2012 = 1980?

Could Rick Perry vs. Barack Obama be the Reagan vs. Carter match-up of the new millennium?

Peter Wehner answered  Jonathan Alter's ridiculously easy challenge to prove Obama has been a bad president.  Wehner's fact-based piece is shooting fish in a barrel.  Unemployment, anemic economic growth, unprecedented deficit spending, worsening housing crisis, international enemies licking their chops...  Wehner wraps it all up in a handy, user-friendly bulleted list.

Obama had a chance to be the next Reagan, but instead became a more flamboyantly inept Carter

Obama is not Carter, he's worse.  Stephen Moore compares Obamanomics to Reaganomics, and it's not pretty for the Hope and Change crowd:

The two presidents have a lot in common. Both inherited an American economy in collapse. And both applied daring, expensive remedies. Mr. Reagan passed the biggest tax cut ever, combined with an agenda of deregulation, monetary restraint and spending controls. Mr. Obama, of course, has given us a $1 trillion spending stimulus.

By the end of the summer of Reagan's third year in office, the economy was soaring. The GDP growth rate was 5% and racing toward 7%, even 8% growth. In 1983 and '84 output was growing so fast the biggest worry was that the economy would "overheat." In the summer of 2011 we have an economy limping along at barely 1% growth and by some indications headed toward a "double-dip" recession. By the end of Reagan's first term, it was Morning in America. Today there is gloomy talk of America in its twilight.

Is Perry the next Reagan?

I don't think so.  Like FDR, Churchill or any other historical figure, there's only one, and the tales of crony crapitalism emanating from Austin give me pause.  Still, Perry poses a credible challenge to both the Democratic and GOP establishments not seen since the rise of the Gipper.

The Republican establishment can't stand the guy because like Reagan, he's an outsider not beholden to the K Street Gucci contingent.  And the Obama mouthpieces blabbing on about how they welcome a Perry challenge while feigning fear of a Romney or a Huntsman smacks a little too much of Brer Rabbit's "Please don't throw me in that briar patch!"

He's got Kinky Friedman's vote!

Here's what the singing humorist had to say...

I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm. He is not only a good sport, he is a good, kindhearted man, and he once sat in on drums with ZZ Top. A guy like that can’t be all bad. (Kinky Friedman - Rick Perry's got my vote)

He closes with a hearty endorsement:

So would I support Rick Perry for president? Hell, yes! As the last nail that hasn’t been hammered down in this country, I agree with Rick that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats. While Obama is busy putting the hyphen between “anal” and “retentive” Rick will be rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. (Kinky Friedman - Rick Perry's got my vote)

President Obama is playing Jimmy Carter to a T, even besting that lugubrious president's dismal record.  Can Rick Perry step in and fill Reagan's boots?

God Save us from Another Cerebral President

A liberal at Politico has taken the original step of questioning the intellectual capacity of a GOP candidate for president

Funny, no one on the left ever questions the intelligence of laff-a-minute good-for-nothing-but-government Maxine Waters or gaff-master good-for-nothing-but-government Joe Biden. Dim bulbs flicker across the liberal landscape, but progressives persist in smearing successful conservatives (George Bush got higher grades than Al Gore, remember?). Here’s the latest poop throwing monkey attack:

Another Texas governor who drops his “g’s” and scorns elites is running for president and the whispers are the same: lightweight, incurious, instinctual.

Strip away the euphemisms and Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: Is he dumb — or just “misunderestimated?” (Politico - Is Rick Perry Dumb?)

Cerebral presidencies are rarely successful

Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama. All supposedly highly-intelligent, all dismal failures.  A president doesn’t need to be a genius, he just needs to be an effective manager and a bold leader, traits not normally found in ivory tower eggheads.

There are different kinds of smarts. There’s book smarts, street smarts, and an ability to think on ones feet, evaluate information and make good decisions using a combination of logical thinking and gut instinct nurtured by experience. Those of us with working class dads who never saw the inside of a college classroom can tell you how we marveled at the man’s ability to smell a rat and avoid making stupid mistakes. 

