COMMENTARY BY DR JOHN WORLDPEACE FOR PRESIDENT 2016
Well it did not take long before one of Rick's cronies decided to write that "Rick Perry is not Stupid" headline.
I don't really think he is stupid, just not smart.
The below reference to LBJ is a joke. Rick cannot fill those boots.
LBJ, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon are presidents who fully understood power and demanded it of themselves. These were men who would do whatever it took to feed their need for power.
Rick just does not have that fire. He is right on with the Texas Republican mindset that finally pulled out of its Reconstructionist mindset and abandoned the Democratic Party and went back to its roots in the Republican Party in 2002. Texas will never go Democratic again. Rick just rode that wave that started back with Ann Richards and ended with the fiasco of Tony Sanchez billionaire oil guy who spent $64 million on the 2002 governor's race and did not get but 40% of the vote. To some degree thanks to my candidacy. $64 million was 8 times what had been spent on the governor's race prior to Tony. He spread a lot of money around.
Karl Rove was laughing all the way at how he engineered the Democrats to try to make Texas a Hispanic run state. Sorry the Alamo is just too recent memory still in Texas.
The other great democratic candidate in 2002 was Dan Morales who tried to steal money from the billion dollar tobacco settlement he got as Attorney General. And he had married a ex stripper along the way. No way Texas was or is ready to put a stripper in the governor's mansion.
I told them. They did not listen. Too much money flowing from Mr. Sanchez. Result, the death of the Democratic Party in Texas as the senior white males voted for Perry instead of Sanchez.
Perry benefited from all that. And Texas has been booming since the end of World War II and it is not likely to stop in the near future.
So Perry fit right in with Texas politics but the Lone Star state is not like any other state in the union. What Rick Perry was to Texas is not what the rest of the USA feels comfortable with.
Senior Americans remember well the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam and George Dubya Bush and Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis of Republican greed on Wall Street.
Rick Perry is not the next President of the USA. He will stumble in some way before the end of February.
There is an old Texas saying, "Everyone thought he was a fool until he opened his mounth and proved it."
Rick needs to stay out of the Presidential race and be happy with his accomplishments to date. He is out of his League.
Dr John WorldPeace
150106 0840
Rick Perry isn’t stupid; he wants power, and he’ll be anyone to get it
Eric Gay/The Associated Press
Gov. Rick Perry took questions from a reporter in an interview last month at the Governor's Mansion in Austin.
Published: 05 January 2015 11:19 PM
Updated: 06 January 2015 12:42 AM
“Is Perry eyeing the White House?” asked a political-wonk headline that appeared over the weekend. It’s a rhetorical question unless you genuinely don’t know what kind of hat the pope wears.
Here’s a hint: People don’t take politicking lessons from hoary old statesmen like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz if they’re not. A guy doesn’t sign up for lessons in “stage presence” with a coach who once headed the Royal Shakespeare Company if he doesn’t have an infamous “brain freeze” moment from a previous campaign to overcome.
Yes, Perry is eyeing the White House. He’s eyeing it like an F-16 radar system locking onto a target aircraft.
Right now, much of the media rumination is about our outgoing governor’s legacy. With the longest tenure in state gubernatorial history, there’s a fair amount to discuss. And after all, “legacy” questions offer a handy opportunity for the man himself to segue into talk about the “Texas Miracle” and jobs and low taxes and the earthly realization of a pro-business, low-regulation, free-enterprise paradise.
Yet as our veteran Austin bureau writer Christy Hoppe observed last week, Perry isn’t especially interested in legacy talk.
“Legacy’s going to be what the legacy’s going to be,” he said dismissively, if not modestly: Legacies are for silver-haired old guys fixing to take it easy on the well-paid-speeches and board-of-directors circuit. Legacies are for semi-retired duffers who linger over their memoirs all morning and take a nap after lunch.
That’s not what Rick Perry is planning for his immediate future.
He can, however, be a lot of other things, as the situation requires: anti-government tea party zealot; affable Reaganesque patriot; theocratic fundamentalist; boot-heeled cowboy outlier; shrewd business insider; tough but still-boyish rogue.
What he’s not is stupid, and that’s the mistake his detractors consistently make in evaluating him. For all that “Governor Goodhair” talk, Rick Perry may be Texas’ smartest practitioner of raw power politics since Lyndon B. Johnson.
Power is what Rick Perry is all about: building it, consolidating it, and using it to get what he wants. Everything else is a means to that end.
Does he really believe people ate dinosaur meat or that government-sponsored prayer will make it rain? Does he genuinely suppose that Texas can secede from the United States “whenever we want”?
Maybe, but that’s not the point. Perry understands the crazier-than-thou GOP primary philosophy that works wonders on contemporary Texas Republicans, and he’s ready to apply it — perhaps in a more polished, streamlined form than in 2012 — to a national audience. Once he defines that audience, he’ll be what it wants him to be.
And he’s a truly brilliant practitioner of old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts patronage politics. Texas government is so honeycombed with Perry cronies, donors, ex-staffers, old Aggies and fishing buddies that archaeologists will still be unearthing their mummified remains from dusty state offices and county courthouses at the turn of the next century.
What does all this mean? Maybe not much, if you’re defining Perry’s chances of a successful run down the 2016 presidential campaign trail by his 2012 performance.
That would not be wise. Even people who believe he’s a fool — which he isn’t — should recognize that he’s smart enough to learn from his mistakes and to avoid repeating them.
As he leaves the governor’s office following his unprecedented 14-year run, Perry is doing what all sensible politicians do: He’s taking credit for everything that has gone right and blaming all the problems on somebody else.
More to the point, he’s selling his own definition of what those “problems” are: Texas’ poor record on poverty, health care, public education and pollution are framed as liberal obsessions that Republican voters don’t care much about anyway.
So even though he’s leaving behind three decades in Texas politics, Rick Perry isn’t awfully interested in his legacy.
As far as he’s concerned, it’s a work in progress.