Category: Rick Perry

Texas Democrats vs. the Rule of Law

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Even a liberal like Jonathan Chait can see it:

They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.
Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg — a Democrat who oversees the state’s Public Corruption unit — was arrested for driving very, very drunk. What followed was a relatively ordinary political dispute. Perry, not unreasonably, urged Lehmberg to resign. Democrats, not unreasonably, resisted out of fear that Perry would replace her with a Republican. Perry, not unreasonably, announced and carried out a threat to veto funding for her agency until Lehmberg resigned.
I do not have a fancy law degree from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, anywhere. I am but a humble country blogger. And yet, having read the indictment, legal training of any kind seems unnecessary to grasp its flimsiness.

You can read the whole thing. It is only logical that it is a bad thing to have a state official whose job is to investigate corruption charged with drunk driving. Yet because she is a Democrat and the governor is a Republican, Lehmberg refused to resign for strictly partisan reasons. The governor then exercised his prerogative in an effort to force Lehmberg to do the right thing — and Democrats then decided that the governor’s exercise of lawful authority was a crime.

 

Paranoid Theory: ‘Karl Rove Was Out Raising Money to Keep Santorum Alive’

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James Yanke at Reaganite Republican links to an article at Business Insider in which Grace Wyler gives credence to a paranoid theory offered by evangelical leader David Lane:

Karl stepped on Rick Perry and then Newt Gingrich every chance he got — albeit with deceit and sophistication — and elevated Mitt Romney at strategic, crucial points along their way to the Republican nomination — Rove’s candidate.
As an example of how sophisticated Rove is…Karl Rove was out raising money to keep Santorum alive until they could kill Newt — Santorum basically ran for Governor of Iowa in 2011, visiting all 99 counties; Santorum, out of Iowa, had no organization, no money and no chance in 2012 to be the Republican nominee; he was only a stalking horse for Mitt Romney — Rove kept Santorum alive until he could kill Rick Perry first, and then Newt Gingrich.
It’s instructive to note that Santorum placed 3rd in the South Carolina Presidential Primary the third week of January, and placed 3rd again the next week in Florida — yet Rove [by encouraging GOP donors to donate Santorum] was able to parlay two third place finishes into a $1M shot of money to keep Santorum alive…this is political gamesmanship on a whole other level, plus access to unlimited money.

This is insane in so many ways I don’t even know where to begin. It is obviously false to claim that Karl Rove raised a dime for Rick Santorum’s campaign. Nearly all of Santorum’s post-Iowa fundraising surge was in the form of online contributions from small donors.

So why on earth would David Lane say such a thing? In February, after Santorum won the trifecta — Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri — his underdog campaign caught the attenton of Annette Simmons, wife of Texas billionaire Harold Clark Simmons. Mrs. Simmons is a devout Christian who doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but news reports about Santorum’s strong Christian values appealed to her. So she told her husband that she was thinking about making a donation to Santorum. The Wall Street Journal reported March 23:

Mr. Simmons wondered about the prospects of the former Pennsylvania senator. He called his personal political muse, Republican strategist Karl Rove.
“Is he worth investing into his super PAC?” Mr. Simmons asked. He rose from his leather recliner in the den and stood at a bay window overlooking swans gliding on a lake encircled by 17,000 tulips. “Does he have a chance?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t count him out,” Mr. Rove said. Mr. Simmons’s wife, Annette, who was keen on Mr. Santorum, promptly donated $1 million to his super PAC, cash badly needed for an ad blitz ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.

Keep in mind what the situation was in February: Michelle Bachmann had quit after Iowa, Perry quit two days before the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary, and Gingrich had gotten stomped by Romney in both Florida and Nevada. Then came Feb. 8, when Santorum won all three contests, while Gingrich placed third in Colorado and fourth (behind Ron Paul) in Minnesota (Newt didn’t make the ballot in Missouri).

