Saturday, August 27, 2011

Who is Rick Perry? Time to get out all those Aggie jokes

 

Perry reminds us of George Bush (Dubya) which annoys the hell out of Karl Rover.
Josh Brolin could be Perry in a movie bio for Perry as well and the resemblance would be remarkable.

I recently discovered dogcanyon.org “politics, opinion and culture for Texas and beyond.” Well done folks. I recommend the following article.

Is Rick Perry Channeling Phil Gramm – - or Clayton Williams?  - BY JOE CUTBIRTH, dogcanyon.org

AUGUST 17, 2011

Comparisons with George W. Bush from pundits who want to sound like they know Texas politics were inevitable, but everyone in Texas knew they were never worth much. Bush is an Ivy Leaguer whose grandfather was a senator from Connecticut. Perry is a genuine Texas Aggie from genuinely small-town Texas.

If you want to understand Perry, you have to understand Texas A&M. The macho swagger of that school is really the essence of who Perry is. Perry comes from my part of Texas, and I’ve known him for 25 years. I covered the Texas House during his time as a state lawmaker, and in those days we all saw the Aggie mystique play out two distinct ways in two Texas political legends: Phil Gramm and Clayton Williams.

…Gramm, who recruited Perry to the GOP, was Perry’s economics professor. Always the opportunist, Gramm leaped last week at the chance to endorse Perry, who barely passed his class (principles of economics) with a D, according to those pesky college transcripts.

Perry learned more than supply-side economics from Gramm, who was about the toughest and meanest campaigner Texas had in his day. Gramm was an unabashed conservative whose strong suit was red meat for the base. He was known for ideas that could be outside even the conservative mainstream, and he never backed down.

The “unabashed conservative” - whose speeches and political positions were so strong and mean-spirited in his joining with the Gingrich reform of the welfare system – Gramm never to my awareness acknowledged his own childhood on welfare and his own college career and success paid for by aid and assistance programs. He just wanted to be seen as a bootstrap academic/politician who in reality owed the system a great deal for how he became what he became.

Who’s Clayton Williams?

Clayton Wheat "Claytie" Williams, Jr. (born October 8, 1931), a businessman from Midland, Texas, was the unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1990 against the Democratic State Treasurer Ann Richards even though Williams initially led in opinion polls by twenty points. –Wikipedia

dogcanyon.org:

Williams bragged that as an undergraduate at Texas A&M he frequented brothels, including the famous LaGrange Chicken Ranch. He urged Hispanics to support him because he met his wife at a Mexican restaurant. He refused to shake Richards’ hand after a rare joint appearance and quipped that Richards, a recovering alcoholic, “must be drinking again” when her campaign released a poll showing she was closing the gap. He even joked with reporters that Texans deal with bad weather the way they deal with rape: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”

Williams was trying to ride the Texas cowboy mystique into the governor’s mansion, and he almost succeeded. No single gaffe or jaw-dropping revelation cost him the race. It was the synergy. Sometime in the fall of 1990, it all hit a tipping point, and things Williams had offered with that cowboy bravado began to turn on him.

By election day, a race that began as John Wayne vs. Lucille Ball ended as Barbara Stanwick vs. Gabby Hayes.

With his own God-talking-campaign strategy Perry seems to believe he can pull a repeat of the Bush tactic of asking believers to put God’s Born-Again Christian in the White House.

Hope the electorate is not again that foolish.

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