Point Austin: Perry's Odds

Should we be more amused or appalled at the prospect of Rick Perry as a presidential candidate?

Certainly, over the centuries, the republic has endured worse, most recently Ronald Reagan and Bush II. But Gov. Perry brings to the subject a unique political cynicism that would be fascinating to watch, if only one didn't have to consider the public consequences. As a young pol on the make and feeling the prevailing Texas winds, Perry moved effortlessly from conservative Democrat to reactionary Republican with nary a backward glance. Stuck behind and below the always anointed Dubya, he patiently bided his time while making little attempt to hide his sense of personal superiority to the GOP's favorite son. That condescension persists primarily in his approach to the press; where Bush was always shamelessly ingratiating, Perry can barely disguise his contempt for the same symbolic transaction, largely dodging it altogether in his last campaign.

He can get away with that in Texas, where the Capitol press corps is small and reflexively deferential. Royal insolence won't play as well nationally, and one of Perry's current hesitations is undoubtedly whether he can overcome both the dismal Bush legacy dragging down any Texan candidate as well as his own reluctance to reach beyond the hard-right GOP base, where he feels most comfortable and which – in Texas – has been all he ever needed.

What would he run on? In the primaries, tax cuts, religion, and fear of Obama, pretty much like the rest of the GOP field. Beyond the image of Manly Westerner, how would he distinguish himself? In theory, by pointing to the Texas economic miracle that took place on his watch, which has produced an unemployment rate a point below the national 9.1% – as it happens, however, higher than 23 other states, including Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Alaska, and even that liberal wasteland of New York. Even with the enthusiastic support of Fox News, it's difficult to maintain the fiction that No Income Tax = Jobs when it's demonstrably untrue.

Don't Touch His Junk

Or Perry will point to his sterling legislative record. Allied with a zealous GOP caucus in both houses, this year Perry emphasized the sort of right-wing-pandering legislation that has come to elicit shrugs and eye-rolls at home but will be much harder to sell nationally. While the nation is pulling back from Arizona-style xenophobia, Perry has pushed voter ID, minority-vote-minimizing redistricting, and the "sanctuary cities" mythology. In a Texas-peculiar hypocrisy, he endorsed a headline-grabbing "anti-groping" bill (for federal airport security, which failed) while designating as an "emergency" a law that requires any woman seeking an abortion to undergo an invasive and humiliating ultrasound procedure for no medical reason.

These are the sort of actions that have endeared Perry to the GOP's hard right, but in a national context, they can also become major political liabilities. The ultrasound bill is but the symbolic edge of an entire slate of health care cutbacks (partly financial, partly ideological, mostly aimed at Planned Parenthood) that will inevitably harm hundreds of thousands of Texas women. It will be difficult to talk around that outcome, and women vote.

Pray for Rapture

In a sense, all this reactionary playmaking was just a sideshow to Perry's main agenda: ruthlessly imposing $15 billion in cuts to public education, health care, and social services – essentially the entire social contract. What­ever one thinks of the politics, the economic effects of these cuts – especially to public schools – are going to hit the state hard over the next several months and will be difficult to disguise on the campaign trail as necessary thriftiness, especially as the consequent layoffs aggravate those unemployment numbers. Republican parents like their schools, too – and as teachers and support personnel disappear and classrooms bulge with students, the same folks who rallied all over the state will be reminding their neighbors of who was running the show in Austin.

Reportedly, at the moment Obama is out-polling Perry in Texas, which is unlikely to stand but gives a sense of how poorly the governor has fulfilled his supposed statewide mandate. Most recently, he announced a Houston prayer meeting in August, designed to shore up his evangelical credentials, although he seems to have done it in such a tone-deaf way – hooking up with an exclusionary Christian group that makes no secret of its anti-Islamic and even anti-Semitic inclinations – that once again, in a national context, the event may well hurt Perry as much as it helps him.

None of this is to say Perry cannot win the Republican nomination. It's no news that the field, handicapped by an increasingly extremist national posture, is extraordinarily weak, while the state of Texas is big enough to create its own political (and certainly fundraising) gravity. Gov. Goodhair can cut an undeniably photogenic figure on TV, and the considered wisdom of the observant Molly Ivins, who gave him that nickname, is that while lots of Americans can tell you how bad our politics are, Texans know from hard experience that they can always get worse. No small complication is that the members of the national Democratic Party may not know much, but they have proven themselves expert at losing elections. To paraphrase an even more cynical commentator, very few political consultants ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.

So, while Perry considers his options, the rest of us can only wonder whether the rest of the country will seriously consider another Texan so soon after the expensive debacle that was the reign of George W. Bush. Much will depend on whether Obama the Compromiser can come up with a sufficient formula that at least salvages the economy for the next 18 months, and whether Congress can be made to swallow it. Those are long odds, and if they fail, they make Perry and his party's seem shorter and shorter all the time.