So if any well-informed person were asked, “Does Santorum have a chance?” the obvious answer would be, “Yes, I wouldn’t count him out.” Yet this is twisted by David Lane — who backed Gingrich from start to finish — into a conspiratorial plot. Furthermore, the idea that Perry and Gingrich lost because Rove “stepped on [them] every chance he got” is blatantly counterfactual:

  • Perry self-destructed in two debates in Florida (Tampa Sept. 12, Orlando Sept. 22), and was never a viable contender thereafter. Whatever prospects there might have been for resurrecting the Texas governor’s campaign ended at the Nov. 9 debate in Michigan, when Perry forgot how to count to three: “Oops.” By all normal logic, Perry should have quit after his fifth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, but instead let himself be persuaded to continue on to South Carolina, only to end up quitting the Thursday before the Saturday primary and endorsing Gingrich.
  • Gingrich was buried in Iowa by a blitz of Romney attack ads, recovered to win South Carolina, then buried against in Florida. As I have extensively documented, Gingrich’s campaign suffered from an unsustainable “burn rate.” Gingrich’s campaign went into the red in late January due to an ill-fated decision to attempt to fight Romney in the expensive Florida TV market and never recovered its financial balance. Newt reportedly spent the days before the Nevada primary desperately “dialing for dollars” (and thereby missed a scheduled appearance with the state’s popular Gov. Brian Sandoval) because of the campaign’s money troubles.

So, on the basis of a single datum — the Harold Simmons call to Karl Rove in February — David Lane has ginned up a conspiracy theory that falsely portrays Rick Santorum as a Rove-controlled stalking horse for the Romney campaign. Paranoia is not an ideology.

UPDATE: It is necessary, in order to understand how absurdly misguided David Lane’s paranoid theory is, to look at the vote totals in the three GOP contests that took place on Feb. 8:

MISSOURI PRIMARY:
RICK SANTORUM …. 55%
MITT ROMNEY ……… 25%
RON PAUL …………….. 12%

COLORADO CAUCUSES:
RICK SANTORUM …. 40%
MITT ROMNEY ……… 35%
NEWT GINGRICH …. 13%
RON PAUL …………….. 12%

MINNESOTA CAUCUSES:
RICK SANTORUM …. 45%
RON PAUL …………….. 27%
MITT ROMNEY ……… 17%
NEWT GINGRICH …. 11%

No intelligent person could look at those results and say that, as of Feb. 9, Newt Gingrich was better positioned than Rick Santorum to defeat Romney, and yet this is what David Lane wants you to believe: That somehow, as a result of Karl Rove’s Machiavellian scheming, Newt got cheated out of the nomination because Annette Simmons gave a million dollars to Santorum’s Super PAC in February.

UPDATE: Linked by Becca J. Lower — thanks!

 


The Phantom Menace, Remembered

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Perry campaign volunteers, Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 9, 2011

“He surfed into the race on a tsunami wave of overconfidence, his campaign led by a bunch of cutthroat a–holes who had just finished sabotaging Newt Gingrich.
“They convinced a lot of people . . . to climb aboard The Smilin’ Texan Express for a one-way ride to glory.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Nov. 29, 2011

Back during the primary campaign — and I think it was in January, but I could be wrong — Ace of Spades did a post in which he ranted sarcastically against “gut hunches” as a basis for political judgment. Perhaps it is solipsistic to imagine Ace had me in mind, just because my hunches during the campaign repeatedly proved more accurate than the predictions of the elite punditocracy.

Even before the campaign really began, I saw the enormous upside potential of Herman Cain’s candidacy at a time when most of the other reporters regarded him as a novelty lightweight. By the time he zoomed to the top of the polls in late September 2011, I looked like prescient genius, and if it hadn’t been for the unexpected (and, Herman still insists, entirely false) sexual allegations, who knows what might have happened?

