“Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is the top choice of Tea Party supporters for a Republican presidential candidate, according to a new poll released Wednesday…

“Twenty percent of Tea Party supporters would like to see Perry as the nominee, according to a McClatchy-Marist poll released Wednesday. Perry displaces former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) as the top Tea Party candidate in Marist’s April poll; Huckabee’s since withdrawn from the race.

“Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is the second choice of the Tea Party, at 17 percent, followed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) at 16 percent and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) at 12 percent.”

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“‘He will distinguish himself from other Republicans as a hawk internationalist, embracing American exceptionalism and the unique role we must play in confronting the many threats we face,’ one foreign policy advisor with knowledge of Perry’s thinking told The Cable. ‘He has no sympathy for the neo-isolationist impulses emanating from some quarters of the Republican Party.’…

“‘He’s a cowboy,’ said Michael Goldfarb, former senior staffer on John McCain’s presidential campaign. ‘You have to assume he’d shoot first and ask questions later — which would be nice after four years of a leading from behind, too little too late foreign policy.'”

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“Some call this the ‘Texas Miracle.’ But with Perry as governor, the state has added hundreds of thousands more jobs than any state by far. And in a country desperate for jobs, this issue — and Perry’s claim that he deserves the credit — sets him apart.

“‘We’re hiring, we can’t hire people fast enough,’ said Jeff Brown of California-based EA video games. He said the company is adding 300 jobs in Austin, Texas, partly because of low costs, but also because of Perry’s three trips to persuade EA to move. ..

“Perry calls his formula simple. ‘This isn’t rocket science,’ he once said. ‘You keep the taxes relatively low, you have a regulatory climate that is fair.'”

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In the book, you call Social Security a “failure” that “we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now.” Is it time for it to end?

Well, the counties of Matagorda, Bresoria, and Galveston in 1981 decided they wanted to opt out of this Social Security program. They have now very well funded programs and their employees are going to be substantially better taken care of then anybody in Social Security. So I would suggest a legitimate conversation about let the states keep their money and implement the programs. That’s one option that’s out there. But I didn’t write the book and say here are all the solutions. I think the first step in finding the solutions is admitting we have a problem—and admitting that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

What about Medicare? That’s an even bigger contributor to these debt problems.

Here’s the problem, in the 25 years that I’ve worked in Texas state government both as a legislator, an appropriator, then as lieutenant governor and the governor of Texas: Washington attaches strings to all these programs. They take away the incentive for innovation because they say here is a portion of your money back and here are the only ways that you can spend it. That on its face is bad public policy. And again, I think it’s an abuse of our Constitution. There’s no place in the Constitution that says Washington, D.C. is supposed to be mandated health-care coverage, for example. That gets to the very core of the book. If America really wants to be strong again, we need to get back to the principles this country was based upon. The Constitution as it was written, and the 10th Amendment that clearly says the states are where these decisions should be made…

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“When he first took office as governor in 2001, Perry went to Mexico and bragged about his law that granted ‘the children of undocumented workers’ special in-state tuition at Texas colleges, the first state in the nation to do so…

“Perry opposed Arizona’s tough anti-illegal immigration law SB 1070. ‘I have concerns,’ he explained, ‘with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas.’…

“Numbers USA, a group that supports immigration control, gives Perry a ‘D-‘ for his positions supporting amnesty, open borders, and opposing border security…

“In [a 2007] speech he came out against building a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border. Perry also came out in favor of blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants in 2006, albeit without citizenship, supporting ‘a guest worker program that takes undocumented workers off the black market and legitimizes their economic contribution.'”

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“The Emerging Technology Fund was created at Mr. Perry’s behest in 2005 to act as a kind of public-sector venture capital firm, largely to provide funding for tech start-ups in Texas. Since then, the fund has committed nearly $200 million of taxpayer money to fund 133 companies. Mr. Perry told a group of CEOs in May that the fund’s ‘strategic investments are what’s helping us keep groundbreaking innovations in the state.’ The governor, together with the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the Texas House, enjoys ultimate decision-making power over the fund’s investments…

“All told, the Dallas Morning News has found that some $16 million from the tech fund has gone to firms in which major Perry contributors were either investors or officers, and $27 million from the fund has gone to companies founded or advised by six advisory board members. The tangle of interests surrounding the fund has raised eyebrows throughout the state, especially among conservatives who think the fund is a misplaced use of taxpayer dollars to start with.

“‘It is fundamentally immoral and arrogant,’ says state representative David Simpson, a tea party-backed freshman from Longview, two hours east of Dallas. The fund ‘opened the door to the appearance of impropriety, if not actual impropriety.'”

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“‘When you examine the entire record what’s happened to education in [Texas], what’s happened to health care in that state, it’s a record of decimation not of progress,’ David Axelrod told me.

“‘I don’t think the picture of Texas is what people want for the country when you look at the whole array of things that happened there,’ he said.

“Texas’ record of job creation has more to do with profits from the oil industry, a growing military and receiving aid from the Recovery Act, according to Axelrod.”

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“The general election will, quite literally, decide the fate of a nation. Every time Team Obama criticizes the Texas economy for its minimum wage job boom, the president will be accused of attacking the working men and women of America. (Texas has created a large share of the new jobs in the United States in the last decade but studies indicate many of them are at places like Wal-Mart and Carl’s Jr.)

“President Obama will also get beaten up for presiding over the first bond rating downgrade in U.S. history as well as high unemployment. When the cold rains fall in early November next year, unemployed voters in places like Ohio will step into the booth and dream of a minimum wage job in the Texas sun selling fishing rods at big box sporting goods stores or working in call centers; they will vote against Barack Obama.

“And in the process, they will write the epitaph to set upon the tombstone of history’s greatest democracy: Perry-Palin, 2012.”

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