Rick Perry's Top Controversies

Mother Jones Magazine 6/20/11
Rick Perry's Top Controversies

By all appearances, Texas Governor Rick Perry is edging closer to a presidential run. His wife wants him to jump into the race and so do the big money guys in New York. Also enthused by the idea were attendees of last weekend's Republican Leadership Conference, where the crowd chanted, "Run, Rick, Run!" But despite everything that Perry's got going for him—a strong state economy, great hair, bible-thumping bona fides, and more than a decade as a sitting governor—he also has a lengthy track record of gaffes, controversial remarks, and dubious dealings. Here are some of the most notable:

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Blame God, not BP: Last year, Perry called the BP oil spill an "act of God."

Crony capitalism: Perry has used the state's Emerging Technologies Fund to benefit political allies. According to the Dallas Morning News, $16 million from the fund, or nearly 10 percent, has been awarded to companies with investors or officers that are large campaign donors to Perry.

The Atlantic 6/20/11
Rick Perry's Moral Problem

Texas governor Rick Perry, the latest Republican presidential It Boy, is a self-styled moralist who wants his fellow Republicans "to stop apologizing for celebrating life." When did they ever start? And who asked them to apologize for harboring sincere religious or moral objections to abortion anyway? (Abortion rights activists just want them to stop imposing their beliefs on the rest of us.) What we do need to hear from Perry, however, is an apology for celebrating death.

Texas has long been a leader in executing people, and Perry has presided over some 200 executions during his tenure as governor. The most notorious of these was the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, whom any just system would have exonerated, as David Grann demonstrated in the New Yorker. Grann's 2009 article brought some unwelcome publicity to the Texas death penalty regime, the immorality of which Perry confirmed; he had denied the defense a brief stay of execution citing gross evidentiary errors by the prosecution, and after Willingham's death, he obstructed an investigation of the case.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson cited Perry's role in this execution and cover-up in her unsuccessful 2010 primary campaign against him. So far, however, it has not generally been seen as a potential problem for a Perry presidential bid. This opinion piece in the L.A. Times is one exception to mainstream political coverage that has generally focused on Perry's appeals to culture warriors, his fundraising prowess, and claims about the Texas economy; his liabilities are said to include questions about whether voters are ready to send another Texas governor to the White House and the state's public education's failures.

Perry's record is sure to be extensively critiqued on the left if he continues to attract attention as a possible presidential candidate. Rachel Maddow has already attacked his economic failures and hypocrisies; the stories of Willingham and other death penalty victims are bound to be reviewed. But, on the right, for godly voters supposedly seeking a moral leader, the silence on Perry's complicity in a casually corrupt criminal justice system is damning.

The Texas Observer 6/13/11

Woe Unto the Hypocrite

LATE IN APRIL, BENEATH THE MAINSTREAM RADAR, Rick Perry took his “Please Don’t Elect Me President” road show to the North Texas studios of hellfire-breathing televangelist James Robison. In 2010, the governor mostly exchanged the Christian Right pieties of previous campaigns for Tea Party fundamentalism. God played only a bit part in his anti-government screed, Fed Up!, released just after his re-election to bolster his national profile. But Perry apparently has re-seen the light as he considers jumping into the GOP presidential contest and filling the gaping Christian Right Southern Populist void left by Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush’s decisions not to run.

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There was never any doubt that if Perry ran for president, he’d spin the catastrophic 2011 Legislature into a heroic tale of unbending fiscal conservatism, sending Tea Partiers into paroxysms of glee. But if he’s going to have a shot at being the right-wing alternative to Mitt Romney, he must have overwhelming support from the Christian Right as well. Which creates a bit of a dilemma: How do you twist the decimation of schools and social programs into something moral, even "Biblical?" Perry will have to do better than quote Old Testament law and miss its point entirely: In Leviticus, the seventh-year Sabbath is recommended for pragmatic reasons; it's good for the land. In Exodus, it's so that "the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave, the beasts of the field shall eat.”

Justifying the politics of selfishness, it appears, is a matter best left to the experts. Luckily, the governor has self-righteous pals in high places, and they have been busy making a “Biblical” case that wealth-first economic policies are just what the Good Lord wants. None is more influential than David Barton, the fundamentalist “historian” and former vice-chair of the Texas GOP, who’s best known for his bogus-but-influential argument that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” Barton has been touring the nation’s megachurches for months with a fresh message: that Obama-style “economic redistribution” is “unbiblical.” Barton preaches that God despises capital-gains taxes, estate taxes, income taxes and universal health care. “Jesus did not like the minimum wage,” he asserted recently at a Rediscovering God in America conference.

