Category: Rick Perry

Rick Santorum Distances Himself From Newt’s Lefty ‘Hit Job’ on Mitt Romney

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Newt Gingrich’s “super PAC” has unleashed its 27-minute documentary about Bain Capital, When Mitt Romney Came to Town, which a Daily Kos blogger calls a “hit job” that “you’d expect from a lefty operation.” It’s as if Newt hired Michael Moore. Avowed lefty Steve Benen calls it “devastating”:

Desperate to gain some traction in South Carolina, Rick Perry has joined in on this weird left-wing beatdown of Romney. The fact that the latest South Carolina poll shows him in sixth place — behind Jon Huntsman, in what was supposed to be Perry’s “firewall” state — perhaps explains Perry’s willingness to engage in an “Occupy”-style attack on free-market capitalism. Rick Santorum refuses to go down that road:

“It’s this hostile rhetoric, which unfortunately – I don’t want to stand here and be a defender of Mitt Romney, but unfortunately even some in our party now, even some running for president will engage in with respect to capitalism,” Santorum said to a town hall of nearly 200 people. “It is bad enough for Barack Obama to blame folks in business for causing problems in this country. It’s one other thing for Republicans to join him.” . . .
Even when prodded by reporters to take a shot, Santorum instead has only said he believes in the economic model that allows people to be successful.
However, that does not mean Santorum has shied away from taking jabs at Romney. The candidate trying to portray himself as the only true conservative in the race has elected to use Romney’s record as a governor, not a businessman, to go on the offensive.
“The other side is going to look at my record and look at Gov. Romney’s record on health care and say, ‘You want to attack me on health care? Who are you to attack me on something that I used your plan to build my health care method?'” said Santorum. “He’s taking away the biggest issue that we have in this election.”

Good on ya, Rick. The problem with attacking “vulture capitalism” (to use Perry’s rhetoric), is that shutting down inefficent and unprofitable segments of a company’s business is essential to maintaining economic viability. Romney did some stupid things at Bain Capital — e.g., his crony capitalist moves in the “My Twinn” debacle — which are subject to criticism. But closing down inefficient operations in an effort to turn around companies that were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy is just the way business works. Perry’s rhetorical appeal to economic ignorance is backfiring disastrously in South Carolina:

BLYTHEWOOD, S.C. (AP) — Presidential candidate Rick Perry’s criticism of Mitt Romney’s business past has cost him the support of a prominent South Carolina Republican.
Investment fund executive and top GOP donor Barry Wynn told The Associated Press Thursday that he’s leaving the Perry fold to endorse Romney. Wynn says he was irritated by Perry’s attacks on Romney’s time at the helm of the private equity firm Bain Capital.
As Wynn put it, “It’s like fingernails on the chalkboard.”

Isn’t it time somebody stuck a fork in the Perry campaign?

UPDATE: Linked by Protein Wisdom, The Rhetorican, Wake Up America and The Lonely Conservative — thanks!

Rick Perry Has Replaced Jon Huntsman in the Coveted ‘Gov. Asterisk’ Position

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Marginal poll numbers, yet deemed debate-worthy:

According to CNN’s criteria for inclusion, a candidate must get at least 4th place in either Iowa or New Hampshire, or get 7% support in at least three national Republican or three South Carolina primary polls released in January. The requirements were posted online last Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the Iowa caucuses began later that night.
Perry came in fifth place in Iowa, and sixth in New Hampshire. And currently, his national and South Carolina poll numbers do not show him meeting that threshold, either.

Never mind, says CNN, they’re including Perry anyway.

Because to do otherwise would be . . . well, heartless.

Philly Layover Musings: The Republican Party Is Depraved and Decadent

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PHILADELPHIA
With a three-hour layover in Philly, I logged on here at the Riverbend Bar & Grill at the airport Marriot, and the first thing I find atop the Memeorandum aggregation is my buddy Dave Weigel’s thoughts on the campaign to date:

I’m thinking of a Republican primary. It starts with a candidate (John McCain/Mitt Romney) who ran once before, came in second place, and won over the party’s elite class without winning over its base. Other candidates, understandably unwilling to accept this, line up: An under-funded social conservative (Mike Huckabee/Rick Santorum), an elder statesman who’s walked to the altar three times (Rudy Giuliani/Newt Gingrich), a libertarian who wants to bring back the gold standard (Ron Paul/Ron Paul).
The conservative base is displeased. In the year before the primary, it pines for a perfect candidate. At the end of summer, on (September 5/August 13), it gets him: (Fred Thompson/Rick Perry). The dream candidate immediately rises to the top of national polls, but collapses after lazy, distaff debate performances. When the primaries arrive, he’s in single digits and reduced to attacking the front-runners. But in Iowa, he does just well enough to justify staying in the race. . . .

