Quotes of the day

“As Perry has become better known over the past two weeks, his Positive Intensity Score has been stable in the low 20s — now 22, compared with 23 two weeks ago. That score is based on the percentage of Republicans familiar with Perry who have a strongly favorable opinion of him minus the percentage with a strongly unfavorable opinion…

“Perry is off to a good start as a now-official candidate, seeing his familiarity among Republicans increase significantly in the last two weeks while maintaining a high Positive Intensity Score. The challenge for him is to keep that score up, now that he is actively campaigning. With that exposure comes the inevitable media scrutiny regarding his issue positions, personal qualities, and record for a broader audience, many of whom may not view them positively.”

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“To be sure, the Texas model doesn’t always impress. (Twenty-seven percent of Texans lack health insurance, for instance, compared with 21 percent of Californians.) But Perry can credibly claim that his state delivers on conservative governance’s two most important promises: a private sector that creates jobs at a remarkable clip, and a public sector that seems to get more for the taxpayers’ money than many more profligate state governments.

“The question is whether Perry himself deserves any of the credit. Here his critics become much more persuasive. When Perry became governor, taxes were already low, regulations were light, and test scores were on their way up. He didn’t create the zoning rules that keep Texas real estate affordable, or the strict lending requirements that minimized the state’s housing bubble. Over all, the Texas model looks like something he inherited rather than a system he built.

“This means that unlike many of his fellow Republican governors, from Mitch Daniels to Chris Christie to Scott Walker — or a Democratic governor like Andrew Cuomo, for that matter — Perry can’t claim to have battled entrenched interest groups, or stemmed a flood tide of red ink. Instead, many of his policy forays have been boondoggles or train wrecks, from the failed attempt to build a $175 billion Trans-Texas Corridor (the kind of project conservatives would mock mercilessly if a Democrat proposed it) to an ill-designed 2006 tax reform that’s undercut the state’s finances.”

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“In his nearly 11 years as chief executive, Perry, now running for the GOP presidential nomination, has overseen more executions than any governor in modern history: 234 and counting. That’s more than the combined total in next two states — Oklahoma and Virginia — since the death penalty was restored 35 years ago…

“He vetoed a bill that would have spared the mentally retarded and sharply criticized a Supreme Court ruling that juveniles were not eligible for death. He has found during his tenure only one inmate on Texas’s crowded death row he thought should receive the lesser sentence of life in prison.

“And Perry’s role in the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham — who supporters said should have been at least temporarily spared when experts warned that faulty forensic science led to his conviction — is still the subject of investigation in Texas…

“‘If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas,’ he wrote in his book lauding states’ rights, ‘Fed Up!'”

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“Perry has given us a glimpse of what happens when his ideology collides with reality. Ideology wins, and it does so not on the up and up but by cheating a bit — in the case of global warming with the fictitious numbers and false charges. We have already seen the consequence of this kind of thinking. George W. Bush’s conviction that he was chosen to rid the world of Saddam Hussein led us into a war for stated reasons that were later contradicted by the evidence — or, more to the point, lack of evidence. Bush had many ways of making his case. To Joe Biden who worried that things were fast going wrong in Iraq, he cited ‘my instincts.’ To others, he said he ‘prayed over’ his decisions. All his prayers and instincts could not, for some reason, produce weapons of mass destruction or impose a plan for governing Iraq once a nominal victory was achieved. This is a terrifying way to make policy…

“I take Perry seriously. He is no Michele Bachmann, unaccountably elected from a single congressional district, but the three-term leader of the vast nation of Texas. The achievement warrants deep respect and, after last week, considerable worry. It’s not his thinking I fear. It’s the lack of any at all.”

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“There’s a quality of ‘meanness’ that has deep roots in Texas politics. You can find it in Texas politicians of both parties, an Austin lobbyist once explained to me. ‘They don’t just want to beat you,’ he said. ‘They want to knock you down, and then stomp on you.’…

“‘There is more tolerance for social inequality in Texas than in any other state,’ one leading Texas political consultant explained to me. ‘What we do here for the mentally retarded and the mentally ill is a disgrace. What we do in the way of health care for the poor and the uninsured is a disgrace. What we do here in the way of our prison system is a disgrace.’…

“If Perry emerges as the Republican standard-bearer, a central theme of the Democratic campaign against him is likely to be: Does the rest of the country really want to be like Texas?”

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“Every successful presidential campaign requires a little touch of hero-worship and personality cult, although again the Obama experience demonstrates the dangers of overdosing on this sort of thing. Perry, as a poster boy for gun-toting Texans (he once shot a coyote while jogging), has inspired a bit of that. If you’ve seen the burgeoning ‘Rick Perry Facts’ meme on the web (@rickperryfacts on Twitter, for example), after the mold of the Chuck Norris Facts, they’re a good example of pumping up Perry’s Texas tough guy image with the proper air of absurdity to avoid taking themselves too seriously. Nobody is going to depict Perry as a ‘Lightworker’ who brings meaning to our lives, paint pictures of him astride a unicorn, or argue that he will fundamentally change the American people or hold back the tides. He’s simply a successful political leader who wants to apply his talents to improving how our federal government works, in many cases by imitating things that have already been done on the federal or state level in the past.

“We all have our biases in preferring candidates. I know three of mine. One, which Perry fits just as have Pawlenty, Palin, Ryan, Rubio, Giuliani, Christie, and even Ronald Reagan, is a preference for Republicans who didn’t grow up wealthy or from prominent families, who have had to scrap their way up the ladder. I’ve voted for my share of to-the-manor-born Republicans and surely will again, but I still feel like Republicans who have had to claw their way up from middle-class or harder backgrounds tend to understand better at a gut level what the party really stands for, how hard it has to work to win, and why it appeals to Americans who don’t come from money and influence. But Perry doesn’t exactly fit the second (I tend to like candidates who are, like me, either lawyers or otherwise talkers, fast on their feet and clever in debate) and as for the third…so sue me, I’m a New Yorker, I prefer not to run Southerners, who tend to get counted out easily by much of the rest of the country. But it’s important to know your biases precisely so you don’t let them dictate your choices. I’d rather have run a candidate from another region of the country, but if Perry’s the best we have – and I think of the current field he is, and that whatever rumors you hear, we’re unlikely to get another top-shelf entrant – he’s my candidate. He doesn’t need to be my hero.”