Tag: comparison

Will Rick Perry Be The Michael Dukakis Of 2012?

Fans of both men will be upset, but the political similarities between the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, and 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, are more than striking.

True, Dukakis, a self-proclaimed “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union, was a cerebral reformer, embraced by reformers and liberals. And Rick Perry, whose unspectacular academic record at Texas A&M did not prevent his becoming the Lone Star State’s first “Aggie” governor, is the heartthrob of the tea party as well as a human Oreck in sucking up funds in corporate suites.

Like all humans, Dukakis and Perry are both products and prisoners of the places from which they come. For Dukakis, for all but four years at college and two in the U.S. Army, that was Brookline, Mass., a town known and envied for its good schools, green spaces and clean government. But Brookline’s politics were something else. Consider this: George McGovern, who as the Democratic nominee in 1972 lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, still won 62 percent of the votes in Brookline. Ronald Reagan, who won 44 states the first time and 49 the second time, won just 30 percent of the votes in Brookline. It’s a good bet that Michael Dukakis did not know anyone personally who had voted for Reagan — which ill-prepared him for a national race.

For Perry, it is his home state that he left — for part of his five-year Air Force tour of duty — when he served as a C-130 transport pilot attaining the rank of captain. Perry’s Texas is as politically unrepresentative of the nation’s politics as Dukakis’s Brookline. There are 29 elected statewide officeholders in Texas — including nine justices of the state Supreme Court — and every one of them is a Republican.

In the Texas state House of Representatives, the GOP has more than a two-to-one majority. While Democrats have won three of the last five presidential elections, no Democratic presidential nominee has carried Texas in the last 35 years. It’s a pretty good bet that Rick Perry does not know anyone socially who voted for Barack Obama, the only Democrat other than Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the last 180 years to win more than 50.1 percent of the national vote.

Understand that George W. Bush came from a different Texas. He had to defeat a popular Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards, to win the governorship. The legislature he confronted was controlled by Democrats, with whom Bush had to (and did) get along. As an indication of his awareness of Democratic voters, George W. Bush, you will recall, ran for national office billing himself as a “compassionate conservative” and advocating a federal “No Child Left Behind” law to improve public education.

When you live in a one-party political bubble like Perry has, you don’t pay any political price for saying really dumb things, like suggesting in Cedar Rapids that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s policies could be “almost treasonous” and adding, “I don’t know what you all would do to him in Iowa, we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas” — a reckless and conspicuously insensitive remark to all who remember the “wanted for treason ” newspaper ad that welcomed another Washington officeholder’s tragic visit to Texas in November of 1963.

How about, “I think you want a president who’s passionate about America — that’s in love with America”? Was Perry suggesting that President Obama does not love America? “You need to ask him.” Those are the words of an unthinking man unprepared for a national race with its intensity of scrutiny, a man who has not been held accountable in a competitive political environment for what he says.

Consider this fair warning for Republicans who want to win back the White House: Rick Perry could well be your Michael Dukakis of 2012.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

COPYRIGHT 2011 MARK SHIELDS

Jackie Kennedy As Betty Draper

Betty Draper from AMC’s “Mad Men” is a grown child, hyper-feminine and superficial, vindictive and petty. She bears a striking resemblance to the portrait that emerges of First Lady Jackie Kennedy in audio interviews with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recorded just months after her husband John’s assassination in 1963 and released for the first time this week.

Recently widowed and still grieving, she shares some of her most intimate moments in the White House and dishes on senior officials, American political figures, and foreign leaders. Perhaps most noteworthy is the defensive — or perhaps just ignorant — posture she takes toward her husband and his likely infidelity.

At just 34, and in what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, describes in a foreword to the book as “the extreme stages of grief,” Mrs. Kennedy displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye. In her distinctive breathy cadences, an intimate tone and the impeccable diction of women of her era and class, she delivers tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband’s aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law.

