should suspend all regulations. The Repubs keep stretching the concept of stupid to new and exciting uncharted areas.
