The Runway is Clearing for Rick Perry

The census reported that there has been a population shift toward the southwest, and toward Texas in particular. It seems there is a reason for this. That's where the jobs are. "Some 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas" ("The Lone Star Jobs Surge," WSJ, 6/10/11).

Since June 2009 when the recession ended (that's right, we're not in a recession any more), Texas added 265,000 jobs, followed at a distant second by New York at 98,000 and Pennsylvania at 95,000.

What accounts for this?

Texas stands out for its free market and business-friendly climate. Capital—both human and investment—is highly mobile, and it migrates all the time to the places where the opportunities are larger and the burdens are lower. Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn't impose unions on businesses or employees. It is open to global trade and competition: Houston, San Antonio and El Paso are entrepôts for commerce, especially in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Journal editorial adds: "the core impulse of Obamanomics is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes." That sounds like a winning presidential campaign to me.

So now three, maybe four, factors are drawing Gov. Rick Perry to the race.

(1) The strikingly impressive job numbers.

(2) The massive exodus from the Gingrich campaign organization, including two men who have engineered victories for Perry in the past. Yesterday, amidst the whispers of a campaign bid, we read, "Members of Mr. Perry's still-extant group of campaign consultants say there is little chance he would embark on a 2012 campaign without Messrs. Carney and Johnson at his side." Today things are radically different.

(3) A persistently weak field. (Mitt "RomneyCare" Romney is the front runner.)

(4) His country needs him. (What politician doesn't see his or her indispensability as a factor.)

The Rick Perry Question

In my column this week, "GOP may have a contender in the wings," I lay out an initial argument for Rick Perry's plausibility as an Omaba-slayer (a knightly reference; no actually violence intended, of course).

1. active defense of the 10th Amendment in the face of Obamacare’s encroachments
2. record as a budget-cutter
3. executive experience is in one of the largest states in the union
4. won an unprecedented three terms with a strong victory in 2010
5. Texas is a growing state with a large Hispanic population

My other two arguments are that he is informed by the right books, and he seems large and colorful enough to match Obama's icon-factor.

He also passes the Katie Couric test. He reads. And he reads the right stuff. In a Wall Street Journal interview not long ago, he highlighted Friedrich Hayek’s classic of political and economic liberty, The Road to Serfdom, and The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, her account of how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interventionist policies actually deepened and lengthened the Depression. “Amity’s book is very eye-opening—scary—for me,” he said. You can judge a man by what scares him.

Shelby Steele says the problem for any candidate facing Barack Obama is that he or she must run against not only Obama the man, but also Obama the icon. This means that whoever leads the Republican ticket has to be somehow larger than life. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is a good man with good principles, but he’s a man of quite human proportions. Others in the race are all-too-human. At the South Carolina debate, I saw men who were trying hard to convince us that they belong on the stage. Sarah Palin was not there, though she seems made for the stage. But one wonders what kind of stage. Like everything in Texas, Rick Perry seems be a large enough character to fill any stage, even one he would share with a sitting president, perhaps even an iconic sitting president.

One of the commenters listed these arguments again him.

1. Guilt by association with Bush given they share a home state. [Really weak.]

2. Adios, mofo. [Not clear just what this is. A bad language incident is a bar to the presidency?]

3. Why don’t you just let us get on down the road? [This is not exactly Troopergate.]

4. Required Gardasil vaccinations, which on its face should offend the personal liberty crowd, but even moreso when the recommendation was made after heavy lobbying by Merck. [A. Get your kids out of public school. B. Exemptions are easily obtained. C. Otherwise, it does seem like bad judgment. D. Do Merck-y drug company connections explain this? E. What does preventing cervical cancer have to do with public education?]

5. Trans-Texas Corridor. Here Perry was going to seize huge swaths of private land under eminent domain in order to build a super-highway to support additional truck traffic due to NAFTA. [This is a concern to the John Birch Society conspiracy theorists and no one else.]

6. Perry floats the idea of secession. [That's just a Texan being Texan. But I'll keep my eyes on it.]

7. Was a Democrat until 1989. [Lot's of good people share that dark past: Reagan, Gramm (Texan)...]

8. Chaired the campaign to elect Al Gore in Texas in 1988. [Any sign of Algorism since then?]

The fellow who posted these objections is a Texan himself who has been keeping a file. If this is the best he can do, Perry looks fit for the stage.

Will Barack Be Back in 2013?

As I have said before, anything can happen in politics. Despite the "science of politics," it's not rocket science. It's not even meteorology.

But historically the American voter has been kind to incumbant Presidents. Consider this post-war history with which I begin my column this week.

George W. Bush served two terms in spite of being bogged down in Iraq and delivering painfully embarrassing debate performances. Of course, John Kerry was a godsend for him.

Bill Clinton went two terms despite a stream of scandals. Granted, he had Bob Dole campaigning for him.

The elder Bush went down after just one term in 1992. But he didn’t really want to win, and Ross Perot’s candidacy allowed Clinton to squeak in with less than majority support.

Ronald Reagan won his’84 landslide with an economy trembling toward recovery. But Walter Mondale’s youth and inexperience helped.