Read the whole thing. The basic problem is this: The sincere idealists suffer from disastrous incompetence, while the selfish cynics are rewarded for their utter lack of ethics or principles. Decent and honest people, recognizing the GOP’s systemic incentives toward moral and political corruption, are repulsed by the shabby lies and vicious compromises necessary to “success” as a Republican, leaving the party to be controlled by a ruthless gang of dishonest jackals.

How else to explain the sadistic venality of those consultants and strategists who publicly backstabbed Newt in May and then hopped the next flight to Austin, where they have spent the past six months collecting fat paychecks in the service of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose formerly excellent reputation his campaign staff has done everything possible to destroy. If he had quit after his humiliating fifth-place finish in Iowa, as any intelligent and honest person would have advised Perry to do, he might have preserved some shred of dignity. Instead, his consultants and strategists — knowing that Perry’s still got a few million bucks left in his campaign account — told him, “No, no, Boss! Don’t quit now! You can win this thing. Trust us.”

And so they’ll spend it all in South Carolina, continuing to pay fees, salaries and commissions to the cronies they’ve hired, and when all is said and done, they will have accomplished nothing but to turn Perry into one of the biggest laughingstocks in American political history, rivaled only by Jon Huntsman. Any politician who hires John Weaver to run their campaign deserves whatever catastrophic embarrassment subsequently befalls them.

The quality of hired help in the GOP has never been really good, and the people who donate money to Republicans ought to start making lists of operatives who hire on to disasters like the Perry and Huntsman campaigns. If any future camapign starts putting those incompetent clowns on its payroll, you’ll know not to give them a dime.

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“We’re Probably Not the Worst Political Party in America”

Desperate Hours in the Hawkeye State

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JOHNSTON, Iowa
Republican voters are getting bombarded with robocalls all over Iowa. Last night, I talked to the night clerk at my hotel here. She’s a mother of three and a Republican, an undecided voter who isn’t even sure she’ll attend her precinct caucus tonight in Grimes. She told me she’s getting calls at home nearly every 30 minutes.

Some of these robocalls are nothing but flat-out lies. There are calls claiming that Rick Santorum isn’t pro-life and isn’t pro-Second Amendment when, in fact, he’s a famously staunch pro-lifer and has an A+ career rating from the National Rifle Association.

Of course, I suspect that Rick Perry’s campaign is behind this. And whether my suspicion is right or wrong, the Perry campaign is a lamentable joke here in Iowa. I’ve been talking to experienced Iowa Republicans during my travels the past week, and experienced observers are united in the opinion that Perry has wasted millions of dollars on a campaign that has done him more harm than good. 

The campaign I dubbed “The Phantom Menace” in August has been an even more wretched disaster than I predicted. According to Nate Silver’s final pre-caucus poll analysis, Perry will be lucky to get 10 percent in the Hawkeye State. A fourth- or fifth-place finish here would, by the normal calculus of politics, cause Perry to quit. But if he did quit, his campaign advisers and consultants would be out of work, so they have convinced him to keep going. And even though they have apparently come to grips with the fact that they’re going to get their asses handed to them in Iowa tonight, they’re still flooding the airwaves with TV ads and pestering people with robocalls.

As I’ve said, if desperation was a cologne fragrance, they’d reek of it. 

Those who have supported Perry should be furious at how they’ve been humiliated, outraged by the arrogant incompetence of Perry’s staff and (ridiculously overpaid) campaign consultants.

And isn’t it time that some people started re-assessing the potential for Rick Santorum to turn a strong showing in Iowa into a campaign that can defeat Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination? Continue reading Desperate Hours in the Hawkeye State →

Perry Campaign’s Amateur Hour

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The secret to an effective “oppo dump” is to leave no fingerprints. The campaign trying to push negative information about its rival into the media strives to obscure the origin of the attack.

If the Rick Perry campaign thinks that delivering its opposition research files to Erick Erickson is an effective messaging technique — well, good luck with that. And the fact that the “oppo dump” doesn’t indicate any wrongdoing by the targeted candidate? Hey, if desperation was a cologne fragrance, you’d reek of it.

