Perry is an unabashed evangelical Christian who recently held a prayer rally at a Texas stadium.
He stepped out onto the backyard pool patio of New Hampshire Deputy House Speaker Pam Tucker, waved at the crowd of about 150 curious Republicans who had come to Greenland to hear him, and said: “Hi! Y’all!”
Before long, he was answering questions. People asked him about everything from energy to Israel.
“Israel’s not ever going to have to worry, if I’m President of the United States,” he said. “We’re gonna be standin’ with our friends, and if you’re our enemy, we’re not just going to give you some lip service. If you try to hurt the United States, we will come defeat you.”
Perry doesn’t shy away from talking about his faith.
“There are certain values that you don’t compromise,” he said. “There are certain things in my life, I’ll tell you, for instance, my faith is somethin’ I’m not going to compromise.”
Warren Gruen, a state representative from Rochester, was among the many at the party who liked that Perry was talking about his religion.
“I love his religious views,” Gruen said. “I’m a born-again Christian, just like he is, and if born-again Christians are going to be prohibited from being open about their faith and prohibited from being involved in public office, then we’re a hurtin’, hurtin’ nation.”
Like Gruen, many of the guests identified with the Tea Party, and the Tea Party includes many evangelical Christians.
Republican activists in New Hampshire tend to be religious, according to University of New Hampshire Survey Center Director Andrew Smith. But Smith said that’s not the case with many voters — Republicans and independents — who are expected to turn out in next year’s Republican presidential primary.
Perry is taller, has much better hair, seems to believe he has an even better pipeline to God than Bush did. And he comes out of Paint Creek, Tex., different from the Texas town that gave us Bush, the one we also know as Yale University.
Whether Dubya Perry is holier than Michele Bachmann, the new President of Ames, Iowa, remains to be seen. For now, though, Perry and Bachmann are the headliners of the moment in the Republican Party. Barack Obama must be rooting like crazy for both of them, at the beginning of a campaign where fringe Republicans might do a better job of saving Obama than he can of saving himself.
Perry is the latest guy in the race, announcing Saturday in South Carolina, not throwing his hat into the race as much as his helmet hair. This was the day after Bachmann, who really does think she can out-God Perry and everybody else in the race, wins a straw poll in Iowa with about 4,000 votes, which is a couple of blocks in New York City.
But that was enough for her to immediately be treated like some sort of front-runner on the Sunday morning talk shows. It was like watching the winner of a split-squad game the first week of spring training be declared the favorite to win the World Series.
The message was so strong that Bachmann didn't get 30% of the vote and nearly lost to Ron Paul. You want to know how desperate people are to start this campaign, even with the 2012 election 15 months away? Straw polls in Ames, Iowa, in the summer of 2011 are how desperate.
Yet there was Bachmann talking herself up big, answering questions about Dubya Perry, as if he is her main competition just by showing up. Of course they both genuflect in front of the Tea Party and the religious right, all those who cheer as Bachmann talks about "taking back the country" from Obama, and act as if gay marriage is more of a threat than the Taliban.
Obama really was elected President on Sept. 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers went under and it seemed like all of Wall Street was about to do the same. Obama didn't have any real answers about how to fix things that day, and apparently still doesn't. But John McCain didn't even seem to know what city he should be in, and Obama was smart enough to make it seem as if Bush and McCain had blown up the economy together. And what had been a fairly close race until then was over, just like that.
It seems like a very long time ago. A few months is a long time in politics, a few years is a lifetime. SEAL Team Six took out Osama Bin Laden in May, and there was the idea at the time that Obama had been reelected right there. Only now, less than four months later, people aren't talking about Obama being the President when we got Bin Laden, they are talking about debt ceilings and unemployment. Republican candidates run against the Obama economy the way he ran against Bush's. What goes around comes around.
Bush's old man once had approval ratings that went through the roof, right after the Persian Gulf War. A year later he was out of business because the economy tanked on him. Obama ought to be challenged on so many things, starting with how much he spent all of his political capital on health care when he should have been focusing on jobs, and how he has talked a better fight than he has actually fought.
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