A reader pushes back:
You keep trying to conflate the two, but at this point in his career Bush was nothing like Perry. Governor Bush worked closely with Lieutenant Gov. Bob Bullock and Speaker Pete Laney, both Democrats. When Bush announced his presidential run, members from both sides of the aisle flocked to endorse him. Granted, he had a hot economy and Democratic majorities to deal with, but he went into it with an attitude of conciliation and compromise.
Perry, on the other hand, has never worked with the opposition.
He fully supported the mid-decade redistricting that all but eliminated white male Democratic office holders in 2003, sent the Democratic senators fleeing out of state to avoid a quorum. Twice, in 2003 and 2011, he faced massive deficits which he closed through cuts, eviscerating health and human services and more than doubling college tuition rates across the state in 2003 and cutting $4 billion from public education this year, while refusing to touch a $9 billion rainy day fund the state has in the bank. But he didn't cut the economic development fund he uses for corporate welfare.
He is an phenomenal campaigner. His opponents react to him like squirrels to rattlesnakes, completely freezing. He can skip debates with no repercussions. He can brag about public education while forcing the layoffs of 100,000 teachers in a state that ranks 45th in SAT scores and has no vocational education. He brags about creating jobs and gets great credit even though most of them are low paying and we've lost jobs in his tenure overall. He allows an innocent man to be executed and brags about it, then fights DNA testing on another death-row inmate that would tell us if he's guilty or if the real killer is still roaming the streets. The hurricane evacuation during Rita in 2005 was a clusterfuck beyond all belief (only the fact that it veered slightly east at the last minute let us avoid a 5-figure body count) with buses of refugees being sent back to the storm zone. He denied there were any problems and blamed the traffic jams on lack of contra flow.
Bush was bad for this country, but Perry would be a disaster. His policy is written by the business lobby. Anybody who thinks Perry has any competence at all is just deluding themselves. It's not his Christianism that's so scary; it's his actual performance in office. Even Palin has worked with Dems before and has taken on the entrenched powers, even if it was out of selfish purposes.
On that note, Benjy Sarlin spotlights one of Perry's political blunders in Texas – issuing an executive order imposing HPV vaccinations on sixth-graders – that raised the ire of both Democrats and Republicans.
(Image by Mario Piperni)
The Dish 