Perry's vulnerabilities with the right

Perry has ratcheted up his slams on President Obama's policies and move on to questioning his patriotism, suggesting a questioner has to "ask him" if he loves his country while in Iowa yesterday.


Last night in Cedar Rapids, he pushed the point harder, underscoring Obama's lack of personal military credentials as a life choice:


"I think people who have had the same experiences connect with people who have had the same experiences. That's human nature," he said. "If you polled the military, the active duty and veterans, and said 'would you rather have a president of the United States that never served a day in the military or someone who is a veteran?' They've going to say, I would venture, that they would like to have a veteran."
He added later: "The president had the opportunity to serve his country. I'm sure at some time he made the decision that isn't what he wanted to do.


Indeed, in an interview with a Des Moines radio station on Monday, Perry was deluged with questions from informed Republican voters about potential conservative heresies on his record — from his enthusiastic backing of an unsuccessful superhighway proposal that critics claimed was a land grab, to his support for Al Gore in the 1988 Democratic presidential primary.


In 2001, Perry signed the Texas DREAM Act, which allowed children of illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition at the state’s universities. In a speech at the time, he underscored the need for children from all backgrounds to receive a quality education. “We must say to every Texas child learning in a Texas classroom, `We don’t care where you come from, but where you are going, and we are going to do everything we can to help you get there,'” he said at the time. “And that vision must include the children of undocumented workers. That’s why Texas took the national lead in allowing such deserving young minds to attend a Texas college at a resident rate. Those young minds are a part of a new generation of leaders; the doors of higher education must be open to them. The message is simple: Educacion es el futuro, y si se puede.”
The Texas governor, in a 2006 editorial, also called a fence along the border with Mexico “cost prohibitive,” remarks sure to draw the ire of many conservatives.
Immigration remains a heated subject among many conservatives. But Perry is fortunate the year is 2011, not 2006: With the economy limping, the issue has lost some resonance as most voters focus squarely on the economy. Still, don’t be surprised if a Perry opponent like Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., uses the issue to convince Republicans that Perry isn’t the down-the-line conservative he claims to be.


Wall Street Journal column published Saturday raises questions about Perry’s use of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which Perry helped create in 2005. The fund was designed to help funnel taxpayer money to technology start-ups in the Lone Star State, but, as the column points out, many of those funds went to big Perry donors. For instance, Convergen LifeSciences, which received $4.5 million, is run by David Nance, who the Wall Street Journal found had donated $75,000 to Perry’s campaigns between 2001 and 2006. He was just one of several donors to receive large grants from the Technology Fund, according to the newspaper.
First Read: Did Perry go too far?
Along with the vaccine imbroglio, the apparent conflict of interest opens Perry up to charges of crony capitalism. For a governor who cut billions from the state budget in areas like education, being seen as doling out favorites to political allies is not a good image.


Perry supported the former Tennessee senator when he ran for president in 1988. At the time, both men were different: Perry was still a Democrat (he switched parties in 1989), and Gore was known more for his defense of family values than for trumpeting the danger of climate change. As Perry put it Monday, “This was Al Gore before he invented the Internet and got to be Mr. Global Warming.”
Of all of Perry’s conservative foibles, however, this is likely the least severe. Conservative southern Democrats were more common in the late 1980s than they are currently. Another outspoken conservative governor, Ronald Reagan, was a former Democrat but that was a non-issue in his presidential campaign.