By John Heilemann - New York
Texas governor Rick Perry has a strong jobs record and a red-meat platform. But does he hate Washington too much to run?
Given the state of the Republican presidential-nominating contest in which the party faithfuls interest in those on the field is exceeded vastly by their yearning for those hovering on the sidelines last Tuesday was a fine dayor should I say an even finer day than usualto be in New York City. For if you happened to be here (as I was) you could have witnessed (as I did) appearances by two of the most enticing prospective GOP entrants: Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry. The events were different in ways too numerous to list but what they had in common is that both were brimming with political flyspeckers all laboring to discern the intentions of the honored out-of-towners.
The former Utah governor and ambassador to China made it easy: Huntsman declared that he would announce his candidacy officially on June 21. The current Texas governor by contrast kept his cards facedownand truth be told how he decides to play them might well prove more consequential. The longest-serving governor in the country and in his states history Perry is a figure with no small degree of political heft not least because of his darling status among both tea-party populists and social conservatives.
But Perrys presidential pitch should he choose to make one will revolve around more than God gays guns and the Tenth Amendment. It will center on jobs with his record in Texaswhich has led the nation by a wide margin in creating them during the downturn along the way becoming home to more Fortune 500 companies than all but two other statesas his proof point. And while the story in Texas is more complicated than Perry suggests his economic appeal throws into relief a glaring conundrum of the 2012 race so far. At a time when the unemployment crisis is at once a human calamity and President Obamas greatest area of political vulnerability the extant crop of Republican hopefuls have presented not a single new or bold idea on how solve it. This failure is either puzzling or predictable depending on your point of view. But whats indisputable is that it has left a yawning void for Perryor someone elseto fill.
That Perry if he runs would immediately assume the mantle of the most colorful male non-lunatic in the race was evident the other night at the Grand Hyatt where he addressed a ballroom packed with attendees of the New York County Republican Partys annual Lincoln Day dinner. Critics in Texas like to call him Governor Good Hair and indeed his hair is goodmaybe even perish the thought as good as Mitt Romneys. His vocal inflections carry loud echoes of George W. Bush but his delivery is more animated (and even antic) than Dubyas ever was. Perrys ability to chop and serve raw red meat is on a par with Pat La Friedas. Speaking of his home state he allowed Theres a few unhappy people there." A well-timed beat. Generally we refer to them as liberals."
When Perry finished he was rewarded with thunderous applausethe kind of thing he has been hearing a lot of lately from audiences on the right. In talk-radio-land the chief cheerleader has been Rush Limbaugh who recently devoted twenty solid minutes of his daily bloviation to begging Perry to run. (Glenn Beck for his part has exhibited an even greater if more nauseating degree of ardor blurting out last year Rick I think you and I could French-kiss right now.") In California a Republican state assemblyman has ginned up a formal Draft Perry movement.
All these blandishments have had an effect on Perry who after months of disclaiming any interest in a White House bid is now openly flirting with the idea and stoking it in the press telling the Texas Tribune last week People would like to have some other options in the race obviously."
The natural space for Perry is in the ultraright anti-Establishment bracket in the contest where the top seed after last weeks debate is likely to be occupied by Michele Bachmann. This year Perry enacted what he deemed emergency legislation" requiring any woman seeking an abortion to have a sonogram first and her doctor to tell her the size of her fetus limbs and organs even if she does not want to know." He was a strong supporter of the Texas anti-sodomy law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. His devotion to guns is such that back home he enjoys packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets" as he has boasted. And then of course there was the suggestion that made him a tea-party hero: that if Washington potentates continued to thumb their nose at the American people" Texas might have no choice but to secede from the Union.
Yet Perry clearly grasps the potential power of marrying his cultural-conservative bona fides to his states economic record. In his speech in New York Perry began by noting that someone had recently told him that he was kinda job-obsessed. I said Yup and the numbers back it up. In the last few years … weve created more jobs than all the other 49 states combined." He joked about how though he was happy to be speaking in Gotham his personal favorite reason" to leave home was to convince a company to move their headquarters to the State of Texas." And also about the irony of replacing Donald Trump the originally scheduled speaker at the dinner: Hes known for saying Youre fired! " Perry said. Were known for saying Youre hired! Thats what we do in Texas!"
Telling the tale of Texas will however only get Perry so far. What he would need to do next is explain how it happened in a way that would set him apart from the existing GOP candidatesand this is where he runs into problems. At last weeks debate and more broadly the solutions to the jobs dilemma being peddled by Romney Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty are the very epitome of same old same old: the familiar conservative catechism of cutting taxes and reducing regulation. Which just happens to be the same formula with a little bit of tort reform tossed in that Perry argues has turned Texas into a teeming jobs machine.
Now to be fair Perrys argument goes a wee bit further than that. He maintains that the key to job growth nationally is a radical form of federalism that would allow every state to compete with ruthless abandon for corporate investmentto compete in other words to out-Texas Texas. To many critics this sounds like a recipe for an abysmal race to the bottom; they point out that the state in addition to creating jobs is also one of the most polluted in the country has the highest percentage of residents without health insurance and ranks 43rd in high-school graduation.
In the Republican primaries none of this might matter much. Nor might some of the more out-there views Perry has expressed regarding the Constitution: In his book Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington he contends that the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendmentswhich allow for the Feds to collect income taxes and for the direct election of U.S. senators respectivelyare both big mistakes. To many tea-partyers in fact these positions might look more like badges of honor than marks of shame.
And yet despite all the factors auguring a run Perry remains further from hurling himself into the fray than some assume. Though he has said he is now thinking about" getting in he has also said that his contemplations are not too far into any type of formative thought process." (If the way Perry talks about thinking makes you wonder about his capacity for thinking you are not alone.) What that means according to people close to the governor is that Team Perry has not even started any rigorous evaluation of the elements that he would weigh in his decisionin terms of fund-raising organization and so on. Perrys advisers also caution that the odds are no better and possibly worse than 50-50 that he will wind up in the race.
Which if you think about it isnt really all that surprising. Running for president is a hellish business even for those who have wanted desperately achingly to be commander-in-chief since they could lace up their shoes. And that emphatically does not describe Rick Perrya man who unlike so many Republicans who claim to be anti-Washington but in fact would love nothing more than to call 1600 Pennsylvania home genuinely seems to despise the place and everything it stands for.
Yet even if the governor does stay out this moment of highly pitched pining for Perry has revealed something important. Not just that Republicans are unsatisfied with their current field but that one of the key things fueling that discontent is the absence on the part of the candidates of a set of prescriptions remotely commensurate substantively or politically with the scale of the jobs crisis. Of course as distressed as this makes Republicans it is no doubt a source of comfort for Obamaexcept that he has no big ideas on jobs either which is why he continues to be at risk of winding up unemployed himself.
