Perry makes his move
by digby
I wrote about Rick Perry’s strategy for getting himself out of the cellar for Salon today. It’s actually pretty smart:
It was inevitable that among the huge field of Republican presidential candidates, a second-tier contender would take advantage of the opening provided by the Donald Trump phenomenon and position him- or herself as the anti-Trump. It’s not easy to stand out in that huge crowd, and this might just offer someone a chance to get some positive press and separate themselves from the pack.
It’s obvious why the first tier sees no upside in angering the Donald. As this article in the New York Times made clear, they need his fans to vote for them:
Since the start of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, a vexing question has hovered over his candidacy: Why have so many party leaders — privately appalled by Mr. Trump’s remarks about immigrants from Mexico — not renounced him?It turns out, interviews show, that the mathematical delicacy of a Republican victory in 2016 — and its dependence on aging, anxious white voters — make it exceedingly perilous for the Republican Party to treat Mr. Trump as the pariah many of its leaders now wish he would become.[W]hat remains so appealing to many of the white voters who like Mr. Trump is his perceived willingness to tell hard truths about delicate issues — racial and otherwise — that, to their mind, the party establishment is too timid to discuss.“There are a lot of people who are very angry at the grass-roots level and who are convinced the Republican leaders in Congress are not doing everything for the conservative cause,” said Charlie Black, a former adviser to John McCain in 2008 and Mr. Romney in 2012. Mr. Trump, he said, holds undeniable appeal to such voters.A poll released by the Pew Research Center in May found that 63 percent of Republican voters view immigrants as a “burden” who compete for jobs, housing, and health care compared with 32 percent of Democrats.
These top candidates — Bush, Walker, Rubio, Paul, Huckabee, etc. — are undoubtedly being advised by their campaign strategists to tread very softly, lest they alienate the xenophobic majority. But one of the current also-rans, who just want a chance to get into the debates, might be able to coax enough of the GOP minority who aren’t Trump followers to make the cut. It looked for a while as if Lindsey Graham would be the one to seize the day, with his strident declaration that Trump is a “wrecking ball” who is going to “kill the party.” But his point wasn’t that Trump was wrong in what he said, but that him saying it was making the GOP look bad, which isn’t the same thing at all. One might have thought that Rick Santorum, winner of the Iowa caucus in 2012 and the last man standing in the primaries after Mitt Romney, would step up with a strong moral condemnation of Trump’s degrading comments about Mexicans. But all Santorum could muster was this tepid criticism:
“While I don’t like the verbiage he’s used, I like the fact that he is focused on a very important issue for American workers and particularly, legal immigrants in this country.”
Actually, Trump isn’t focused on American workers; he’s focused on undocumented “rapists,” who he says the Mexican government is somehow “sending” here as an act of aggression against the United States. And most of the other second-tier candidates have good things to say about Trump, which one can only assume means that they genuinely agree with him.
But this week one of the candidates did decide to take a courageous step of wooing some of those non-bigoted Iowans by taking on Trump directly. It was former Texas Governor Rick Perry who threw caution to the wind, saying:
“I have a message for my fellow Republicans and the independents who will be voting in the primary process: what Mr. Trump is offering is not conservatism, it is Trump-ism – a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense.”
Read on. He’s also about to spend a ton of money on national ads to get his name recognition up, something that makes a lot of sense in this weird situation where national polling is going to decide whether a candidate gets to debate in Iowa. Fox will be certainly be pleased — how convenient that their rules will bring them such a nice profit.
He’s not as dumb as he sounds.
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