As soon as the Cain Train ran off the rails, I jumped straight to the Santorum Express, at a time when he was the lowest underdog in the field. Again, my gut hunch proved prescient, and by the time the polls began to catch up with my gut, Santorum was on the verge of a stunning upset in the Iowa caucuses. Despite all the odds against him, until he finally dropped out in April, Santorum was the last viable alternative to Romney.

Many other things my gut also got right: Pawlenty was too boring, Huntsman was hopeless, the Gingrich bubble predictably imploded, and Sarah Palin never got past the “maybe” I got from her people when I tried to gauge her interest in the 2012 race back in early November 2010. (The well-placed source who, in June 2011, left me hanging in the wind with his word that Palin would make a final decision “within a week”? Yeah, maybe I ought to burn him, but he swears that was the word he got from Palin’s people, and I guess their mixed signals were not his fault.)

Of all my gut hunches, however, none was more accurate than the weird vibe I got in August 2011 about the Rick Perry campaign:

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.”

Something was definitely wrong with the Perry campaign, and if I couldn’t quite articulate the rational basis for that spooky foreboding, the deadly accuracy of my hunch was amply vindicated by subsequent events. So now comes Jay Root of the Texas Tribune to tell his own version of events:

At this point you may be wondering why anyone would write a book about a presidential candidate who made the word “oops” his calling card. The short answer is that “Oops! A Diary From the 2012 Campaign Trail” began not as a book but as a diary — a behind-the-scenes look at life on a modern presidential campaign. The “embed” reporters. The bus. The way news is really gathered in the age of Twitter and YouTube.
I had every reason to believe I was covering the eventual Republican nominee when Perry immediately shot to the top of the polls in the summer of 2011. By the time his campaign ground to a halt five months later, the words of the Democratic strategist James Carville, spoken on CNN in January, seemed like the most apt description of what I had witnessed: “the worst presidential campaign/candidate in American history.”  . . .

Read the whole thing. It may not as interesting as some of my gut hunches, but it’s still pretty good.

Jeff Goldstein Isn’t Ready to Don His Saffron Robe and Chant, ‘Hare Mitt-nu’

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“Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak. . . . I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”
— letter from a soldier in the 79th New York Infantry, 1863

Seedubya today was cracking cynical jests on Twitter, whence I derived the headline joke. Speaking of headlines and jokes . . .

Rick Perry endorses David Dewhurst
for Hutchison’s Senate seat

Not a joke, but quite laughable: Alleged populist sides with GOP Establishment against Tea Party-backed dynamo Ted Cruz?

Jeff Goldstein — who has been on a tear lately, as Mike Hendrix notes — decided there were some bridges that badly needed burning:

Crazy how all that online support that started out with Perry (and was simultaneously very vocal in its attacks on Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum, et al.,) seems now to have solidified behind Romney.
I mean, who would have thought it, right? These people go to TEA Party conferences! On stipends! And are given speaking roles. To stand up for conservative principles.
So they have to be conservatives, no? I mean, they are our conservative leaders, if you judge by their online influence.

It’s almost as if certain people were peddling their asses like cell-block punks trying to hustle up the price of a carton of Newports.

NTTAWWT, just don’t kid yourself that the rest of us can’t see what you’re doing. Maybe this will all work out just like you’ve planned it, and on Nov. 7 you’ll be accepting congratulations on the key role you played in Romney’s glorious triumph.

My hunch — and hey, maybe it’s only a hunch — is that this is as tragic a miscalculation as your ride on the Rick Perry bandwagon turned out to be, and all you’ll get is a sore ass, with no Newports to show for it.

Coalition politics in a two-party system requires each of us to decide which compromises we will accept and on what terms, so I try not to be too judgmental or intolerant about such things. What genuinely annoys me is irresponsible incompetence in politics of the sort that permits people to advocate bad policies and strategies which fail, and yet those who bring about such predictable failures — “the fools that bring disaster” — suffer no loss of influence as a result.