The overpaid staffers who have run the Perry campaign into the ditch are already preparing their excuses for failure in Iowa:

[S]ome of his advisers have begun laying the groundwork to explain how the Texas governor bombed so dramatically in a race that he seemed to control for a brief period upon entering the race in August.
Their explanations for the nosedive come against the backdrop of a campaign riven by an intense, behind-the-scenes power struggle that took place largely between a group of the governor’s longtime advisers and a new cadre of consultants brought on this fall. In the end, the outsiders won out — and ever since have marginalized Perry’s longtime chief strategist while crafting a new strategy in which the Texan has portrayed himself as a political outsider and culture warrior. . . .
[S]ources close to the campaign depict a dysfunctional operation that might be beyond saving because of what they describe as the political equivalent of malpractice by the previous regime.
“There has never been a more ineptly orchestrated, just unbelievably subpar campaign for President of the United States than this one,” said a senior Perry adviser.

Even Perry supporter Dan Riehl is getting sick of this clumsy campaign. Yesterday, I was talking to people about how a candidate with such a great story to tell — Texas has the best economy in the United States — has done so poorly. People who had called Herman Cain’s campaign the worst-run presidential campaign of the year may owe Mark Block an apology.

Remember when I was the first reporter to raise the question of whether Perry’s back pain was a factor in his poor debate performance? They originally denied this, but two weeks ago, Perry admitted that had been a problem. 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.

If true, that would explain a lot about the candidate. Now the question is, “What’s wrong with his campaign staff?”

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey:

There’s an old saying that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. That’s not entirely true; when a big enterprise fails, it usually produces a thousand claims for paternity for someone else. . . .
In order for Perry to regain credibility as a contender, and especially as a Not-Romney who can take on Barack Obama, the collapse of his campaign in October has to be laid at the feet of someone other than Rick Perry.

Indeed: This finger-pointing festival may just be an effort at “strategic communications,” pre-emptive face-saving intended to assure campaign donors (and Perry supporters in South Carolina) that the likely caucus catastrophe on Tuesday isn’t the death knell on his campaign.

And no one now seems to remember who originally dubbed the Perry campaign in Iowa “The Phantom Menace.”

Speaking of being denied the credit I deserve, last night I gave Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard an earful for not mentioning me as an early prophet of the Santorum Surge in a widely-cited item he published this week.

Of course, I don’t blame Hayes personally for the fact that no one important reads a blogger who is Not Good Enough for BlogCon. “A Venn Diagram Might Be Helpful.”

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl has a startling confession: “I guess I’m getting soft in my old age.” Say it ain’t so!

IOWA NOTEBOOK: Occupy Caucuses?

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Rick Perry speaks at Smokey Row coffee shop
Pella, Iowa, Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2011

DAVENPORT, Iowa
After days of chasing after campaigns, I find myself in the unusual position of waiting for the campaign to come to me. Rick Santorum will be here in Davenport this evening for a 7 p.m. event, and so I’m hunkered down in the corner booth at a McDonald’s, which will be temporary headquarters of the National Affairs Desk for a few hours.

The National Affairs Desk, 2:10 p.m. CT, Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011

There’s news today about the Occupiers, who have announced plans to disrupt the GOP caucuses here:

DES MOINES, Iowa — Five Occupy protesters were arrested Thursday outside the Iowa campaign headquarters of presidential contender Ron Paul as the group continued its protest against Republican candidates and President Barack Obama.
The five were cited with trespassing and later released after they refused repeated requests to leave Paul’s campaign office in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny. The action came a day after seven protesters were arrested outside Republican Mitt Romney’s Des Moines headquarters, and Occupy spokeswoman Danielle Ryun said more protests, and probably arrests, will come.
“They’re all going to get equal play on this,” Ryun said. “We are very disillusioned with every candidate.”
The protests are part of an Occupy the Caucuses effort launched this week in Des Moines, attracting activists from around the country. Many of them have promised to interrupt campaign activities.
Ryun said the protesters would be going to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters in Des Moines later Thursday and to other Republican candidate offices Friday.
Eight protesters were arrested at the state Democratic Party offices on Dec. 19. Ryan said protesters would try to get into the offices again Thursday.
Lt. Ben Bowersox, an Ankeny police spokesman, said as many as 15 protesters were at the Paul headquarters. They were told to move to a public sidewalk nearby or face arrest. All but the five moved to the sidewalk.