Leadership takes that special kind of smarts, and intellectuals usually don’t fit the bill. The best leaders, be they sergeants or generals are smart, but not the brainy Newt Gingrich intellectual type. They are interested in ideas only for their practical use, not as an academic pursuit.  Good leaders can ingest information, often conflicting, presented to them by experts. They can evaluate that information against experience and empirical evidence and pull the trigger without the dithering and the drama.

The two most important qualities to look for in a president are Philosophy and Judgment

Philosophy tells us where the candidate wants to lead the nation, and judgment tells us if he can take us there or not. Our best leaders picked good people and trusted them, encouraging open debate and then synthesizing the information to craft policy. Putting philosophy aside, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George Bush were all very good at this. Barack Obama is not, and he's ill-served by an inept staff to boot.

Rick Perry has demonstrated these successful leadership qualities in his 10 plus years as Texas Governor:

“If he doesn’t know the answer, he’s going to find someone who does,” the lobbyist said. “He recognizes good help and brings ’em on for advice. He’s not going to know every foreign leader — but he has the good sense and instincts to pick good people who help him make good decisions.”

“Pilots execute flight plans,” Miller said. “They have a plan, they fly a certain pattern and that’s the way he’s always operated — he has a flight plan for what he’s trying to do and he executes.”

Mike Baselice, Perry’s longtime pollster, said his client is of the Ronald Reagan school of management: “Trust people and manage well.” (Politico - Is Rick Perry Dumb?)

Indeed, it’s the presidents who get too far in the weeds who get into trouble

Think Lyndon Johnson with maps of Vietnam on his desk planning bombing raids or Jimmy Carter making unilateral and ill-considered moralistic decisions on foreign policy that redounded greatly to our nation’s detriment. I’ve seen sergeants and colonels make the same mistakes during my military career.

A president can’t do it all anyway; the galaxy of subject matter is too vast for any one brain to comprehend.  I had the great fortune to study colonels and generals up close during my last few years in the Air Force. Like presidents, people who are in charge of vast enterprises are not the technocrats figuring out every problem. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not writing code while running their respective companies as CEO. They are leading a team and managing its efforts.

The best leaders take the long and broad view, set the tone and transmit the game plan, leaving their experts to solve the Rubic's Cube.  David Harsanyi explains…

That doesn't make them "dumb." What makes a person dumb is repeating mistakes when all the evidence tells him to stop for his own good. We will witness this human shortcoming when the president rolls out his new "stimulus" package.

Some ideas, goes Orwell's saying, are so dumb only intellectuals can believe them.

On the other hand, reflexive anti-intellectualism (a misguided belief on the right that was spurred by having to share the word "intellectual" with Cornel West) is also destructive. If you're going to propose more than hope in 2012—say, some policy—you have to be prepared with scholarly backup. (Harsanyi – You Don’t Have to be Smart, Just Right)

Rick Perry Pledges to Blow Up Hoover Dam

Rick Perry continues to fascinate me. He is the only candidate other than Ron Paul who poses a real threat to both the GOP Establishment and the Obama Democrats.

Karl Rove has stopped attacking democrats and is now going all MSNBC on Perry.  In response, the left has gone from bawling for The Texas Turd Blossom’s imprisonment to praising his Perry-bashing sagacity.


The reason I like Perry right now is because he has kicked off a loud and much-needed dialog about the size and scope of government, complete with talk of jobs, overregulation and tort reform. He’s not the only conservative itching for such a throwdown, but he’s attracted the brightest spotlight and he’s the only candidate with a real record of grappling with these issues.

Here’s a news excerpt that reveals the media's barely disguised hatred of the man:

(API – Herford Station, Iowa) To clamorous crowds of government-hating Tea Partiers, Rick Perry pledged to blow up Hoover Dam if elected president.

He also removed any doubt about whether he was packing heat by shooting out a chandelier in the ball room where he held his post-rally press conference. When confronted by horrified reporters, most still cowering under tables, he replied that the offending light fixture “looked too French,” as he calmly tucked the Smith & Wesson Model 500 back inside his jacket.

A disheveled CNN reporter with a visible wet spot covering his crotch indignantly challenged the Texas governor’s hostility to all things government. “Why do you hate welfare babies and infrastructure?” “You just want to blow up government!”

“Yeah,” replied Perry, eyes narrowing to slits, “and y’all don’t even want to know what I got planned for that yapping pack of French Poodles y’all call the press corpse.”