The New Republic 6/21/11
Rick Perry: Why His Texas Record Is Much Worse Than You Think

Between speeches in Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, Rick Perry is doing his best to keep people guessing if and when he’ll throw his (ten-gallon) hat into the GOP presidential primary. When the Texas governor appeared last Tuesday on “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” the conservative Fox News host was already gushing over the hundreds of thousands of new jobs created in Texas in the past two years. When Cavuto asked how Perry had lured Carl’s Jr. restaurants to Texas, the governor flashed a trademark smile. “They love the smell of freedom,” he explained.

Cavuto is hardly the only one enamored with the Perry story. Following his media blitz, few articles have cast a skeptic’s eye on the governor’s Texas record. “Texas Governor Calls for Halt of Economic Ruin” read one recent Bloomberg headline. The narrative is appealing: Small-town guy becomes Texas governor and makes (the economy) good—all by sticking to conservative principles. But while Texas remains “open for business”—the slogan of his successful re-election campaign in 2010—the state’s Legislature is in the process of a going-out-of-business sale. The Texas budget for the next two years is a mess of accounting tricks and gutted programs, thanks to an unprecedented budget shortfall. The state’s business tax has not only been unpopular, it also doesn’t generate nearly enough revenue. Operating at a structural deficit, the state has even begun to attack funding in the once-hallowed ground of education. And while Perry has spent a good bit of June on his non-campaign-campaign, state lawmakers from both parties are fighting tooth-and-nail to legislate around his dictums.

Although he campaigned in 2010 on the premise that, as he told the Associated Press, “Texas is better off than practically any state in the country,” Perry, along with the rest of the state, soon discovered that Texas’s budget gap—$27 billion short of what it would need to maintain its already lean services in the next biennium—was among the worst in the nation. Luckily, Texas did have a rainy day fund—over $9 billion saved up for “economic stabilization.” Some lawmakers, including many Republicans in the state Senate, advocated using the fund to prevent or at least soften cuts to education and health care. But Perry, who had turned “preserving the rainy day fund” into an applause line, stood firm in refusing to use it to plug holes in the budget for 2012-13. As a result, the budget cuts were draconian—initial proposals cut almost 20 percent from public schools and proposed 30 percent cuts to Medicaid providers. According to estimates from the nonpartisan state Legislative Budget Board, the initial proposal would have cost the state over 300,000 future jobs.

The Fix Washington Post 6/21/11

Is Rick Perry too George W. Bush-y?

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As Perry inches closer to a run for president, some of his opponents maintain his one big vulnerability is not his record or the team around him, but rather his voice, accent and his mannerisms. In other words, he’s just too Bush-y.

Perry’s accent is similar to his fellow Texan, as is the swagger and the way Perry enunciates his points when he speaks. He pronounces “American” like Bush, smiles like Bush and drops the ‘g’ at the end of words – lovin’, spendin’ – just like Bush.

Some Republicans say the physical and verbal similarities are more of a problem than the fact that Perry was Bush’s lieutenant governor.

“There will be a sizable portion of the primary electorate that will be hesitant to vote for ‘another George W. Bush,’ whether that’s fair or not to hang on Gov. Perry,” said an operative assisting another candidate in the GOP field.

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“I think voters are much more concerned about their next paycheck then about some contrived similarities in mannerisms,” said Perry strategist David Carney. “The Bush haters need to get a new hobby.”

Campaign for America's Future 6/22/11

The 'Texas Miracle' Is A Mirage

There is no "Texas miracle" for workers and job-seekers.

There is a Texas mirage, painted vividly by conservatives and being sold as the real deal by arch-conservative Texas governor Rick Perry, who may in a few days declare his intent to run for the Republican presidential nomination. The mirage is this: Because Texas doubled-down on the right-wing orthodoxy of cutting business taxes and regulation, the state's economy is outperforming the rest of the nation's in producing jobs.

The mirage is bolstered by such mainstream media articles as Monday's thinly-reported USA Today story, "Texas wins in U.S. economy shift." That story declared, "Texas became the USA's second-largest economy during the past decade — displacing New York and perhaps heading one day toward challenging California — in one of the biggest economic shifts in the past half-century."

The story about being the country's second-largest economy is a good one as long as you don't ask how it got there and who is being left behind. If you ask those questions, here's some of what you might find.

