Perry Enters the Race

Governor Rick Perry announced his run for the Republican nomination for president this week. Perry has a history of both social and fiscal conservatism and could potentially shake up the entire race. A candidate that has a combination of religious conservatism (Sunday's Pray-a-palloza in Texas) and fiscal conservatism (tanking the Texas job market and giving handouts to the rich), could triangulate the current runners in the race.

Perry' social/religious conservatism is arguably as extreme as Bachmann, but definitely more so than the entire rest of the pack. The extreme right wing of the Republican/Tea Party would never vote for a non social conservative like Romney or Huntsman, thus a significant portion of the base will support one of the  two social right wingers. I am an ardent supporter of the separation of church and state, and believe that the election of either of these religious zealots would be disastrous for the entire country. Governer Perry perfectly demonstrated the inability of religious fundamentalists to govern rationally when he proposed prayer as a solution to the economic problems of the country. Never mind the suggestion that Christianity is above all other religions implied in his statements, look at the rational result to the irrational statement: A huge problem is swamping the country, do we pray or try to implement solutions? If prayer is a recognized solution in secular problems in exclusion of actual solutions, imagine just how bad things could get before people realize what is happening.

The fiscal conservative credentials of Governor Perry are impeccable: He took money from the poor/students, gave tax breaks to the rich, damaged job growth, and used accounting tricks to hide his damaging economic policy' consequences. When will the right wingers either read basic economic theory or look at history. I can't believe that so many people can think back and think "I'm sure that the conservative president will fix the economy this time, we just need to prevent those Democratic minorities from disrupting the economy just like what happens EVERY TIME a conservative is in the presidency." The right wing fails to see the correlations between their election and the crashing of the economy as well as increases in the income gap. The "fiscal conservative badges for this Republican primary are worn by Perry and Romney. When combining the fiscal conservative label necessity with social issues, I think that Perry has a very good chance to beat Romney in the primary but less of a chance to beat Obama in the general election.

The Sarcastic Liberal