Moe Lane

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I can’t believe that Jerry Brown led with his chin with this one:

Gov. Jerry Brown publicly scoffed at Gov. Rick Perry’s attempt to draw Californians to Texas for better business, saying that the ad campaign is “barely a fart.”

[snip]

Brown told reporters that if Perry wanted to be taken seriously, he would have to spend at least $25 million on radio and television ads. The ad paid for by TexasOne was a mere $24,000, which, Brown mockingly called “the smallest entry into the media market of California.”

(Audio of the ad here; text here) (more…)

And the word is, of course…

Dear Secretary Sebelius :

In the ObamaCare plan, the federal government sought to force the states to expand their Medicaid programs by – in the words of the Supreme Court – putting a gun to their heads. Now that the “gun to the head” has been removed, please relay this message to the President: I oppose both the expansion of Medicaid as provided in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the creation of a so-called “state” insurance exchange, because both represent brazen intrusions into the sovereignty of our state.

…”Mofo.”

God bless Texas.

(Via @bendomenech.)

Moe Lane

It’s a shame, of course: Perry wasn’t my first choice – Pawlenty was – but I liked Rick’s positions on pretty much everything that wasn’t a social issue.  And, of course, he was a governor, which became my absolute minimum requirement after the 2008 disaster and remains so to this day.

[pause]

Well, it’s highly unlikely that the Romney campaign’s going to reach out to me on this anyway, so I guess it’s time to start on House/Senate/Governor races.  I have further comments, but “First: do no harm.”

Ed Morrissey notes this Byron York article about how Mitt Romney would probably like to stop the debates now, please.  This is my thinking on this.

• On the one hand, I agree with Ed: we’ve had a godawful amount of debates so far.  They’re exhausting to cover; I can only imagine how grinding they are to the people actually doing them.  From Mitt Romney’s point of view, a debate must be much like how Tom Wolfe portrayed physical examinations as being for fighter pilots.  Which is to say, the best that Romney can hope for in a debate right now is to not have a campaign-ending disaster.
• On the other hand, I also agree with Ed: we’re actually starting to see things that look like debates, instead of an extended poking of Republican candidates with sticks to see whether they’ll attack the bars.  Also, as Byron noted, the debates are popular (the ABC News poll had 6.25 million viewers).
• And on the gripping hand: well, this is probably not a good time for Mitt Romney to quit debates anyway.  Yesterday was… not optimal: Romney got punched hard by Santorum, frankly evaded his way through the question of whether he’d release his income tax statements, and spent most of the debate agreeing with Rick Perry.  I would seriously recommend that Romney quit the debate schedule when he’s in a slightly better pole position.

I think that this is a reasonably fair take on the subject.

At least, I haven’t gotten anything from them; and they’re one of the campaigns whose mailing lists I am on.  Normally, that would be considered a bad sign; but, keeping my RS colleague and friend* Erick Erickson’s recent post in mind, this could end up being a pretty good one. I’ve got less against Team Perry’s media contingent then some, but it’s fairly clear by now that a shakeup is needed.

Moe Lane (more…)

…in a post-Perry primary environment, but it turns out that this will not be necessary. Governor Perry’s staying in:

“I talked to my campaign staff, senior guys, you know, (Joe) Allbaugh, (Ray) Sullivan,” Perry said. “This wasn’t a hard decision. This was one of those where you take a look, you didn’t do as well in Iowa as you wanted to, but this is a quirky place and a quirky process to say the least. We’re going to go into places where they have actual primaries and there are going to be real Republicans voting. I’m excited about getting out with real Republicans and laying out – not that there aren’t real Republicans here in Iowa, but the fact is that it was a pretty loosey-goosey process and you had a lot of people who were there that admitted they were Democrats, voting in the caucuses last night.”

Good.  I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the idea of having to settle for another candidate at this point.