“Cited with trespassing and later released”? These scum should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law — and beyond. A bunch of worthless punks running around whining about how oppressed they are? I say, give them a nice taste of some real oppression: Tase them, pepper spray them, beat them with nightsticks. Crush them like ants.

But these are merely my personal feelings, and do not reflect the official opinions of the Future U.S. Embassy in Vanuatu. Continue reading IOWA NOTEBOOK: Occupy Caucuses? →

Greetings From the Quad City

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DAVENPORT, Iowa — Woke up late today — too late for the complimentary breakfast here at the Radisson Quad City Plaza — and thought, “Hey, no need to hurry today.” Monday I flew into Cedar Rapids and had to go halfway across the state to a Rick Santorum event, then back to Iowa City. Then yesterday I had to go rent a car and drive to Davenport for a Mitt Romney event … and today?

Well, there’s a full schedule of campaign events, and I’m probably going to go see Rick Perry in Pella at 3:30 p.m. (CT) today, then catch Rick Santorum in Cedar Rapids at 6:30 p.m.. A calculation — based on the fact that I’m now driving a sweet black Ford Mustang — says I don’t have to leave here until about 1 p.m. So I’m typing this while the USA Network is showing Juneau (I’d never seen it before) and reading the copy of the Quad City Times I picked up (for 75 cents) at the coffee shop down the street. Here’s the first paragraph of the front-page story by Ed Tibbetts:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, keying on a speech President Barack Obama made in Davenport four years  ago this week, said Tuesday the president abandoned his campaign promises to unite the country and “demonizes our fellow Americans,” and he cast the election as one to save the vision of the country.

Fifty-one words? Too long, Ed. That paragraph should have ended with “country.” When I pay 75 cents for a newspaper, I expect that first paragraph to grab me by the throat and compel me to read the whole damn thing. Maybe your editors are to blame. I know you can write better stuff than that clunky 51-word lead, Ed.

See? That’s the kind of cranky stuff I’d be doing if I had more time on my hands. It’s probably for the best thaat I always seem to be racing back and forth across the state like maniac. And that’s why I just took off all my clothes before getting in the shower, to do Raw Naked Blogging of today’s latest Iowa-centric headlines:

EMILY’s List ranks Gingrich as
‘worst’ GOP presidential candidate
— The Hill

Republican Rivals Unleash
Broadside on Paul in Iowa
— New York Times

For Romney, stealth campaign brings
real hopes of winning Iowa
— Washington Post

Poll: Newsletters Not Hurting Paul in Iowa
— Slate

Perry changes stance to oppose all abortions
— CNN

Pro-Gingrich Super PAC: Romney is
‘2nd most dangerous man in America’
— NBC

Paul holds slim lead over Romney
in first post-Christmas Iowa poll
— The Hill

So that’s the news, but the tip-jar hitters didn’t send me to Iowa just so I could sit in a hotel room aggregating headlines while naked.

I could do naked aggregation at home. And sometimes do.

You’d never read a sentence like that in the Quad City Times, even though they charge 75 cents a copy. You can read this for free, but you should hit the tip jar anyway. This hotel room is $89 a night and I missed the free breakfast, so I’ll probably have to pick up some Mickey D’s on the way to Pella, which will cost me $3. But before I do that, first I’ve got to take a shower. And maybe before I leave I’ll do some Wet Naked Updates. That could be worth a few extra bucks, eh?

UPDATE: Wow. Nothing like a long hot shower to make me feel better. But the shower was long enough that I’ve only got a few minutes to throw up a couple of quick (wet and naked) linkbacks to our blog buddies before I get dressed and head out on the road to Pella:

Rick Santorum just launched a new statewide radio ad. Maybe I’ll get a chance to hear it while I’m driving to Pella. Hit the freaking tip jar!





Rick Perry Is Suing Virginia Over Primary Ballot Exclusion? UPDATE: ‘It Appears That Rick Perry Is Right’

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by Smitty

Or, “Rich Ferrous Vein Discovered In Irony Mine”. From the WaPoo:

Perry’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Richmond, contends that the state Republican chairman and members of the State Board of Elections ­violated Perry’s constitutional rights by enforcing state requirements for the gathering of signatures.
The suit maintains that Perry was unable to submit the required number of signatures because of the board’s “requirement that all petition circulators be an eligible or registered qualified voter in Virginia.”
That requirement substantially limits the number of people who could circulate petitions and thus “imposes a severe burden” on Perry’s freedoms of speech and association, the lawsuit argued. It cites the Constitution’s First and 14th amendments.
The lawsuit also challenges on the same grounds requirements regarding the number of signatures and the qualifications for signers.

