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Opening Arguments

You don't know Rick

With Rick Perry apparently poised to enter the presidential race, the Washington Post pulls out a journalistic staple and heads to the Lone Star State in an effort to understand the politician "as Texans see him."

That is the most colorful way of saying what a number of Texans who have watched Perry closely over the years agree on, which is that he has proved to be a skilled and disciplined candidate with an instinct for where the base of his party stands and a style on the stump that is as aggressive as it is conservative.

[. . .]

Burka, who has come to understand Perry's strengths and weaknesses as well as anyone in the state, had much to say of value. Among other things, he noted that the governor with the big head of hair should not be dismissed as a “soft or feckless” pretty boy, as if he were a Republican version of the Democratic Breck Boy, John Edwards.

“Perry is a hard man,” Burka wrote. “He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved — or respected. And he has gotten his wish. Perry does not have many friends in the [Texas] Legislature.”

Nice try, but the piece relied heavily on Texas political insiders, and about the only thing I got out of it was that Perry is much, much tougher than outsiders think. That tells me why he will be a top-tier candidate the minute he jumps in, but not why I should support him or cheer hims efforts. I expect that is a bit of an exaggeration anyway, the same way the national media's portrayal of Mitch Daniels as a beloved budget cutter was. Those of us who followed the governor's political battles know there were fans but also plenty of foes of his ideas, and that he caught flak for some things from those in his own party.

That's the main thing missing from the Perry story -- a sense of what ordinary people from across the political spectrum in Texas think about him. And that is the toughest thing for journalists to get right -- I know, because I've failed at it a few times myself. No matter how objective and dispassionate you try to be, your own political leanings color what you do. And no matter how astute you are, there is every difference in the world between following someone's political arguments day in and day out and trying to fathom them (and the reaction to them) all at once in a one-shot analysis.

Comments

littlejohn
Wed, 08/10/2011 - 10:07am

I'd pay to watch Edwards and Perry in a fistfight. I figure they'd both have their arms up high, yelling "Not the face! Not the face!"

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