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Rick Perry may be the most successful Republican running for president. And that could be his Achilles heel.
The former Texas governor can generate consensus in the GOP, but the party might need something more
If you subtract his last failed bid for the White House, Rick Perry has a lot to recommend himself as a presidential candidate for the Republican Party.
He led Texas to incredible growth before, during, and after the nationwide economic crash. His state is one of the few places whose cities are able to retain a growing middle class. As Matthew Yglesias helpfully pointed out, this is not just due to soaring energy revenues, but to the low-regulatory footprint that Perry helped to shape.
Perry also won 38 percent of Latino voters when he was re-elected in 2010, which is remarkably better than Mitt Romney's 27 percent in the 2012 election. After considering his mien, his stature, and his record, I've convinced myself (again) that Rick Perry is formidable contender, as have other political observers.
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But Perry offers something else to the GOP that is not as attractive: the illusion that Republicans can defer a fateful choice about the direction of their party. Unlike the Republican candidates who hail from the Senate, Perry's record as a governor is one based almost entirely around issues that generate consensus in the party and the conservative movement, which in Perry's case is doubly dangerous precisely because his record was successful.
Perry's sell is almost entirely about Texas' job growth, and Texas' outsized contribution to the post-Bush recovery that has slowly unfolded over two terms of the Obama administration. While attributing most of the Texas boom to energy sales, Samuel Rines had an important reminder of the scale of Texas' success:
From its peak in January 2008 through today, the United States has created only 750,000 jobs. Texas created over a million jobs during that same period — meaning that the rest of the country (RotC) is still short 300,000 jobs. During the recovery, job creation has been all Texas or — at the very least — disproportionately Texas. [National Interest]
Unlike Jeb Bush, Perry doesn't ask that the party come around on issues like Common Core. He also leavens his support for some form of a path to citizenship with tougher talk about border security. And Bush's presence in the race actually frees Perry from being the heir of the last presidential administration to emerge out of the Texas governor's mansion.
The GOP candidates that come from the Senate tend to align themselves with a starker ideological choice and a narrower electoral strategy. Rand Paul's libertarian leanings ally him with a younger generation of voters and activists both within and outside the GOP who care about digital privacy, want to shrink the post-9/11 security state, and, perhaps, are eager to de-emphasize social issues. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham promise a return to a vigorous, interventionist foreign policy, a stance that seems more attractive to Republicans angry at the barbarity of ISIS and the national humiliation the group's advance represents.
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That's not to say that Rick Perry can't be tripped up. Everyone remembers the "oops" moment, even if, like Rick Perry, they can't recall the three executive branch departments the candidate wanted to shutter. The moment immortalized a campaign that never quite got off the ground.
But it was not the only problem, not by a long shot. Perry, who was supposed to be a bold thinker, whiffed on his tax-reform proposal. He proposed a flat tax, but allowed the option for people to file under the current tax code. This amounted to an admission that our bloated mess of a tax code was, in fact, better than what his policy advisers could devise in the freedom of a white paper.
But in truth it was Mitt Romney who ended Perry's chance of becoming "the alternative" on the debate stage, by running to the right of Perry on immigration.
Romney, however, had the luxury of focusing on his opponents one by one, and destroying them in turn as conservatives moved them into his firing line. In a race that will be as multi-polar as the 2016 GOP nomination contest, Perry is likely to avoid a primary foe that is as single-minded in his or her attempt to destroy him.
The errors of the 2012 Perry campaign will be easy to avoid. He is already hiring a better class of policy wonk, as evidenced by his brain trust snapping up health-care policy experts like Avik Roy. By not promising any decisive break with GOP orthodoxy, or any rethink of the party's strategy, Perry can skirt the kind of furious intra-party opposition that other candidates will face.
The danger for Perry is that by being a generic Republican, he will start to poll like one in the general election — and lose.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.
