Rick Perry vs World

28 May 2012

Rick Perry's endorsement of David Dewhurst for Senate

It's an open secret in Austin that Rick Perry doesn't love David Dewhurst. The governor has told more than a few unflattering anecdotes about Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst over the years.

So why is the governor endorsing Dewhurst? Well, it's not about Dewhurst. From all indicators, Perry is serious about running for re-election, particularly if Barack Obama is re-elected.

What's the one thing that stands between Rick Perry and re-election? A primary challenge from someone who is more conservative than Kay Bailey Hutchison.

What's the easiest way to win a primary? Convince no one else to run. That's why Perry endorsed Dewhurst.

If Dewhurst loses this 2012 Senate primary, it signals that the incumbent can be beaten. It signals that money and name ID can be overcome. And that might embolden some of the downballot officeholders who have been (im)patiently waiting in line...for over a decade.

It's even more than that though: a Dewhurst defeat imperils the narrative that Perry has promoted in recent years: that the Texas economy is growing due to frugal spending. There's some truth to it (and indeed Perry has fought for lower spending while Dewhurst has equivocated), but there's also been quite a bit of accounting tricks and kicking the can down the road.

Frankly, I think Attorney General Abbott miscalculated in two ways. One, he might have beaten Perry to the punch by announcing earlier that he was running for Guv in 2014. [Conventional wisdom is that Abbott wouldn't run against Perry due to friendship, though perhaps recent polling numbers might strain that? Either way, by letting Perry announce first, he put himself in this position.] Second, he might have endorsed Cruz in the late stages of this primary and taken credit for being the shot in the arm that got Cruz into a runoff. It would have also served the AG well with activists for a future run.

Maybe Perry didn't have a choice. As many people around the Texas legislature have noted, they had to support Dewhurst, because if Dewhurst loses then he is likely to kill their legislation in the next session of the legislature. But one thing is for sure: Perry's endorsement of Dewhurst wasn't really about Dewhurst. It was about Perry.

Posted by Evan @ 05/28/12 08:35 AM | Comments (0)

Ted Cruz resume

I don't think future opponents will make David Dewhurst's mistake of trying to attack Ted Cruz's resume.

Posted by Evan @ 05/28/12 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

27 May 2012

Nassim Nicholas Taleb prologue

The prologue to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's upcoming book is available in PDF.

Robert Caro, Marco Rubio, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's a good reading summer for me.

Posted by Evan @ 05/27/12 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

25 May 2012

arhcive

Archived

Archived.

Posted by Evan @ 05/25/12 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

This post is available in the paid archive.

archived

Posted by Evan @ 05/25/12 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

23 May 2012

Who's the empty suit, Tom Leppert?

Tom Leppert's last few TV ads claim that Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst are just mere empty suits. Yet at the beginning of his campaign, Tom Leppert admitted that he didn't know anything about foreign policy. With apologies to The Hotline:

Shot:
Tom Leppert, talking about his opponents:

"Everybody's got their first three sentences, which is about 60 seconds. They can't deal with the issues any deeper than that."

Chaser:
Tom Leppert at the beginning of the campaign, per National Review:

On foreign policy, he's admittedly a neophyte. Asked whether he would have supported New START, Leppert responds, "To be frank with you, that's where I would have used the position to sit down with our folks in national security and get a good feel for whether they thought that was protecting our interests."

At the time of that interview, New START was the hottest issue facing the US Senate and conservatives opposed it. Yet Tom Leppert apparently hadn't even heard about New START, much less formed an opinion on whether the terms of the treaty made it worth it to give up American sovereignty.

Bottom line: You can't claim others are empty suits when you don't have a position on the hot issues of the office you're running for.

Posted by Evan @ 05/23/12 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

About that Huckabee endorsement

Due to a paucity of willing endorsers, David Dewhurst has long pointed to Mike Huckabee to vouch for his conservative credentials.

One little problem: Huckabee's endorsement doesn't even carry much weight in his home state of Arkansas. Last night, former Huckabee aide Beth Anne Rankin lost a congressional primary in Arkansas by more than 20 points to Tom Cotton. Rankin lost despite the fact that she was the 2010 Republican nominee and despite (or maybe because of?) Huckabee going all out in his endorsement of Rankin.

Posted by Evan @ 05/23/12 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

24 April 2012

On Tom Leppert and his strategy selection

"Tom Leppert would have a much better chance of being senator if he'd run as a Democrat," mused a friend at lunch the other day.

I guffawed, and then a moment later I realized he was right. Leppert might have had a chance as a Democrat. In the race that he is running, he has chosen a strategy that gives him exactly zero chance to be the Republican nominee for Senate in 2012.

Tom Leppert is trying to run as a Reagan conservative, but he's got only regional name ID and not that much money – compared to Dewhurst. He's chosen a strategy that has exactly zero chance at electing him senator. My guess is that a consultant* told him that he needed to run as a wanna-be Ronald Reagan to win. One small problem: there's not much in Leppert's record to support that.

Tom Leppert is running as a Reaganite, but until he ran for public office he'd donated almost as much to Democrats as to Republicans. He now says he's against both gay marriage and civil unions because it is a "faith issue," yet as Dallas mayor he had a gay chief of staff, marched in gay pride parades, welcomed gay conventions to Dallas, and told a gay reporter that while he hadn't thought about gay marriage much…he could see both sides of the issue. He talks now like a conservative activist but sought the support of ACORN and the SEIU…and he mostly didn't even bother to vote until he ran for mayor. He says he wants to cut federal spending as a Senator yet one of his main focuses as mayor was securing Congressional earmarks for a municipal redevelopment project. I understand the occasional nuance, but I can't thread the needle through all of those. Nor can primary voters.

Here's the thing – your average voter doesn't know any of the preceding paragraph (which was off the top of my head…there's more if you research it) and yet Leppert is still in single digits in the polls. Essentially Leppert is trying to fit in a space that he never had any chance of winning, and which Cruz has now locked up securely.

Currently, Leppert is attacking Cruz thinking that he can peel off votes in order to make it into the runoff. What he doesn't realize is that Cruz’s supporters are much more firmly committed to him than Dewhurst's voters are. So Leppert has essentially painted himself into a corner by trying to be something that the record doesn't really support.

Even if Leppert were to somehow squeeze into a runoff, he would have no chance against either Dewhurst or Cruz in a runoff. If you don't understand why, read again the long paragraph above.

Now there's some pretty small chance Leppert squeezes into a runoff, using the Jesse Ventura technique. Put lots of relatively positive fluffy messages on TV and hope to pick up just enough votes when frontrunners attack each other. Or try to pick up just the right amount of Dewhurst support by attacking him since his support is soft. Both sound pretty unlikely to me, and neither are strategies that will allow victory in a runoff.

But as a Democrat, Leppert might have had a shot. He could have run as a Blue Dog with some establishment support. Could he get through a Dem primary? Not my area of expertise, though I might suggest that Dem primaries are more a collection of interest groups that might have afforded a chance. My guess is that Leppert does actually identify more as a Republican, and that's why he ran as a Republican. But he simply doesn't have the record to run as Ronald Reagan, Jr.

* I don't remember who Leppert's consultant is, so I feel free to be candid.

Posted by Evan @ 04/24/12 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

09 March 2012

Long time no see, dear reader

It's been awhile since I've had time to post here. Not sure that will change much, but I have a week of vacation, so perhaps I'll re-work something I had 90% done in August -- a long examination of our US Senate race.

And then I'll get back to my job search.

Posted by Evan @ 03/09/12 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

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