GOP Primary: Will the Real Rick Perry Please Stand Up

When I first saw Rick Perry on a national news program in 2010, I was very impressed with the amount of presence he conveyed. It was shortly before candidates started forming their exploratory committees and announcing that they were running (or officially considering running) for the GOP nomination. At first glance, Perry struck me as the strongest candidate, at least in his ability to communicate a clear, conservative message in a way that seemed likely to resonate with Republican voters.

Then something weird happened. Perry announced that he was accepting the chair of the Republican Governor's Association, which was universally seen as proof that the governor had meant it when he said that he wasn't running for President in 2012. Shocked, I started taking a close look at the Governor of Texas, who I admittedly knew little about at that point in the fall of 2010. What I started to find, however, seemed to explain much. Perry had a lot of potential problems in terms of positions, quotes and his record while the longest serving governor of Texas. That's why I was even more surprised to see him prompted into the race this late in the game.

Perry seems to be just the latest in a string of candidates who've been prodded into the pool by influential members of the Republican elite, who for some reason are intent not to support the walking billboard for their party's talking points – former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Romney, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Congressman Ron Paul and former MN Governor Tim Pawlenty seemed to be the only candidates who genuinely wanted the nomination from the outset. None too impressed it seems, Republican leaders and major donors pleaded with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to throw in their hats, later got Chinese Ambassador Jon Huntsman to enter the race to a lukewarm response, and then failed to lure Congressman Paul Ryan into the fold.

Absent something completely unforeseen, this seems to be the field they're stuck with. But their flirtation with supporting Perry, who it should be noted still has not corralled a majority of the big money sitting on the sidelines, doesn't look like a blossoming romance, especially after a somewhat weak showing in his first debate on Wednesday night. Perry might need a little time to get his rhythm, but such a late entrance doesn't really allow for much of a warm-up. The bottom line is Governor Perry did nothing to distinguish himself in what remained a fairly even field on Wednesday night, though the attacks by his competition highlighted his vulnerabilities quite vividly.

When you get past the tough talk and the rhetoric and start peeling away the onion, it's sort of difficult to get a good feel on who Rick Perry is. His supporters are selling an image of the Texas gunslinger; a straight-talking, no-nonsense chief executive who's more cowboy than politician, but Americans have already done that dance. Still, in uncertain times, people look for strong figures and President Obama's inability to exercise command influence over a Congress that his party has half control of, probably makes a John Wayne figure all the more attractive. But presidential politics are a long and dirty game, especially in the early goings. If all you had to do was look like the guy who'd play the President in an action movie, Perry would be a shoe-in. But the fierce competition for this role means you can't just invent a narrative that doesn't coincide with a candidate's record – and Rick Perry's record is unquestionably at odds with his carefully crafted image.

For starters, most voters were shocked to learn that Perry was a long-time Democrat. All of the efforts to paint him as being Reaganesque run into a brick wall when you reveal the fact that he supported Al Gore for President in 1988, chairing then Senator Gore's Texas campaign – a campaign that was centered around undoing the Reagan Revolution! The fact that Karl Rove brought him to the conservative light, if you will, only for the two to engage in an ongoing feud that has led Perry to distance himself from Bush as far back as 2008 also makes it harder to get a read on his politics.

That year, Perry was a major supporter of Rudy Giuliani's presidential run, another odd choice, getting behind the most socially liberal candidate in that race, only to paint himself as a far-right conservative on such issues today. Doing so also raises questions about other policy decisions, most glaringly the Gardasil fiasco.

Gardasil is an FDA approved vaccine that is said to protect against HPV, an extremely common STD that is related to cervical cancer. The problem is that Perry, who promotes himself as a small-government Christian conservative that opposes stem-cell research, any sort of abortion rights and advocates abstinence-only sex education, used an executive order to ram through a mandatory policy to vaccinate girls as young as 11 or 12 with a vaccine that protects them from a disease that they couldn't possibly get if the abstinence education program his state spent money on worked. In his defense, of course it didn't work – Texas has the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the country (see video below). The fact that Perry and his staff had deep ties to the vaccine's manufacturer Merck Pharmaceutical, further complicated the seemingly hypocritical position.

Next comes Perry's claim that his record of job creation in Texas is somehow proof that he holds the answers for our country's economic woes. Texas has added jobs to its economy during the last few years, while most other states have lost them, but the Texas Miracle seems rather spurious with the Devil lurking in the details. Texas' unemployment rate is still over 8 percent and Perry doubled the state's debt and then used some rather questionable accounting tricks to ”balance“ the budget. There's also the rather sizable epidemic of poverty in his state. The census showed that 1 in 6 Texans are living below the poverty line. 1 in 7 are on food stamps – in a state that has the highest threshold to qualify for them. They've also got the highest percentage of high school dropouts in the country, as they've continuously cut educational funding.

