Romney will be the Republican nominee

Right now the four possible Republican candidates for President are Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and trailing the pack, Rick Perry. But the recent announcement that Gingrich and Perry failed to qualify for the very significant Virginia primary to be held March 6, 2012 pretty much establishes that Romney is going to be the nominee. Let's look at Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick perry individually.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul has a good chance to win the Iowa caucuses according to Nate Silver. But he isn't likely to be able to build on that relatively strong showing in Iowa. His support is quite strong, but very narrow. Nate estimates that at the very best Ron Paul might be able to get about one-third of the Republican votes.

Nate bases his opinion on a series of polls. But his analysis comes from before the Republican establishment really started going after Ron Paul because he was beginning to appear to be a real threat to Romney. The growing chorus quoting Ron Paul's racist writings in his 1980's and 1990's news letters will lower these numbers. So will wider distribution of his views regarding pulling American troops back to the American shores and entering a new period of American isolationism.

Ron Paul's fervant supporters will keep him in the Republican nomination process until it ends, but I think Nate Silver's estimate as high as one-third of Republican voters is highly optomistic.

Newt Gingrich

The next candidate to look at is Newt Gingrich. Newt's disorganization has jumped up to bite him big time. He has failed to qualify for the Virginia Primary which is to be held on Super Tuesday March 6, 2012. His campaign needed signatures from 10,000 registered voters, including 400 from each of the states 11 Congressional Districts. The Newt campaign could not organize itself well enough to achieve a relatively small admininstrative requirement by the deadline. This failure demonstrates what most observers already recognize - Newt is horribly disorganized.

It will be interesting to see if Newt's secretive backers and their Super Pacs who have funded Newt's recent rise from obscurity to being considered a viable candidate forthe Republican nomination as an alternate to Romney will continue throught the Spring.

Rick Perry

Rick Perry, the only other non-Romney candidate likely to be able to compete into the Spring, also failed to qualify for the Virginia primary. Like Newt, Rick Perry has had the appearance of being a well-funded alternative to Mitt Romney. His series of gaffes in the debates have clearly demonstrated that he is not Presidential quality, but his deep-pocketed funders in Texas have been willing to shell out the money for the primary season anyway. I'm not sure what his funders thought they were going to buy, but it's pretty sure Rick Perry will never deliver to them. America as a whole is the winner here.

Mitt Romney

Given the weaknesses of Romney's three major opponents and the fact that the Republican establishment is circling the wagons in support of Mitt it looks like Mitt Romney will, as previously expected, be the Republican nominee for President.

Is there a chance this line up will change this spring? There's always a chance, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller. Without the Virginia votes on Super Tuesday Gingrich and Perry are very unlikely to be able to effectively challenge Romney. Ron Paul will never get over 35% of the Republicans and I'll be surprised if he gets 20%. The more Paul moves to become a real challenger the more the fact that he is utterly insane will become clear even to the Republican voters. The field of candidates really has winnowed down that tightly.

Both the tea partiers and the evangelical Republicans are going to make a lot of noise objecting to Romney, but as spring moves forward their hatred of Obama and the hope that Romney can defeat him will damp down that noise. As much as the evangelicals dislike Romney's Mormon religion, they hate Obama and the Democrats worse. They will hold their collective noses and prepare to vote for Romney in November.

The media is going to hate this. Where is the conflict that drives ratings and advertising? No drama Obama isn't going to give it to them, and while Romney will try to lure the media in he doesn't have much to offer them until after the Republican convention in August. That leaves the media in about a six months long silly season from Super Tuesday until the conventions. Then it will be Obama vs Romney - just as has been clear since last summer.

Republican Whoppers last night.

Republicans simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Alex Wagner from the Huffington Post explains.

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Here's some more of the same:

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Rick Perry is lying about Social Security being a Ponzi scheme. At it's core Social Security Retirement is a term insurance plan in which the money paid in during the current year pays the benefits paid out the same year. That is exactly the same plan as term life insurance, and it is a financial model of the reality. The working people this year much provide sufficient goods and services to support all workers and all non-workers together. Remember, non-workers include non-working spouses, children, retired individuals and wealthy investors who don't do anything real for the economy.

