Perry’s Month
4th October 2011
Ben Dominech has a gimlet eye.
Does Perry have the heft to be president? This is a different question than you may think it is. It’s not about impressing the self-styled gatekeepers (leave them to their Santorum worship) in Washington and New York, who still think Rudy Giuliani has national appeal, have never shot a gun, and have no idea about the difference between a lease and a hunting lease (they also haven’t determined the outcome of a Republican primary since 1976). It’s about the donor community and the national conservative base, which overlaps. This requires different attributes, and more meaningful ones, than the often vacuous checkboxes of the national scene. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan appeals to the base not for its specifics but because it is a plan. It’s an improvement; it’s a sign of seriousness that goes a step further than rhetoric; and it puts a marker in the sand about what he believes economic policy should look like. Perry’s Texas handlers need to understand that no one has paid attention to Perry’s superb acumen in handling environmental regulatory issues over the past decade, for instance – it’s all new to them. Tim Pawlenty gave a series of pretty good policy speeches that went nowhere because he has the personality of reduced-fat cream cheese. Perry has the opposite problem – he has personality out the ears, but the only policy markers that national Republicans have heard thus far are that he loves Texas, Israel, immigrants, and getting some goats for our computer industry. He doesn’t need to be Paul Ryan, nor should he pretend to be. But he needs a plan, and he needs it soon, and it needs to be damn good. There’s an economic policy-only debate coming up on October 11 where Gardasil and immigration will be in the background; Perry should at least tease his economic plan there, and lay it out soon after.