NY Times OpEd 6/22/11

The Haunting of Rick Perry

Should Gov. Rick Perry of Texas enter the 2012 presidential race, he would enjoy a strange and remarkable escort — the irrepressible ghost of Cameron Todd Willingham.

Charged with the horrific crime of intentionally torching his home and leaving his three daughters to the blaze, Willingham’s 1991 conviction and 2004 execution were secured by two great bugbears of America’s criminal justice system: pseudoscientific forensics and the compromised testimony of a jailhouse snitch.

The fire investigators who fingered Willingham relied on the kind of sorcery that fire scientists have tried for the past 20 years to chase from the field. The informant, for his part, claimed that Willingham had inexplicably blurted out a confession, then recanted his tale. Then, in the words of New Yorker reporter David Grann, he “recanted his recantation.” When Grann tracked him down in 2009, he told him that “it’s very possible I misunderstood” what Willingham said, pausing to add “the statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?”

Rothenberg Political Report 6/22/11

Rick Perry: Republican Savior or GOP Disaster?
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Some observers believe that Perry’s performance in Austin will develop into an issue. Perry is great at claiming credit, asserted one Republican observer, but has been “AWOL as governor; he shows up every three years when it’s time to campaign.”

“It’s not that he is personally corrupt,” said a critic who believes that “ethics” will become a problem for the governor. “It’s that he uses big pieces of Texas government as his playpen. There is evidence of pay-to-play, for example. Hutchison had plenty of opposition research on him, but Perry ran such a superior campaign that her material didn’t get through. Once that gets out, he’ll have a hard time surviving it. And you can bet that the information will make its way to the media.”

But will Republican caucus attendees and primary voters really care? Or will they be smitten by his populist rhetoric, his contrast to Obama and his claim, supported by Politifact Texas, that Texas has created more jobs since he became governor than any other state.

While there are differences of opinion among strategists about Perry’s appeal in the GOP race, there is unanimous agreement that the Texan would be a risky general election choice for his party.

One conservative, for example, suggested that he would be strong with the party base but would have questionable appeal among independent and moderate voters.

Huffington Post 6/20/11
Rick Perry Gay Rumors: Governor's Aides Prepared To Tackle Allegations Should They Resurface: Report

Texas Governor Rick Perry's camp is prepared to tackle unfounded rumors dating back to as early as 2004 about the Lone Star State Republican's personal life should he run for president and the allegations resurface, according to Politico.

Roughly seven years ago, Perry himself addressed the unsubstantiated buzz that he and his wife planned to divorce and that he was gay. He denied the rumors and told the Austin American-Statesman at the time that he was the victim of a "smear campaign" being conducted by his political enemies. The AP reported in March of 2004:

Perry said the rumors "are not correct in any shape, form or fashion. These are irresponsible. They're salacious. They're hurtful to my family."
...
"I don't think a rumor can just get to critical mass by itself," Perry said. "I think you have to have a well thought-out, organized effort to disseminate that kind of information and keep it going day after day after day after day."

Rick Perry will enter the Republican presidential contest and he will win the party's nomination. A bold prediction? Not really, not when you consider the noises coming out of Texas and the ungainly sight of the other candidates.

When he does, Democrats will probably make the mistake of thinking that hanging a "George W Bush 2" label around the Texas governor's neck will sink him. Maybe it won't help Perry win the presidency in 2012 but it's hardly a bar to winning the Republican nomination.

Salon Magazine 6/23/11

Latino audience unamused by Rick Perry's Jose Cuervo joke

Here's a joke that Texas Gov. Rick Perry should probably leave out of his stump speech:

Gov. Rick Perry received a tepid response when he addressed the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on Thursday, joking about the pronunciation of a Hispanic appointee's last name and frequently staring blankly at the audience when they failed to respond to his conservative applause lines. ...

But a joke about how perfect it was to appoint Jose Cuevas to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission because his name sounds like Jose Cuervo - a brand of tequila - fell flat. Perry struggled to regain his confidence as he described Texas as a land of opportunity.

According to a San Antonio news report, just a handful of people in the audience of 500 applauded after the potential presidential hopeful's speech. And there were protesters outside denouncing several harsh immigration laws backed by Perry.

Salon Magazine 6/25/11
The darkest chapter of Rick Perry's career

Did Texas Gov. Rick Perry sign off on the execution of an innocent man?