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Rick Perry's political donors and what he gives them if they donate to him

Who are Rick Perry's biggest donors? Can America afford to bring Rick Perry into striking range of becoming President?

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Rick Perry has been selling off Texas government to make sure that he has the money he needs to run for office. Corrupt? Crooked? Yeah, what else is new? Perry is a Texas Republican and the governor.

Rick Perry is not stupid. He is a farm boy who is quite shrewd at getting what he wants and at selling his services. But he is governor of a state (Texas) which does not require any significant work from the governor (the state constitution was written right after Reconstruction to prevent carpetbaggers from controlling the state) and Perry has not demonstrated much knowledge of when the government really should do.

How Rick Perry funds his election campaigns

Want to know how Rick Perry raises money to run for office? Here's the story written by Ben Adler and published by The Nation.

One of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s oft-touted strengths in the Republican primary is his demonstrated prowess at fundraising. Less widely known is how he has raised that money and what he has done in return for it. According to Texas good government and environmental watchdogs, Perry has raised much of his campaign funds from business executives who have financial interests in state government decisions. Often Perry’s supporters come from the energy sector and Perry’s help for them has come at the expense of the environment.

Over his three campaigns for governor Perry raised a remarkable $102 million. Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, who was no slouch at fundraising himself, brought in $41 million over two campaigns.

Half of Perry’s haul, $51 million, has come from just 204 sources. Some are political action committees, but most are wealthy individuals. “He relies on a relatively small network of very big hitters, wealthy businessmen and their spouses who want something out of Texas government,” says Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit research group that tracks the influence of money in Texas politics. As the Dallas Morning News reported during Perry’s re-election bid last year, “Perry tapped scores of big-dollar donors—including some who have business before the state or have benefited from taxpayer subsidies,” to vastly outraise his Democratic opponent, Bill White.

Perry rewards those who make sizeable contributions with appointments and political favors. He also works hard to do what his contributores want him to do. His seond largest all time donor is the owner of a nuclear waste dump, Harold Simmons.

Perry led the charge in 2010, while Simmons gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry’s re-election campaign, to allow Simmons to import nuclear waste from thirty-eight states. On June 27 of this year, ten days after Perry signed the legislation, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry. Tom Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, estimates that the rule change will bring upward of $2 billion for Simmons. “If you put money in Perry’s purse, he’ll create policies you need,” says Smith.

Perry has been similarly accommodating of various other energy interests in the state. Texas has violated the Clean Air Act by allowing industrial plants such as oil refineries to reduce emissions overall rather than at each emissions point. When the Environmental Protection Agency informed Texas that they would have to take over Clean Air Act implementation in the state, Perry complained. “Perry’s on the cutting edge of this whole ‘job-killing EPA’ strategy that Republicans have used,” says Smith. There’s a saying Texas, according to Smith that “it’s cheaper to invest in politicians than in pollution controls.” Perry has been similarly critical of the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases nationally.

Perry has been carrying water for environmentally destructive industries since his days in the Texas legislature. Back then, in the late 1980s, he led efforts to prevent species such as the golden cheek warbler from being listed as endangered, because their habitats in West Texas were threatened by suburban sprawl. Developers feared that they would be unable to pave over sensitive lands. Perry’s all-time biggest donor is home builder Bob Perry (no relation).

Essentially Rick Perry is owned by Bob Perry, Harold Simmons, and a few similar very wealthy individuals. Rick Perry has been happy to sell the health and economic well-being of Texans to these people.

Now those same people want to buy the government of the United States. That's why Rick Perry is running for President.

The prospects of Perry for President

Romney is running primarily based on his supposed electability (which is why the amount of money he brings in is so very important), but that ignores the fact that he is unnominatable. It really is the Sharon Angle dynamic. The social conservatives simply will not vote for a mormon cult member. It's not a political decision to them, it's a religious one.

