Another Texas governor who drops his “g’s” and scorns elites is running for president and the whispers are the same: Lightweight, incurious, instinctual.
Strip away the euphemisms, and Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: is he dumb - or just misunderestimated?
Strip away the euphemisms, and Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: is he dumb - or just misunderestimated?
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/62214.html#ixzz1WPrplH1k
Doubts about Perry’s intellect have hounded him since he was first elected as a state legislator nearly three decades ago. In Austin, he’s been derided as a right-place, right-time pol who looks the part but isn’t so deep – “Gov. Goodhair.” Now, with the chatter picking back up among his enemies and taking flight in elite Republican circles, the rap threatens to follow him to the national stage.
“He’s like Bush only without the brains,” cracked one former Republican governor who knows Perry, repeating a joke that has made the rounds.The Texan’s loyalists reject the suggestion, asserting that it owes to political bias and sour grapes, but Perry himself seems to welcome the low bar. He cracked on the campaign trail earlier this month that the difference between he and Bush was that he went to Texas A&M and the former president attended Yale.
But conversations with both Perry admirers and critics reveal a more complicated assessment about the mind of a politician who has never lost an election—and ranks as the longest-serving governor in Texas history.
He is not an ideas man. Perry hasn’t spent his political career marking up the latest Cato or Heritage white papers or reading policy-heavy books late into the night. Advisers and colleagues have informed much of his thinking over the years.
“He’s not a guy who’s going to go up to the Aspen Institute,” said longtime Texas lobbyist Bill Miller, a Perry fan. “It’s not the way he’s made.”
Miller said Perry learns what is necessary to be effective.
“If he should know about John Locke, he’ll know about John Locke,” said Miller. “If it’s not on his schedule, it’s irrelevant to him.”
China policy, for example, has surely not been much on Perry’s mind during his time in Austin.
And that showed when, in an interview last week with Laura Ingraham, he responded to a question about whether a rising China is good for the United States with platitudes that prompted the conservative talk show host to complain that he was only offering “broad generalities.”
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