The New York
Times January 17, 2015
Rick Perry!
The man who
has been governor of Texas since pterodactyls roamed the plains took his leave
at the State Capitol this week. He is not saying anything for sure about
running for president. Mum's the word until springtime. However, he recently
told a reporter that if voters want to break from the Obama era, ''I am a very
clear and compelling individual to support.''
Wow, the
Republican race is getting to be like one of those crime shows where the
detectives have to paste pictures all over the wall so they can keep the
suspects straight. So many old friends popping up this month -- Mitt Romney and
now Rick Perry. The man who drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the
car roof and the man who claims he shot a coyote while jogging. The animal
lobby had better get out there and see how Jeb Bush feels about wolf hunting.
Almost
everybody has a Rick Perry favorite moment. For 99 percent, it's probably the
dreaded ''oops'' debate when he announced that as president he was going to
shutter three federal agencies -- and then could only think of two.
And, yeah,
that one was pretty good. However, I still cherish a television interview Perry
did a few years earlier with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he
defended abstinence-only sex education despite the state's astronomical rates
of teenage pregnancy.
''It works,''
Perry said defiantly and totally erroneously.
''Can you give
me a statistic suggesting it works?'' asked Smith.
''I'm going to
tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,'' Perry replied. Smith
was too discreet to press for details, but let's hope it comes up during the
campaign.
Perry had been
governor of Texas for more than 14 years, an all-time record. In his farewell
speech to the State Legislature, he reminded the lawmakers of all they'd been
through together, including hurricanes, wildfires and the tragic disintegration
of the Space Shuttle Columbia over Texas in 2003, although Perry called it
''Space Shuttle Challenger,'' which blew up in 1986.
No mention of
his pending felony indictment for abuse of power. Perry tried to force a county
district attorney to resign by threatening to veto the money for an office she
runs that investigates public corruption. It's a complicated story. First you
learn that the D.A. in question had been arrested in a rather spectacular
drunken-driving case, and you tilt a little toward Perry. Then you discover
that two other county D.A.'s were charged with drunken driving during the Perry
administration without attracting the wrath of the governor. Then you sort of
get distracted by wondering what's going on with Texas district attorneys.
We've got ages
to work it out.
Perry bragged
about the state's economy, which he often refers to as ''the Texas Miracle.''
Really, we have not heard so much about miracles since Our Lady of Fatima. The
state's record of job creation is his big calling card to the presidential
league, and once he starts harping on it again we're going to wonder: Has Texas
been growing so many jobs because Perry cut taxes and regulations? Or is it
because Texas happens to be a state with warm weather, lots of space for cheap
housing, a huge border
with Mexico and massive oil and gas deposits? Is Perry a great leader or just
conveniently located? Eventually, someone will repeat the old Ann Richards joke
about being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
Perry's
signature job-building initiative is something called the Texas Enterprise
Fund, which aims to persuade out-of-state companies to move to Texas, or expand
there. One of its beneficiaries, Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, got $50
million in return for creating what Perry said were more than 12,000 jobs. An
investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed the fund folk had been
counting every single biotech job created anywhere in the state for the
previous six years. Actually the number was more like 10.
But it's great
that the governor's ambitions are forcing us to think a lot about Texas, a
state that deserves more attention, having been home to only three of the last
eight elected chief executives. Not even half! And although lawmakers from
Texas currently lead six of the committees in the House of Representatives,
that's still under a third.
There's also
United States Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, making all the
pre-presidential-campaign stops and offering an option to all of us who are yearning
for a vision to the right of Rick Perry. I once threw out the possibility of an
entire Republican ticket from the Lone Star State, and many readers desperately
wrote to argue that that was unconstitutional. It might be fairer to say that
the Constitution isn't crazy about the idea.
We can figure
that out down the line. Meanwhile, Perry and Cruz could both be in the
presidential debates. Let's see who's better at counting to three.