Texas has succeeded in luring companies (and their jobs) from other states, largely by setting the lowest bar for environmental regulations and workers' rights. They have the highest percentage of working poor in the nation. How does that translate to a national platform, is what Americans need to be asking. America has lost a lot of jobs to third world nations whose workers slave for below the living wage with little or no rights, while international corporations are free to drain their natural resources and pollute their land. Are we going to follow the Texas method on a global scale and lure them back by lowering the bar to meet their quality of life (or lack of)?

Another ironic juxtaposition is that Texas' low cost of living and avoidance of much of the economic slump was actually caused by its ability to largely avoid the housing collapse. Housing prices stayed relatively sane even during the height of the boom and they have not had near the foreclosure woes of other states. Why? The Texas mortgage industry is the most regulated in the nation. Strict government regulation made many of the Ponzi schemes that built the bubble not worth the effort in Texas, because of all the hoops that lenders had to jump through to ensure that consumers were protected.

Most bank mortgage loan products of the era (and many still) had a disclaimer that they were not offered in Texas, because they didn't meet their standards or the bank didn't even bother trying to get them approved there. Ironically, one of Texas' best arguments for what works in their state is an example of the stringent market protections that keep one sector from cannibalizing all the others. These are known as big-government, job-killing regulations that stifle the creativity of the marketplace and slow economic growth on Wall Street, but they seem to have saved the Lone Star State's hyde and my guess is, most states wish they'd have been so wise – yet Rick Perry isn't advertising this victory.

Then of course there's the oil. Texas is rich in natural resources like oil and natural gas. Oil prices have increased dramatically at the same time the economy as a whole imploded. It's therefore very difficult to compare Texas' oil-driven economy to the U.S at-large – that is unless we suddenly discover that the other 49 states can pump black gold at the rate that Texas can – something again that Perry says can be largely fixed by more drilling and less regulating.

Finally, there's all of the other normal politician baggage like the fact that Perry, a career public-sector employee, has become a millionaire while never earning more than a low six-figure salary. How? By getting ”lucky“ it seems – or by being outright corrupt. It's hard to tell. Perry has made some instant fortunes by buying land and selling it to supporters and business partners for hugely appreciated (in both senses of the word I'm sure) sums. There's also a stunning list of big-government type subsidies to those who raise hundreds of thousands in cash for his campaigns. Considering that a new Super PAC pledged this week to raise and spend $55 million getting him the nomination, voters should have a keen interest in what their invisible donors expect in return from someone who's seemed so willing to play ball.

Even putting his past behind him, Perry has already started showing some signs of foot in the mouth disorder. During the debate, while trying to defend his stance on global warming, which he says "the jury is still out on," Perry said, "Galileo got outvoted for a spell." I'm pretty sure this was just blatant ignorance of who exactly Galileo was and on what and by whom, he'd been "outvoted" on, but it nonetheless made Perry look rather foolish as he was in fact citing a legitimate scientist who'd successfully proven a theory that was at odds with leaders who didn't believe in science, only the dogma of the church. The reference, rather than solidify his position, instead drew a comparison of Perry to the 17th century religious leaders who tried the 'father of modern astronomy" for heresy. I can't imagine this endearing him to young voters. His 185-page small-government manifesto Fed Up is also loaded with potential landmines like when he defends Sarah Palin's comments about death panels and of course the Social Security is a Ponzi scheme thing.

In the end, Perry looks like just another run of the mill politician who's reaching one rung too far up the ladder. In a state like Texas, he has clearly been able to milk the udders and carve himself a nice sized piece of the proverbial pie. But on a much bigger stage, it starts to become clear that Perry is just another stooge for special interests who's been willing to paint his stripes a different color in every shade of the spectrum, depending on which way the political winds are blowing and dollars are falling.

I don't blame Republicans for hoping that a better candidate will come along or for trying to lure new meat into the race, even at this late stage. If this is the best guy the GOP has, they are going to have a much tougher time unseating a sitting president than they seem to expect – no matter how low his approval rating sinks. If Rick Perry is more than what I've described above, he needs to explain that to the American people. So far, he hasn't been able to do that in anything approaching a meaningful way and the skeptic in me thinks there's an easy to see reason – he can't.