WORLDVIEW:IS IT really conceivable that, having drawn breath briefly, indulging itself with an African-American experiment, US voters will next year again return a Texan governor to the White House? Four years after the inglorious departure of one George W Bush? Yihaa!
That is now a real prospect after the well-anticipated announcement this week by Governor Rick Perry (61) he is throwing his Stetson in the ring for the Republican nomination.
Within only a couple of days, despite calling the head of the Fed Ben Bernanke a traitor, the deeply conservative evangelical has pushed himself firmly to the front of the race, with one poll this week (Rasmussen) showing Perry leading among Republicans at 20 per cent, against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s 18 per cent and Tea Party darling, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s 13 per cent.
Perry has a lot going for him. The former air force fighter pilot who worked for some years on his family’s cotton farm cuts a fit, handsome figure and is a likeable, disciplined candidate and superb fundraiser with good political instincts. A Democrat until 1989, he has yet to lose an election in three decades in politics – he has won six elections for state office – becoming governor of the country’s second most populous state in late 2000 after Bush assumed the presidency.
But another Bush he ain’t. The two are said to dislike each other intensely – the latter’s former right-hand man Karl Rove termed Perry a “cowboy”. He recently refused to answer a reporter’s question about whether, as seems likely, he was carrying a concealed weapon. “That’s why it’s called ‘concealed’,” Perry responded. Earlier this year he supported legislation to allow Texas college students to carry concealed weapons on campus.
He has a heap more redneck Texan in him than his predecessor. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and language of conciliation, whatever about the practice, are anathema to a man who was an early Tea Party backer, and whose anti-establishment and anti-Washington language has included talk of Texas seceding from the union.
The governor was responding at a 2009 anti-tax rally in Austin, the Texas capital, to calls from the crowd to “secede, secede” when he said: “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” Yihaa! His stump speech talks of making Washington “as inconsequential in your lives as possible”.
Perry’s hard-core Texan “states rights” agenda runs to dismantling federal pension and medicare systems and a controversial willingness to allow New York to legalise gay marriage on the basis that it’s an issue for the state.
In Fed Up, his campaign manifesto, he says the federal government has gone too far by passing laws "regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programmes and Medicare and Medicaid, [and] creating national minimum wage laws". These are all issues he argues that should be left to the states.
"His ideology seems to reflect the fusion between right-wing Christian thought and economic libertarianism, the market as the reflection of God's perfect plan," writes Jonathan Chait of the New Republic.
Like Bachmann, Perry has a strong appeal to the party’s evangelical wing and has provoked protests from backers of church-state separation for his willingness to mix politics and prayer. He called the 2010 BP oil spill an “act of God”, and told Texas residents prayer was the best way to combat the state’s devastating drought. (It didn’t work.) He has called global warming “a scientific theory that has not been proven”.
Despite his extreme views, Perry is favourably viewed by the Republican establishment as much more electable than Bachmann over Obama, and a real alternative to their mainstream candidate, Romney. The latter’s strength on economic management and jobs Perry can match with talk of the Texas success story – in the past two years the state has accounted for at least one-third of the new jobs created in the US. The governor boasts his state’s low taxes and loose regulations have unleashed entrepreneurship there.
The truth is not quite as simple. Texan job growth, mostly in low-pay employment, has been largely driven by buoyant oil and gas prices – the sector accounts for one-third of jobs and supplies 40 per cent of tax revenues. Much of the non-energy job growth is in the public sector, in part financed by the despised federal government.
On other measures the state’s record is abysmal. Texas has the fourth-highest poverty rate – one in four children – in the US. It tied with Mississippi last year for the highest percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs. It ranks first in adults without high school diplomas. A quarter of its population lacks healthcare coverage. The state ranks 47th for the level of state spending on schools.
With Obama languishing in the polls in a stagnant economy, Republicans will be counting on voters ignoring such unpalatable realities should they be faced with Perry's name on next year's ballot. But that's not a given. As one Republican strategist put it to the Washington Post, Perry has "a strong, deep, red-state vibe" that will be "great for primaries, but not in blue states we need" in order to win the general election.