When Breitbart News asked Texas Governor Rick Perry recently if he thought the next president of the United States would be a senator, his answer was simple.
“No.”
And that would be the exact answer he should give, especially if he wants to be the man in the White House. If he had said “Yes,” it would have been tantamount to saying, “I don’t have a chance at this.”
Rick Perry famously flamed out of the 2008 GOP presidential primary after making several public flubs that undermined party voter confidence in him as a candidate who could beat Barack Obama in his reelection bid. Republican voters tried on candidate after candidate week after week, looking for someone who could stop Obama. In the end, no one could.
Now, Perry wants to position himself early on as a viable candidate who can be the cure for what the GOP sees as an Obama malaise. Of course, Barack Obama is not up for reelection. But if the recent midterm elections are any indication, the GOP strategy will probably stay much the same. After all it worked.
All they need to do is paint any Democrat candidate as “the next Obama” or as having been friendly and allied with Obama. Republican strategists have revealed since the midterms that their strategy only worked because Democrat candidates believed it would, and therefore spent a lot of effort to distance themselves from the president. But any coach knows, if a play keeps getting your team points, keep running it.
Perry touts his experience as governor, comparing the duties of that office to those of president of the nation.
“If you’re in the Senate or if you’re in the House, you can give a speech and then go home. Governors can’t. We have to govern,” Perry said. “And the president of the United States, historically, has had to operate that way, too; the ones that were successful. And one of the reasons why this President is not successful is because he’s never had that experience.”
Perry used his position as governor to deploy the National Guard to handle the steady stream of illegal immigrants in Texas. He says this qualifies him to handle wars overseas.
“It is absolutely no different that if you would have left a residual force in Baghdad,” he claimed. “Same mentality, same concept. When you move your law enforcement or your military, or both, away from a place, the vacuum is going to be filled.”
Perry listed several natural disasters that occurred on his watch as governor, suggesting that his experience in those incidents qualified him to handle national-level crises and even wars as president.
“Disasters are not unlike war. The first things that occurs in war is that chaos reigns and you throw out your battle plan,” he added.