As Perry flirts with a presidential candidacy, the long-disputed case of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 for an arson that many fire experts believe he did not commit, is emerging again.

Willingham was convicted of setting a 1991 fire that destroyed his house and killed his three young daughters. Perry denied a last-minute request for a stay of execution in 2004 based on new scientific analysis that there was no evidence of arson at the house. And he later removed several members of a state panel investigating the case -- a move designed to delay a politically damaging report from the panel, critics charge.

In April, a state commission investigating the case finally issued a lengthy report calling for more training for fire investigators. It is now awaiting a legal opinion on whether it can rule that fire investigators in the Willingham case were negligent or guilty of misconduct -- a conclusion that, if it is made, would likely generate more damaging headlines for Perry.

To learn more about the case, I spoke with Steve Mims, co-director of a recent documentary on the case, "Incendiary." The transcript has been edited for length and clarity; the trailer for the film is at the bottom of this post.

Time Magazine 6/27/11
The Cracks in Rick Perry’s Job-Growth Record
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Perry’s biggest tool for job raiding is controversial. Beginning in 2003, he persuaded the Texas legislature to give him control over several massive, largely unsupervised funds that provide subsidies to businesses that move to Texas. His office proudly claims that the two biggest funds have created more than 54,000 jobs in the past eight years. “They’ve been immensely important to our state’s economic development,” says Catherine Frazier, Perry’s deputy press secretary. “This is about attracting jobs and making Texas a destination for companies to relocate and expand.”

The largest fund, the Texas Enterprise Fund, was created in 2003 and has awarded some $412 million in subsidies to companies nominally to create jobs. A December 2010 analysis by the Texas comptroller found that $119 million of that money went to companies that didn’t deliver on the jobs they promised. The governor’s office took back only $21 million from those underperformers, often choosing to define downward the job-creation requirements. GOP Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom Perry beat in last year’s GOP gubernatorial primary, called revelations that taxpayer-funded contracts sent money overseas to create jobs “disturbing” and “unacceptable.”

The second major fund under Perry’s control, the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, has also proven controversial since its creation in 2005. It has spent some $320 million on tax credits and other subsidies for high-tech companies willing to move to Texas. An October 2010 investigation by the Dallas Morning News found that $16 million of that money was awarded to companies with investors or officers who are large campaign donors. Perry denied that politics influenced the awarding of money from the funds. He succeeded in fending off efforts to cut his massive subsidy fund budgets in the legislative session that ended last month, but the legislature did impose new controls and oversight on the funds.

Even those subsidy-chasing companies that do produce jobs don’t necessarily create long-lasting ones or increase a state’s overall prosperity. While 18% of all jobs in the U.S. failed to last the five years from 2001 to 2006, 26% of jobs created through interstate moves failed during the same period, according to researchers Jed Kolko of the Public Policy Institute of California and Donald Walls, a consultant and researcher.

Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School says tax-credit funds used to lure jobs from one state to another often “ultimately don’t support long-term prosperity” because companies that can move easily “are looking for the best deal, and when the deal runs out, they move,” taking their jobs with them. Anti-corporate-welfare advocates, like Greg LeRoy, executive director of the Washington-based group Good Jobs First, say the tax-credit game is worse than zero sum, because when a company gets a tax credit to move to a new state, the departed state loses jobs, while the destination state’s residents get stuck with higher taxes or worse services.

Texas Tribune 6/28/11
Rick Perry No Stranger to Controversial Views

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But Sabato said Perry would likely face blowback on his ideas from independents and, of course, Democrats if he makes it into a general election contest against President Barack Obama. Sabato also said there are other positions Perry has taken in the past — positions that don’t make into Fed Up! — that could dog Perry in a Republican primary race.

Chief among them is the governor’s unsuccessful attempt in 2007 to require that teenage girls be immunized against Human papillomavirus, or HPV, the most common sexually transmitted sexual disease and a known cause of cervical cancer. During the 2012 governor's race, Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison repeatedly criticized Perry for issuing the executive order that was later overturned by the Texas Legislature.

The governor noted that parents could opt out of the provision, but critics said parents should be able to opt in voluntarily instead. On the political front, it sent Perry’s social conservative base into an uproar over fears that the vaccine would encourage sexual promiscuity among teenagers.

Perry said it was the “pro-life” thing to do, and he has never disavowed the decision. In an interview after a campaign swing in the spring of last year, Perry choked up as he told the story of Heather Burcham, who died of cervical cancer in 2007 and had become a spokeswoman for mandatory vaccination.

