After he announced Monday he would not be running for re-election, I was hardly the first to recall Gov. Rick Perry’s rude dismissal of an impertinent reporter – the moment echoed across the state, at least to those Texans thoroughly wearied of the flamboyantly anti-government tenure of the longest-serving governor in Texas history. In that 2005 incident, the reporter had been pressing the governor on his supposed plans for funding public education; it was not a productive interrogation, since one of Perry’s primary gubernatorial projects has been defunding public education.
Perry’s inadvertently recorded farewell – pseudo-Spanish overlaid with pseudo-profanity – was as characteristic in its way as the even more notorious “Oops!” moment of his flamed-out 2012 presidential campaign. The latter reflected Perry’s fundamental disinterest in the actual nuts-and-bolts of policy; GOP candidates must appear to “cut government,” so let’s designate three federal agencies for the chopping block – other than the military, it doesn’t really matter precisely which agencies they are.
“Adios, mofo!” on the other hand, carries with it that casual, pop-macho disrespect for anyone (especially a reporter) questioning the governor’s authority, indeed questioning him at all. It’s been Perry’s standard posture at press conferences (when he must endure them at all) for years, normally restrained just on the edge of outright contempt. It’s one of the things that distinguishes his public personality from that of his predecessor’s. George W. Bush would get all frat-boy chummy with Capitol reporters, framing his condescension (and their obsequiousness) by giving them all childish nicknames. “Mofo” is about as friendly as Perry could even manage, and its cheap profanity also belied his otherwise unctuous rhetorical sanctimony.
In recent years, he’s flagrantly and successfully pandered to the GOP’s fundamentalist base by impersonating a secular, “pro-life” preacher akin to those Sunday-morning TV prosperity gospelers. Follow the “Texas Miracle,” and you, too, can be both saved and rich.
Or at least find a job at Wal-Mart.
Pay Now or Pay Later
On Earth, Perry preaches tax cuts, deregulation, tort reform, and transportation. He’s found it difficult to pay for the last item, largely because of the first three, so the only Grand Imperial Plan of his lengthy tenure – the Trans-Texas Corridor – was shot down by a combination anti-eminent domain country cussedness and ideological opposition to any and all taxes, including the gas tax. As several commentators have already pointed out, the “Texas Miracle” is largely attributable to the state’s longtime economic safety net – rising oil and gas prices – and whatever else the governor may or may not have done, he didn’t put that gas in the ground.
The conventional political wisdom describes Texas as a “low-tax, low-service” state, in part because of the governor and Legislature’s institutional objection to higher (state) property taxes and virtually all social services. But public needs don’t disappear simply because state officials refuse to budget for them; they’re just pushed down onto local jurisdictions with fewer resources. Hence, “high-tax, low-service” is a lot more accurate description, since counties, cities, and school districts are forced either to raise taxes to pay for basic services or do without – with the predictable consequence that the people with the least resources pay the highest percentage of their incomes for public burdens like education, health care, and public safety.
The epitome of this contradiction, in recent months, has been the legislative priorities in the wake of the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion: a governor and Legislature determined to shamelessly regulate women’s rights and bodies and to regulate fertilizer plants for public safety not at all.
Smug Hypocrisy
If Perry does indeed decide to run once again for president – and the only greater gift to the Democrats would be Sarah Palin – he will point to “job creation” and “tort reform” as his signature accomplishments. Texans should instead remember him best as the public official who did more than any other to undermine the state’s founding constitutional guarantee of “an efficient system of free public schools,” and more recently, the governor who gave his absolute best effort to blocking and undermining the provision of basic health care for Texans, especially women.
Perry presided over the largest funding cuts to public education in Texas history – meanwhile enforcing punitive “accountability” systems that emphasize rote teaching and standardized testing – while even abandoning the obligation to fund student population growth that his simultaneous “economic growth” policies supposedly encourage. On the health care side, the record is more dismal: adamant opposition to national health care, to Medicaid expansion, and indeed to basic services in the state with more uninsured citizens than any other.
The starkest public hypocrisy we’ve seen at the Legislature in recent weeks. Perry has enthusiastically joined in the promotion and enactment of policies certain to increase the number of both abortions and unplanned births, and the number of women and children without access to basic health care – all in the supposed name of protecting women and children. Although the public fight, understandably, has been about the direct suppression of women’s rights to privacy and bodily autonomy, the much broader effect of these reactionary abortion laws is to make much more difficult the provision of basic health care for women and their families.
It’s a peculiarly smug and willful blindness that enables people with every social and economic advantage, not to mention immense political power – and no worries of their own about basic necessities like health care and education – to do what they can to prevent others from acquiring those same necessities. That’s Perry’s real farewell message to every ordinary Texan: “Adios, mofos.”
This article appears in July 12 • 2013.