Moe Lane

…that Politico used to back up its repeating of anonymous internal sniping from Perry’s campaign; or else to kindly shut up:

Partial transcript at the link. One of the nice things about being a Perry supporter is that his contempt for the DC establishment – which Politico most assuredly is a member of at this point – is never particularly in doubt. I’m also reasonably sure that at this moment Perry is making his staffers understand that anonymous talking out of turn to hostile media sources is a perk for other campaigns, not his. After 2008, that’s a selling point right there.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Between Jon Huntsman buying 10kbet.com, the Democrats and of course Rick Perry…

…folks were pretty eager to hit this one. Hard.

Let’s not get this entire mess out for the record, for once.  Let’s just summarize.  It is in fact possible to disapprove of Rick Perry’s social-conservative ad without also hating social conservatives, ceasing to support Perry, or viciously and profanely outing (warning: language NSFW) Perry’s pollster.  Something that GOProud should have thought about before it made itself radioactive and embarrassed its putative allies on the Right by doing that last one.

Put another way: this was not a good explanation, GOProud.  I am a social moderate and same-sex marriage supporter who wanted the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell… and I have no intention of defending your group on this.  You guys screwed up.  Own it, so that we can move on.

I don’t like getting involved in intra-blog discussions like this, but I feel forced to point out to Hot Air that Governor Perry’s stated willingness to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria needs – needs – to be seen in light of the following facts:

• There is a group called the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) which is opposed to the Assad regime.  It is unclear how large the group is, but  it is reportedly growing – it is certainly going after more ambitious targets – and it is currently based out of southern Turkey.
• The FSA has in fact requested that Turkey impose a no-fly zone.
• Turkey enjoys, if that’s the right word (it’s not) poor relations with Syria, to the point where its prime minister is openly calling for Assad to step down.
• It is thus reasonable to state that the FSA’s continued existence as a group is due to the Turkish government’s willingness to at least tolerate it; it is reasonable to speculate that the Turkish government may choose to openly support/use the FSA in the future.  Which means that it is not outside the realm of possibility that a no-fly zone may in fact be imposed by the Turks.
• While Turkey probably has a large enough air force to do the job itself, it is still a member of NATO.

(more…)

This is not really about Perry.  This is about quality control at the Washington Post.

This is getting exasperating. Now we apparently have Michael Gerson of the Washington Post making stuff up:

It is now a familiar pattern — the scandal of sanity. Rick Perry is criticized for supporting discounted higher education for the children of undocumented workers, as though the ignorance of the innocent is an obviously superior policy option.

[snip]

There is room for debate on all these issues.

[snip]

But these are not the arguments we’ve seen. Instead, candidates are accused of political heresy. Then they apologize — some eagerly, others reluctantly. Movement conservatives have created a box of orthodoxy so small that even the most conservative candidates must engage in undignified contortions just to fit.

(more…)

Now, normally I don’t like to do this sort of thing when it comes to people who will be eventually on my side when it comes to an election. Truly, I do not. But while I was reading this Jen Rubin Washington Post article targeting the latest anti-Romney… excuse me, I meant to type out “Newt Gingrich,” there… I was struck by something in these two paragraphs:

Andy Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and arguably the most dazzling writer on the right, has been a one-man killing machine. In a series of pieces on Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Jon Huntsman, he has systematically done in (or helped to do in) more Republican candidates than Think Progress, the New York Times and George Soros ever could.

In some cases, the effort was an intentional dissection of the candidate’s foibles. He wrote of the liberal elites’ favorite Republican: “Huntsman seems to have missed something big in the landslides of 2010. The reason for his Rip Van Winkle aura, to use still another metaphor, is that Huntsman spent most of the Obama administration out of the country.” His kickoff suffered from “hoary rhetoric [and] the overpackaging that can’t quite obscure the obvious lack of anything fresh to say.” At other times, Ferguson has simply caught the candidates unaware, letting them sink themselves (Daniels’s “social truce” and Barbour’s musing about the civil rights movement in Yazoo City).

(more…)