Those of us who supported Rick Perry over Mitt Romney in 2012 can take a small measure of vindication in this look at how Perry was ahead of the curve on immigration, education, entitlements and other issues in terms of anticipating where the GOP would be headed next. That’s without even mentioning Perry’s tax plan or his stances on Turkey and Syria.
If Perry had been the nominee in 2012, it’s hard to see what states he loses that Romney won; the worst that happens is that he ends up more or less with the same electoral results as Romney and possibly a worse popular vote margin. But how the race’s dynamics unfold? That’s unknowable. On the upside, we’re finally done with Romney, and can have a Romney-less contested primary for the first time since 2000.
Perry has an outstanding record and resume, but my sense is that he’s best off playing Goldwater to the next nominee’s Reagan rather than trying to run again himself. There’s plenty of younger talent ready to go, and he’d have an uphill battle to unmake his first impression.
5 thoughts on “Ahead of His Time”
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Hey Crank, how about a mea culpa on the Iraq War?
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Keep it simple. Something like this should suffice:
“I was wrong. The liberals were right. In the future, I’ll try not to be duped by grifters.”
The election no longer hinges on someone who has proven himself. Wise conservative policy implementation, great economic numbers, popular political numbers, and a decent and honest man no longer means what it used to.
This is a TV sound bite world controlled by Progressives. Romney had the face and mannerisms and some conservative cred though it wasn’t natural but even he was transfigurable by the media. Look what they did to his impeccable character. Look what they did to his business acumen. Rick Perry did not stand a chance. He was made to be mocked by the media. No longer can one be decent and have great credentials and a proven leader. The proof of this is who WAS elected. A man who isn’t decent, had zero credentials and zero leadership but they could use his ability to command a spotlight.
The answer is to get back into the media, take back the universities, and any hope we have will be a man who along with conservative cred can dominate a spotlight. Glen Beck and Roger Ailes is a beginners step but we have a long way to go before we can even get our arguments out there to uniformed voters who get there news from Rachel Maddow and or who attended a university. As always for those on the right the road is hard.
RoyBeans –
Mitt Romney was exposed as a man who was contemptuous of nearly half the population, thanks to a video made by a bartender who showed more courage than anyone in the media. And his tax returns were so poisonous that he could not release them to the public. Mitt is a man without any character at all. His only quality is that he wanted to be president. As for your admiration of Glenn Beck, he is a black-helicopter lunatic who traffics in conspiracy theories and was so incompetent he got himself kicked off Fox News. Roger Ailes advised Richard Nixon, so ’nuff said about him.
Your comment makes some vague reference to people who attended universities. You are the typical Tea Party ignoramus. I counted several spelling and grammatical errors in your comment, including the inability to distinguish between “there” and “their.”
“Steve” has done nothing more than to prove RoyBeans’ point. Who’s the ignoramus?
Berto – You may have missed the news, but we won the war. Saddam, his sons & his regime? Gone. The neo-Ba’athist irredentists? Crushed. Zarqawi? Dead, his organization in tatters, his hero bin Laden caught in large part because we captured Zarqawi’s messenger to him as a result of the war. The whole constellation of the old power structure of the region – Assad, Muabarak, Qaddafi – gone or under seige.
The struggle’s not over, not for Iraqis and not for regional progress as a whole. But we accomplished in Iraq what we set out to do.
Steve, the election’s over, you can dispense with the canned talking points. Romney was and is a good man and a terrible politician. The GOP’s future lies with never nominating his like again.