That leaves Ron Paul and Bachmann as Perry's only significant opponents. Neither can get over 20% of the Republican nomination voters. I think we will see Perry for President with a veep who is attractive to the money Republicans. It'll be interesting to see if Perry can bury the hatchet with Karl Rove and the Bush people. The Republican desire to win over Obama is going to be one of Perry's strongest selling points.

Perry's shift to the center after locking up the nomination is going to be eye-ball jarring, but the right-wing media will facilitate it by burying all his pandering to secessionists and to the tea partiers. Anyone who dares bring those things up will be attacked.

Perry locked up the social conservatives with his christian "renewal" service last week. And as a Democrat who changed parties to the Republicans he has crafted an image that he will never be out-flanked to the right.

Sneer if you will, but from what I have seen Perry is probably the most talented, determined and well-organized politician on the Republican national stage. He will give Obama one hell of a run for his money.

And remember, I say this as a Texas Democrat. Do not underestimate what Perry brings to the table. John Henry at 12:58 PM has the right idea.

I do not know if there is enough "Texas Fatigue" outside of Texas in the colonies ... uh, the rest of the US ... to be a barrier to a Perry win for President.

Here, from Redstate, is a conservative view of Rick Perry. This is, of course, during the primary season, though, and may not last beyond that time.

An older article on Rick Perry. Burka was quite prescient.

Here is an excerpt from a February 2010 Texas Monthly article on Rick Perry. Don't ever forget that Rick Perry started out in politics as a Democrat and supported Al Gore for President in Texas in 1988. The media image you see of him today is carefully crafted to get him elected to office.

Remember, this article was published early in 2010. Much of what Rick Perry anticipated in politics appears to have occurred, and he is set to take advantage of those changes.

by Paul Burka

One year ago, I wrote a story about the upcoming Republican gubernatorial primary between Governor Rick Perry and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. At the time, Hutchison had recently announced her intention to form a committee to explore a race for governor, and her campaign had released a poll showing her 24 points ahead of Perry, 55 percent to 31 percent. The governor’s political career appeared to be in deep trouble. Among Hutchison supporters, 58 percent had a “very favorable” opinion of her. Only 30 percent of Perry supporters felt the same way about him. She led him in every geographical section of the state.

What a difference a year makes. Since then, their fortunes have gone in opposite directions. Perry has held a lead, typically in the low double digits, in almost every poll taken since early summer, and now it is Hutchison’s political career that is in peril: Her Senate term expires on January 1, 2013, and she has said she will not seek reelection. Meanwhile, Perry’s prospects have never been rosier. Just a year after it appeared that he was on the brink of his last race, he is poised to become one of the leaders of his party. His travel schedule, speaking engagements, and television appearances in recent months give every indication that he and his team of advisers are looking beyond Texas to national politics. If Perry defeats Hutchison in the March 2 Republican primary and goes on to win a third full term in November, he will immediately join the crowd of potential presidential aspirants in 2012—if he hasn’t done so already.

Throughout his career, Perry has always benefited from an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, and once again, his luck seems to be working. The Republican field for 2012 is not deep. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are the leftovers, Mark Sanford self-destructed, Sarah Palin is too polarizing, Newt Gingrich is old news, and that leaves . . . well, why not Rick Perry? Who among the contenders has a better conservative record? Who better expresses the anger of the average Republican voter? Who has a more robust fundraising base? Of the governors commonly mentioned—Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota; Haley Barbour, of Mississippi; Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana; Mitch Daniels, of Indiana—whose state has weathered the recession more successfully?

Most people who follow Texas politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became president; that he is “Governor Goodhair” or “Governor 39 Percent” or some similar appellation of mild disrespect accompanied by a twist of humor; that he doesn’t really do anything well except win elections, which he has done with regularity. There is truth in the conventional wisdom, but there is also blindness. Perry has been so often viewed as a caricature that many Texans have failed to recognize his talent. The fact is that no Republican has so ably surfed the wave of populist anger that has swept through the party in the past year.