I mean, isn’t Rick from “Don’t mess with” Texas? Haven’t the Virginia rules, while arguably onerous, been published a long time? While not a 10th Amendment call, doesn’t this very suit kind of trample the notion of federalism? If the Virginia primary was Newt’s Pearl Harbor, does this suit risk turning it into Perry’s Alamo?

Snark aside, unless he can show that the VA GOP deliberately rigged this primary, on which point I am really skeptical, the whole effort seems misguided. Sure, the GOP may here may be reading the rules closely, and sticking to the un-anointed, establishment candidates, but they’re still the rules.

Reached for comment, Hayao Miyazaki had this to say:

Update: a bit of research, based upon the comments, gives us a Red State post linking Ballot Access News, emphasis mine:

But what has not been reported is that in the only other presidential primaries in which Virginia required 10,000 signatures (2000, 2004, and 2008) the signatures were not checked. Any candidate who submitted at least 10,000 raw signatures, on notarized sheets, and which had at least 400 signatures from each U.S. House district, was put on the ballot. In 2000, five Republicans qualified: George Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, and Steve Forbes. In 2004 there was no Republican primary in Virginia. In 2008, six Republicans qualified: John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson (an earlier version of this post erroneously said Alan Keyes qualified in 2008, but he only qualified in 2000).
The only reason the Virginia Republican Party checked the signatures for validity for the current primary is that in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court. It was filed too late to be heard before the election, but is still pending. The effect of the lawsuit was to persuade the Republican Party to start checking petitions. If the Republican Party had not changed that policy, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would be on the 2012 ballot.

What I glean here is:

  • The rules have NOT BEEN changed.
  • Enforcement has been uneven over time.
  • The Osborne suit, coming in October 2011, is mighty, mighty convenient. Why, a couple months before the 2012 Presidential election due date, did an independent candidate for state legislature, quite unexpectedly become interested in the internals of the GOP nomination process? I’m not saying That He Elevated Fetishing Internal X-rays Which Any Sane Interlocutor Never cares about to an absurd level, but it would lead one to question the timing if, say, some link between Osborne and one of the campaigns were to surface.

I really hate to see this issue hang over the GOP like a cloud of air pollution. Maybe Ron Paul should get together with Mitt and have Romney’s campaign chair, VA Lt Gov Bill Bolling, set about enforcing the ballot rules in keeping with tradition. If either candidate is confident of his victory anyway, why should they seek to squelch competition? Especially at the cost of giving the GOP elephant such a donkey cast.

Update II: the plot thickens. At the Northern Virginia Tea Party FaceBook page,

Surprisingly, Rick Perry’s lawsuit challenging Virginia’s ballot access petition laws seems to be “spot on.” Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were kept off Virginia’s GOP primary ballot for the March 6 primary. Rick Perry relies upon the US Supreme Court precedent of BUCKLEY V. AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (97-930) 525 U.S. 182 (1999), in which the US Supreme Court agreed with the District Court: “the requirement of registration limits the number of persons available to circulate and sign [initiative] petitions and, accordingly, restricts core political speech.” THEREFORE, THE REQUIREMENT THAT PETITION GATHERERS MUST BE REGISTERED VOTERS IN VIRGINIA CLEARLY VIOLATES A DECISION BY THE US SUPREME COURT IN 1999. Of course, courts can find any number of reasons to take unexpected twists and turns. But it appears that Rick Perry is right.

My recommendation to the GOP is that this matter be concluded soonest, with Newt and Perry on the ballot. Continued wrestling with the pig is just going to get lipstick everywhere.

Update III: Still further details at Tim Boyer. Has the VA GOP conducted a successful auto-beclownment operation? It may very well have.

Update IV: HotAir has some great detail. Morrissey takes the straightforward approach that this is a competence test for the campaigns. I’m 60% in agreement there, and 40% interested in seeing what the legal fallout from Perry’s suit is. I happen to be of the ‘more is better’ school of thought; even if you’re a Romney or Paul supporter, inoculating your candidate from competition is not necessarily a Good Thing. Could I vote for Ron Paul in a primary as a protest against GOP tomfoolery? It sounds mad, but less so over time. . .