Demoralization spreads in the ranks as the troops begin to realize the “leaders” are members of a sort of Old Boys Club, and that their leadership status has nothing to do with actual merit, except in terms of their superior ability to curry favor with fellow club members.

After a while of watching this, you start noticing little things:

Oh, that’s sweet. Even as @NewtGingrich campaign was drowning in debt, it found $12k to pay daughter’s company.

Little things like that you notice, and you remember when Newt was also peddling his ass. But now what’s he got to show for it?

A sore ass. And no Newports.

A Couple Things Wrong, Jim Antle

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Jim Antle of the American Spectator gets almost everything right in this column about the 2012 campaign. His two most glaring errors:

Yet if Santorum had done just a bit better in Michigan and Ohio, we could be having a very different discussion right now. Santorum showed future conservative contenders how to go hunting where the ducks are. As the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed, a Republican like Bobby Jindal could take the Santorum coalition — Southerners, Midwesterners, evangelicals, Catholics, and Reagan Democrats — and build on it.

  1. Error: Never quote Ross Douchebag.
  2. Error: Bobby Jindal zigged when he should have zagged.
    I remember the Sept. 13 CNN Tea Party Express debate in Tampa, encountering Bobby Jindal as he exited the CNN tent outside the auditorium. Jindal had endorsed Rick Perry and was appearing on CNN as a Perry surrogate along with Objective Political Analyst Erick Erickson.

The Perry campaign was a predictable disaster — “The Phantom Menace” — and the way Jindal climbed aboard that bandwagon irritated me at the time. I’ve always liked Jindal, but Ross Douchebag’s idea that Jindal “could take the Santorum coalition” is based on the presumption that Santorum has no future plans for that coalition.

It’s one of those ideas Ivy-educated Boy Geniuses get, like “Tim Pawlenty, Conservative Alternative to Romney,” or “Second Look at Newt.”

Pundits like to think up clever ideas that impress their peers as “counterintuitive,” but are actually just counter to common sense. The really genius ideas, however, are always the kind of common sense things that seem stupid to people who think of themselves as clever.

What does common-sense genius look like? I remember when Steve Foley called me on Election Night 2010 and said, “Whaddya think about Herman Cain?” That was a genius idea. I remember when Lisa Graas said to me in August, “Hey, while you’re in Iowa, do you think you could go check out Rick Santorum?” That was a genius idea.

Now, here’s another common-sense genius idea: Rick Santorum spends the next four months working on his convention speech. And I mean honing it ’til it shines: Every word, every pause, the whole thing committed to memory and rehearsed until it is absolutely perfect.

So that when Santorum gets his primetime moment in Tampa, millions of Americans will say, “Damn. Why didn’t Republicans nominate him?”

Yesterday, somebody started the “Rick 2016? Facebook page.

Common-sense genius, you see.

Ain’t I Done Told Ya So?

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Perhaps you remember this Sept. 23 headline:

Does Pain Explain Perry’s
Poor Debate Performances?

Once more, I give credit to Brian Ledbetter of Snapped Shots for the e-mail tip alerting me that Rick Perry had undergone back surgery in July, thus permitting me to become the first national journalist to suggest that there might be a connection between the Texas governor’s back pain and his problems in the TV debates.

The day after I posted that at The American Spectator, Perry’s campaign denied (to Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post) that the governor’s back pain was a problem. It was nearly three months later — in an interview with the Des Moines Register published Dec. 11 — that Perry admitted he was “pretty fatigued” because of his back problems.

Ah, but it was worse than mere “fatigue,” as I was told during my trip to Iowa and reported on Dec. 31:

Earlier this week, I talked to a well-informed conservative who claimed to know — from sources close to the Perry campaign — that the governor had been prescribed Oxycontin for pain, and was subsequently taken off that medication when it became apparent it was affecting him negatively.

