George Will: Rick Perry: A Texan’s ‘exceptionalism’

On the while this is a very positive article by George Will but we would be remiss if we didn't point out a few things that are not quite right.  Rick was raised a Methodist and the family are members of a Methodist Church in Austin.  He attends a church at times that is closer to the rental house they are living in while the Governor's Mansion is renovated from the fire.   That church is one of the non-denominational mega churches that has sprung up around the Country.  There are a lot of people that have been put off over the years by the mainstream churches as they have trended farther left.  To say that Governor Perry is an evangelical is stretching it a wee bit.

Perry says that as governor, he regularly attends numerous churches to speak. As for why he ultimately chooses to go to one place and not another, he said he administers a simple test. 

"If I remember on Wednesday what the message was on Sunday, it was a good message," Perry said.

Would bet a lot of people who go to church could relate to that last statement.   There are times while listening to a sermon you wonder what a pastor is talking about as they ramble on and on.  We had a Lutheran Church in the town I grew up where the pastor said if it cannot be said in 20 minutes, it is not worth saying and had his wife time his sermons who would give him a heads up when he was approaching 20 minutes.  His messages were ones you did remember.

Would like someone to explain this paragraph to me because most of it makes little sense to people outside the beltway:

 Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, might be easier to elect than to nominate. The reverse might be true of Perry. Is he a wine that will not travel? To win the White House, a Republican must be competitive among independents, including women, in places like Montgomery County outside Philadelphia. Perry — his accent, his Westerner’s body language, those boots — is proof that, in spite of the culture’s homogenizing forces, regional differences remain remarkably durable. But so, too, do regional antipathies, some of which have intensified as voters have become more polarized, partly because of a Texas governor who became president.

Speaking for a lot of us in Middle America, Mitt Romney is not someone we want to see as President and after his gaffe in Florida don't think we are alone.  Saying that "I am unemployed" was not a joke and if I was unemployed I would be highly insulted to think a millionaire considers himself unemployed.  All he wants to do is run for President or he could go back to work any day he chooses and if he chose not to work, he has plenty of money not to worry.  It shows that Romney is totally out of touch with grassroots America.

Another thing about the paragraph above that bothers me is why would a Republican candidate worry about what women outside Philadelphia think of our candidate.  When was the last time we could count Pennsylvania as a reliable red state?  Ronald Reagan?  It is what Middle America including Ohio and the south think of Gov Perry and he gets a huge thumbs up from us.

Governor Perry was very well received in NYC by the Republicans but then that doesn't fit the narrative that a Texan cannot win the Presidency again.  Why not?   Would rather have the plain spoken Texan any day than someone who changes their views to get elected.

Rick Perry: A Texan’s ‘exceptionalism’By George F. Will, Published: June 24San Antonio 

In the 1850s, on the steps of the Waco courthouse, Wallace Jefferson’s great-great-great-grandfather was sold. Today, Jefferson is chief justice of Texas’s Supreme Court. The governor who nominated him also nominated the state’s first Latina justice. Rick Perry, 61, the longest-serving governor in Texas history and, in his 11th year, currently the nation’s senior governor, says these nominations are two of his proudest accomplishments. 

French cuffs and cowboy boots are, like sauerkraut ice cream, an eclectic combination, but Perry, who wears both, is a potentially potent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination because his political creed is uneclectic, matching that of the Republican nominating electorate. He was a “10th Amendment conservative” (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) before the Tea Party appeared. And before Barack Obama’s statism — especially Obamacare’s individual mandate — catalyzed concern for the American project of limited government. 

Social issues, especially abortion, are gateways to the Republican nominating electorate: In today’s climate of economic fear, a candidate’s positions on social issues will not be decisive with his electorate — but they can be disqualifying. Perry — an evangelical Christian, like most Republican participants in Iowa’s caucuses and the South Carolina primary — emphatically qualifies. 

Pausing in his enjoyment of a hamburger the size of a hubcap, Perry, the Eagle Scout son of Democratic tenant farmers, says that he entered politics as a Democrat: “I never met a Republican until I was in the Air Force.” Perry’s father had been a B-17 tail gunner flying out of England in 1944. Perry, stationed abroad flying C-130 transports, became a captain and a believer in American exceptionalism. 

He matriculated into the culture wars in the riotous year of 1968. As the University of Texas at Austin was becoming a bastion of liberalism, Perry headed to Texas A&M, which was transitioning from an all-male military school but not from conservatism. He became a Republican in 1989 — “I made both parties happy” — at a younger age than Ronald Reagan did, and he has never lost an election. 

(snip) 

Between 2001 and last June, Texas — a right-to-work state that taxes neither personal income nor capital gains — added more jobs than the other 49 states combined. And since the recovery began two Junes ago, Texas has created 37 percent of America’s net new jobs. 

Excerpt:  Read More at the Washington Post