Talking Points Memo 7/2/11
Will Rick Perry Defy International Law (Again)?

It's Rick Perry v The World. On Thursday the Texas Governor (and possible Republican presidential player) will face a stark choice: allow the execution of Mexican national Humberto Leal Garcia, or listen to high-ranking international figures and grant a last-minute delay.

Mr. Leal was arrested in 1994. He was convicted of the rape and murder of a 16 year-old girl. His defenders say this was a miscarriage of justice. They observe that the prosecution used now largely discredited forensic methods. They further claim that he is mentally disabled, had no prior criminal record, and was represented by seemingly incompetent lawyers.

So far there's nothing here to lift this to international attention. And yet, in recent days calls for Gov. Perry to delay the execution have come from U.N. officials as high up as Navi Pillay, the world body's highest defender of human rights. Indeed, the Obama administration has even weighed in, saying the decision to execute Mr. Leal would cause "serious repercussions" and even "irreparable harm" to US foreign relations.

There is one detail in the case that elevates it to this level: Mr. Leal was born in Mexico. His family moved to the States when he was two. Though he graduated from a San Antonio high school, he never obtained citizenship. Consequently, though raised in Texas, he is still officially a citizen of Mexico.

Mother Jones Magazine 7/8/11
Rick Perry's Death Penalty Problem

Texas Governor Rick Perry's close relationship with fringe figures of the religious right is likely to be an issue for him if, as looks increasingly likely, he decides to run for president. But his central role in an international incident could loom even larger. Last night, he declined to intervene in the execution of a Mexican national, Humberto Leal, by lethal injection, despite public requests from the White House and the government of Mexico to hold off. Here's the AP:





Perry's death penalty record is the sort of thing that, in a normal political climate (as opposed to the current one), would cripple any realistic shot at the Oval Office. He refused to stay the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, and, after the fact, when the evidence began to overwhelmingly suggest that Willingham had been innocent, he replaced three members of the commission that had been reviewing the case. (Perry stands by the execution, insisting that Willingham was a "monster.") After two decades on death row, Anthony Graves was released only after a lengthy investigation from Texas Monthly showed that he had been wrongfully convicted. And Perry's doggedly embraced the death penalty even as studies continue to show that executions are costing his cash-strapped state hundreds of millions of dollars.

Perry has presided over more than 230 executions as governor. As the Texas Tribune notes, he's commuted the death sentences of 31 death row inmates, but in 30 of those cases, that was only because the Supreme Court ordered him to. The high court intervened against again last March, ordering that the state was required to consider DNA testing in an appeal from a death row inmate. In 2010, a Houston district judge ruled the state's death penalty system was unconstitutional because it violated the 8th and 14th Amendments. Earlier this year, a Texas House committee considered a bill to put a two-year moratorium on executions, in light of continued evidence of wrongful convictions. And in April, a psychologist frequently employed as an expert by the state in death penalty cases was banned from performing mental evaluations after she was found to be using "unscientific" methods in her official analyses. Through it all, Perry has maintained the same confident tone: "I think our system works."

Daily Kos 7/8/11

Romney Isn't The One To Fear In 2012

I see that the front page is focused on the present GOP contenders, none of whom is going to get the GOP nomination. It's not going to be Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain, Paul, or Palin in the end. The real candidate that the front-pagers aren't focusing on is Rick Perry. He's the dark horse candidate who has the real powerbrokers behind him: the religious right, the Koch brothers, and a so-called unaffiliated SuperPAC called "Americans For Rick Perry" just filed with the FEC to raise money for future attack ads.

The earlier the front page on Dailykos starts talking about Rick Perry and his miserable record as Governor, the better off we'll be going into the 2012 election. Even though Rick Perry has not officially announced, he's setting himself up as a dark horse candidate by travelling all over the country and meeting with wealthy donors such as the Koch brothers, and lining up the religious right behind him. If we all can knock him down early in the GOP primaries in favor of a weaker candidate, it means that the 2012 presidential election won't be as difficult.

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Why should we fear Rick Perry? Even though his team has floated stories to the press about the so-called division between him and Bush in an attempt to show that Rick Perry is nothing like Bush, he's Bush on steroids. Perry's team know that this is one of his weakest points, is that his planned path to the White House is modeled after former President George W. Bush, and that they have the same connections to Republican strategists, donors, the religious right, and to conservative think tanks.