Look what it took to unseat Jimmy Carter. Runaway inflation and through-the-roof interest rates, gas shortages, hostages in Iran, people burning our embassies around the world, and a challenge from within his own party by Ted Kennedy. But even given all that, he still might have won had it not been for the “Debacle in the Desert,” his failed attempt to rescue the 53 American hostages in Tehran. It also took a master campaigner (”Let’s make America great again,” “There he goes again”) to dislodge him.

It took the fallout from Watergate to defeat Gerald Ford, including his pardon of Richard Nixon.

Speaking of Nixon, he won reelection in the midst of Vietnam . . . and big time! George McGovern and his 3 a.m. convention acceptance speech is not enough to explain the win.

Lyndon Johnson declined to run for a second complete term.

John F. Kennedy? It’s too sad to mention.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: two terms. No problem.

Today the New York Times reported some widely circulated politics-prediction data that bears on the president's re-electability. "No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent." This looks very bad for BHO. The current unemployment rate is around 9 percent and not heading south, at least not with anything near the speed it would have to maintain to get him into the victory zone. What are the chances, however, that this economy will suddenly start generating on balance 400,000 jobs a month?

According to the NYT, the Federal Reserve has pumped for than $2 trillion into the economy initially to save it from collapse but then in its Keynesian wisdom to jump start and rev up the economy to re-election speed in time for 2012. No sign of life yet, but the bill for the treatment has a lot of people concerned.

We like isolated facts like this because it gives us the illusion of scientific control over what continues to be the maddeningly, sometimes frighteningly, and yet also excitingly unpredictable political future. Have you heard, for example, that no Republican candidate has ever won the White House without first winning the Ohio primary? I think that's how it goes. Until Reagan beat the bullet in 1981, everyone since Abraham Lincoln elected to the presidency in a year ending in zero died in office. The Zero factor! Science never lies!

This 7.2 Factor is not as clear as it seems. Rooted Cosmopolitan notes this:

■Since FDR only Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the two Bush’s have been elected president and then sought reelection. It’s hard to draw big conclusions from a sample of seven.


■Since FDR, only three times has a president been up for reelection when the unemployment rate was as high as 7.2%. Two of those presidents–Carter and Bush I–lost. The other, Reagan, won. For those who weren’t counting, that a sample of three.

■When presidents have sought reelection when the unemployment rate was over 7.2 and lost, the winner prevailed with 50% (Reagan) and 43% (Clinton). Maybe, just maybe, there was a third-party factor that was at least as significant to the incumbent’s loss as the unemployment rate?

Well, I've reviewed some other reasons that Carter and Bush lost their races.

Nonetheless, high unemployment is a big drag on a campaign, especially after a $2 trillion investment and boastful promises of bringing us back to happy days in no time at all.

Long Range Political Prediction

Ordinarily, the only thing that long-range political predictions have going for them is that they are forgotten long before they are disproved.

But Dick Morris makes a strong case for the unlikelihood of Barack Obama's re-election in 2012.

It is essentially an economic argument. Economic slowdown, inflation (sharply rising food and energy prices), sustained unemployment, and a continuing crisis in the housing market.

This dark horizon is partly the administration's own doing. Part of it is international events like the Middle East revolutions that have driven up oil prices and the Sendai earthquake that has taken the world's third largest economy offline. As far as the Middle East is concerned, a wiser American foreign policy could have turned some of these events, such as those in Libya and a couple of years ago in Iran, to our advantage.

Here's Morris:

As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said - outrageously and wrongly - about 9/11, "the chickens are coming home to roost." The policies of this administration - the disastrous overspending, the irresponsible borrowing, the social experimentation - all are magnifying and amplifying the impact of the recession. Relief is not going to come anytime soon.

Instead, the true legacy of the Obama years is likely to be stagflation and an entire decade wiped out by his policies, budget and programs. Long after he is gone in 2013, we will still be repairing the damage of his terrible decisions.

Of course, anything can happen in politics. Like the Republicans could put up a completely implausible candidate as they did in the 2010 Senate contests in Nevada and Maryland.

A Second Look at Sarah Palin

As readers of this blog may recall, though Harold and I agree on a lot, we have not seen eye to eye on the worthiness of Sarah Palin to occupy the White House (though we agree she is more worthy than the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Norman Podhoretz (you see, he plays to win), entitled "In Defense of Sarah Palin." It sent me down this road of reflection that WORLD has graciously published under the title, "A Palin Skeptic Takes a Second Look."

The Obamacare victory has changed the presidential race for 2012. The question for Republicans in choosing a candidate to go up against the sitting president is: Who has the skill, the vision, the mettle, and the integrity to drive this Behemoth back into the churning sea of political evils from whence it came?

Sarah Palin, for all her wide-eyed parochial wonderment when asked about anything outside of Alaska (okay, she's getting better; she's been reading up), may have the undiluted patriotism and single-minded determination needed to roll this thing back successfully. Podhoretz provoked me with this:

Take, for example, foreign policy. True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.

What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn. Jimmy Carter also has a high IQ, which did not prevent him from becoming one of the worst presidents in American history, and so does Bill Clinton, which did not prevent him from befouling the presidential nest.

After other reflections that you really must read, I conclude: "if what the country needs to pull us out of our free fall into European social democracy is someone with a solid center in classical republican principles as well as the skill, vision, mettle, and integrity to pull it off politically, Sarah Palin may be the one to do it."

But all I'm doing is taking a fresh look. I'll try not to forget, however, that she has woefully little experience actually governing, and bailed out of the job she did have.