The Iowa source who told me that was speaking off-the-record in such a way that, when he described (but would not name) his source, I suspected I knew the quite famous political operative. However, I don’t burn my sources, especially not in such a way that it would burn my source’s sources, so therefore:

  1. I only mentioned it once, burying it in a blog post on New Year’s Eve; and
  2. I made sure the sourcing was vague.

Also, given that this was a second-hand sort of item, I didn’t want to seem to be spreading malicious gossip without substantiation. However, in my defense — another fact that was necessarily omitted from that Dec. 31 item — I knew it wasn’t malicious because the Iowa source actually had a favorable disposition toward Perry, despite being disappointed by the mismanagement of Perry’s campaign in the Hawkeye State. (Note to self: Call source and see if we’ve reached “now it can be told” status.)

OK, so that’s what happened from September through December, from my first speculation until the subsequent confirmation that back pain was a major factor in Rick Perry’s undoing. Now, via Alex Pappas at The Daily Caller, the denouement:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry was under the influence of painkillers during televised presidential debates over the last year to help relieve severe back pain, according to a soon-to-be released eBook on the 2012 Republican race for president obtained by The Daily Caller.
“It became an open secret that he was using painkillers in sufficient dosages to keep him standing through the two-hour debates,” write the authors of “Inside the Circus.”
A source provided TheDC with an advance copy of the eBook, authored by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas. The book comes out Tuesday.

Read the whole thing. And keep this little episode in mind next time I tell you something that seems too strange to be true.

UPDATE: My smartass friend Doug Winship — one of the world’s greatest bartenders — knows just how to stick the knife in:

Too bad you quit blogging. You could brag about this….

Yeah, thanks, smartass. I would have actually quit, too, if tip-jar hitters hadn’t talked me out of it. So hit the freaking tip jar.





Why Does DC Fund TX?

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by Smitty

Tina Korbe at HotAir on Rick Perry:

Incidentally, this is one of the things I most respect about Rick Perry: He is willing to forgo federal funds, recognizing that federal dollars always come with strings attached.

In the chronic case, are not the 57 states the horse, and the federal government the cart?

Sure, natural disasters may trigger some acute reversal, say, if the Mississippi River floods out the entire Midwest. But I read a sentence like that, and I wonder:

  • Does the entire economy work in some non-obvious way? or
  • Am I just a chump for not understanding something that everyone else grasps readily?

I submit that, post debt crisis, one of our tasks to look for in the plan will be a transition off of the notion of ‘federal dollars’ and onto a notion akin to ‘federal revenues’, where DC, like a river, is constrained by the banks of receipts at the treasury that come from the states.

Returning our federal government’s feet to earth may be what it takes to trigger an influx of sane, moral people into running for office.
Not to say the candidates we have are insane or immoral; rather, insufficient.

Sources Close to Christina Hendricks Could Not Be Reached for Comment

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When you’re seeking a metaphor for “no chance in hell,” certain impossible scenarios immediately come to mind, which was what I was aiming for in my American Spectator column today:

Monday, Carl Cameron of Fox News was the vehicle by which “sources close to the Gingrich campaign” floated a trial balloon, suggesting that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich might announce Texas Gov. Rick Perry as his running mate “prior to the Republican National Convention at the end of August.”
While I haven’t bothered to check with my own “sources close to the Gingrich campaign,” this suggestion had the distinct aroma of a substance one might find on the plains of Texas in the vicinity of a herd of longhorn cattle. Carl Cameron is too smart of a reporter to believe such a steaming pile of nonsense, and so my guess is that Carl was just sharing it with Fox News viewers in order to give them a glimpse of how truly desperate “sources close to the Gingrich campaign” have become. Republican voters go to the polls in Alabama and Mississippi today, and if Newt loses these two primaries, he’s got as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as he has of making Christina Hendricks his next wife. . . .

Read the whole purposefully cruel thing. My apologies to Newt fans, but I finally got tired of being forced to listen to such ridiculousness.