Charles DeGaulle, the French president, is “that egomaniac.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping has found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, is “a real prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.”

The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

She suggests that “violently liberal women in politics” preferred Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential nominee, to Mr. Kennedy because they “were scared of sex.” Of Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, in a stage whisper, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.”

Any shortcomings on the part of her husband are not mentioned. She speaks of his loyalty, sensitivity, courage — traits consistent with the Camelot template she had been the first to invoke. She presents herself as adoring, eager for his approval and deeply moved by the man. There is no talk of his extramarital affairs or secret struggle with Addison’s disease, though she does speak in detail about his back pain and the 1954 back surgery that almost killed him.

Besides betraying her elite and sheltered upbringing, Kennedy’s words display an almost-childish fixation on the trivial and mundane; she appears divorced from reality, like someone who compartmentalizes and ignores the unpleasant. That she would argue all of Martin Luther King’s civil rights and social justice work should be discredited by his alleged affairs is really quite silly when her own husband’s sexual exploits during his time in the White House are the stuff of legend.

“My feeling is that people in a kind of informal situation say things without completely thinking them through. My guess is some of the thoughts, in retrospect, she might have taken them back or reconsidered them or not gone down that particular route,” said Stephen Schlesinger, son of the legendary historian.

“In his journals there’s a lot of things people say that look silly in retrospect. I’m willing to give her a pass on most of the stuff she said.”

Rick Perry Compares Winning Lower Taxes For Rich To Civil Rights Struggle

Asked about the anniversary of a Civil Rights protest and where America has come since then while in South Carolina this week, Texas Governor Rick Perry replied:

Listen, America’s gone a long way from the standpoint of civil rights and thank God we have. I mean we’ve gone from a country that made great strides in issues of civil rights. I think we all can be proud of that. And as we go forward, America needs to be about freedom. It needs to be about freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. And Americans regardless of what their cultural or ethnic background is they need to know that they can come to America and you got a chance to have any dream come true because the economic climate is gonna be improved.

Apparently it is lost on the governor that the Civil Rights movement was in some cases as much about economic justice as social. After all, Martin Luther King Jr. ended his life fighting for anti-poverty initiatives and the labor movement, not the right to vote or attend a movie.

Indeed, the greatest legacy of the Jim Crow Era the governor suggests he is glad we’ve moved past is the massive economic inequality between blacks and whites which persists to this day. Cutting taxes on corporations and deregulating big business couldn’t have less to do with the universal struggle for equality.

Rick Perry: A More Conservative, Partisan Bush

A Los Angeles Timescomparison of George W. Bush and the man who succeeded him as governor of Texas, rumored presidential candidate Rick Perry, suggests that if America is already suffering Bush fatigue, Rick Perry might prove positively toxic:

Both men hewed to the tenets of Texas Republicanism: low taxes, small government and limited regulation. But Bush prided himself on his ability to work with Democrats, while Perry took a much more partisan approach.

Bush also showed a greater willingness to spend on programs, especially education, with potential long-term benefits. Perry, by contrast, has cut billions from public education to help balance the state budget.

The governor has little use for the philosophy Bush dubbed “compassionate conservatism.” At a recent foray to the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, he told a cheering crowd that conservatives should “stand up” and “stop apologizing” for their beliefs.

Perry has long been a favorite of Christian conservatives, embracing their issues with a zeal Bush lacked. He also has strong support in the “tea party” movement; Perry was at a local rally in 2009 when he broached the prospect of his state seceding from the union, a statement he later disavowed.

More recently, Perry used an emergency session of the Legislature to push for tighter restrictions on abortion and legislation to criminalize aggressive airport searches. The pat-down bill died Wednesday.

If Americans found Bush to be partisan, abrasive, and too conservative–and polls show he continues to be viewed unfavorably, and that Americans hold him responsible in large part for the state of the economy–Rick Perry will be hard-pressed not to come off as a nastier, even more polarizing version of him, especially since the two look and even sound alike.