Thanks Rick
by Steve
Thankfully, Rick Perry entered the presidential race today, and was immediately touted by GOP insiders as the new leader of the pack. It won't be long before a fawning Beltway media, who already swooned over George W. Bush will start telling us that Perry is a credible national candidate.
For now, it will be fun to simply see how this shakes up the GOP race, especially what it does to Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, who won the Ames straw poll today (the countdown clock has already started for Tim Pawlenty). Perry will immediately suck down a good deal of money from donors, to go with the ATM he already has from Big Oil and all the firms who participate in his "pay to play" approach to governance in Texas. And Perry will immediately get media commentators and "GOP strategists" like Bush accomplice Matthew Dowd to say stupid things:
“He becomes immediately one of the top three candidates, and he fills a vacuum — of someone who is a conservative, who has credibility and can speak to the fiscal conservative, anti-big-government and anti-Washington crowd, but he’s also a social conservative,” said Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for President George W. Bush. “At least in the short term, he is a major disruption in the race.”
Really Dowd? How does Perry, man of the worst deficits in the history of Texas, speak to the fiscal conservatives? Oh, I see. He's kept taxes very low and filled the state with minimum wage and oil workers, yet his overall job growth record is less than stellar. And he's managed to tout his record as if the deficits don't exist, at a time when the Tea Party allegedly is concerned about debt and deficits. As soon as the Tea Party ditches Bachmann and swings in behind Perry, we can bury the notion that the Tea Party cares one wit about fiscal responsibility. All they and their Big Oil bankrollers care about are low taxes and no regulations. This will be made clear soon enough.
No matter. Perry's entry is all good, because of what it does for the GOP race. Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment is about to be forgotten repeatedly, and bricks will eventually fly as his competitors struggle to contain him and prevent a groundswell. And the happiest people at news of Perry's entry are not only bloggers like me, but also the crew at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.