Governor Perry wrapped up the press conference by forcibly baptizing a crying msnbc reporter in a bucket of Jack Daniels while loudly shouting, “praise Jesus!”

Brilliant conservative commentator Jeff Jacoby then stood up and efficiently batted down the liberal “conservatives hate government” meme:

But it isn’t highways or veterans’ programs or minority voting rights that conservatives find so objectionable about Washington. When Perry speaks of making the nation’s capital “inconsequential,’’ he isn’t proposing to dismantle the Hoover Dam. Hard as it may be for liberals to accept, the Republican base isn’t motivated by blind loathing of the federal government, or by a nihilistic urge to wipe out the good that Washington has accomplished.

What conservatives believe, rather, is what America’s Founders believed: that government is best which governs least, [...]

But as government grows larger and more powerful, it crowds out private action. It replaces local, familiar, and organic institutions with remote bureaucratic ones. As state and federal governments swell, taking over functions that used to be left to individuals and voluntary organizations, communities are weakened.

Increasingly citizens are taught to rely on government, rather than on themselves or their neighbors. They develop a sense of entitlement, and entitlement in turn fuels selfishness. (Jeff Jacoby – When Inconsequential Means Better)

Bill Bennett explains Why Rick Perry is a Strong Candidate, reminding us that before the candidacy and before the pathetic Demagogic party attacks, Perry’s Texas attracted a lot of non-partisan praise:

In 2009, one nonpartisan poll of business executives ranked Texas as "the No. 1 state to do business" for the fourth year in a row. And, the Economist magazine highlighted Texas in 2009 as "Lone Star Rising" with a subtitle to its special report: "Thanks to low taxes and light regulation, Texas is booming." This was in addition to several favorable data points comparing Texas to California in a separate piece in the magazine.

Ed Morrissey explains how twisted statistics lure in Jersey Shore liberals who fail to pause and notice the lack of a statistical baseline or detect the common trick of comparing dissimilar or different time periods. If it sounds too good (or too bad) to be true, it probably is.

For the opposing viewpoint, see American Prospect explain Perry’s Pitfalls

My favorite article about Governor Perry is by liberal Texan James C. Moore. I wish I could write like this talented man…

Romney has business experience and intellect that are not on Perry's resume' but he is from "Massatoositts," (Webster's Texas Edition, see also "Massachusetts"), and Texans love to kick their political boots into New Englanders' squishy parts. (Why Rick Perry is headed to the White House)

Game on!

Democrat Mudball Fight

The Democrat party’s favorite tactic is demagoguery.  The Clintons raised it to a high art.  A raw form of it is mudslinging. Obama has messed things up so badly that he cannot stand on his record, so all he has left is the “they’re even worse than I am” ploy. Throwing mudballs takes that shine right off your enemies (yes, Obama has called us enemies, not opponents).

His $859 billion economic stimulus program was a miserable failure, solid majorities of the public now demand repeal of Obamacare, unemployment remains above 9 percent, his Gallup approval rating is in the tank at 39 percent, and many economists say there's a one-in-three chance of a double-dip recession. In other words, Obama can't run on his own record, so he believes he has to run down everybody else's record to have a chance at a second term. (Washington Examiner)

Which would you rather have? A Rick Perry Texas McJob, or an Obamanomics No Job? Crappy job beats no job every time in my book.  BTW, go here for a fact-based analysis of the Texas job machine that blows the libtard propaganda out of the water.

We had more leftwing propaganda spillage here yesterday, so here are a few more links that shine the light of truth and expose the liberal lies. A favorite trick to to pick a little downturn in an overall upward trending line and say , "SEE!  They Lost Jobs There!"  It's entertaining to watch the gyrations lefties go through to "prove" their point.  Fact is, blue states are bleeding out people, and most are choosing to move to Texas, where the jobs are.  The people have voted, with their feet.

Paul Krugman is Troll, and He's Wrong
Don't Mess with the Texas Economy

On a related note, Chuck DeVore has written a tight defense of Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor project

I bring this up not so much to defend Governor Perry, but because DeVore raised some interesting privatization issues as well as shedding light on how changes outside of the US will shift a lot of port traffic from California to Texas.