That Perry has both the potential and the plan to aim higher than the Governor’s Mansion is underscored by the contrast between his campaign and Hutchison’s. Last fall, I attended events at which each candidate appeared. In October, I watched Perry address the Texas Association of Realtors in a banquet room on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in central Austin. TAR is one of the largest and most politically active trade associations in the Austin lobby and one of the biggest financial contributors. Its members are exactly the kind of folks a Republican candidate for governor would want in his corner—individual entrepreneurs and hustlers offering the good life in the suburbs to those who seek it, for a 6 percent commission. And Rick Perry has them in his corner.

As I watched him speak I could appreciate the skills that he has acquired during what is now nine years in office, foremost among which is his ability to connect with his constituency. Early in his remarks, he began an anecdote by saying, “I don’t know how many of you watch Fox News,” before adding, in a knowing tone, “but I suppose most of you do.” Later in the speech, he interrupted himself to urge the people in the audience to take out their cell phones. In an instant he transformed himself into the Aggie yell leader he once was. “Put in that you’re fed up,” he prodded them. “No, put in that you’re fired up. Then text it to 956-13. It comes directly to me.” And, of course, there was the inevitable jab at Washington: “It’s frustrating to deal with the federal government. They are supposed to provide a strong military, secure our borders, and deliver the mail.” He paused for effect. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad.”

Several weeks later, I drove to San Antonio, where Hutchison was making an appearance at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy to talk about education, following an earlier stop in Houston, where she spoke on the same subject. The academy is part of a promising but controversial educational experiment—single-sex public schools for girls—that some women’s and educational advocacy groups have condemned as discriminatory. The person who made schools like this possible was Hutchison herself, through an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2001.

The event took place in the library. Hutchison spoke from a lectern on the floor, surrounded by girls from the school. Most of them were black or Hispanic. They wore uniforms of white blouses, pleated plaid skirts, and blue cardigans. The rest of the people in attendance were from the school and the school district. No Hutchison supporters were in evidence; no refreshments were provided. This was not a rally; it was a media event, the object of which was to get free airtime in the state’s third-largest TV market. The most important people in the room were not the school officials but four television reporters with tripods.

Hutchison has been critical of Perry’s record on public education—a dropout pandemic, stagnant test scores—and her remarks were primarily about her support of more innovations. “Single-sex schools are very close to my heart,” she said. She also embraced charter schools, magnet schools, and accelerated high schools. She wants the state to switch to electronic textbooks and provide students with a hybrid device similar to the Amazon Kindle.

The two campaign events seemed to have been part of entirely different races. Perry’s speech to the realtors evoked national themes and aimed to tap into a powerful feeling of discontent toward Washington. Hutchison’s appearance in San Antonio, on the other hand, was designed to portray her as a smart policy maker on an important state issue. She did it well. If you didn’t know they were in the same race, you might conclude that they were running for different offices, Perry for president (or perhaps the second spot on the national ticket), Hutchison for governor or lieutenant governor. The problem for Hutchison is that the energy in the Republican party today is not directed at how to make government work better. It is directed against government, and no one channels that anger better than Rick Perry.

That Perry has his sights set on Washington, the place he professes to loathe, would explain a lot—for starters, why he decided to seek four more years as governor, despite rumors that he had told many of his key supporters that if they stuck with him in 2006 (when Hutchison was openly considering running against him) he wouldn’t run again. Hutchison declined to challenge him, no doubt expecting a clear field in 2010, and Perry became Governor 39 Percent after a four-way race. Following this poor showing, most people, myself included, thought there was no way he could face the voters again. He would become Texas’s longest-serving governor, take a victory lap, and make easy money on the boards of companies that had benefited from his governorship.

But that is not how events played out. Perry’s inner circle, particularly his consultant Dave Carney, has believed that he has had national potential at least since 2006. Carney made that point during an interview I had with the Perry team that summer for a story about the upcoming governor’s race. Carney is from New Hampshire, the incubator of presidential ambitions, and he knows what it takes to succeed on a national level. The rest is my hypothesis: Sometime in 2007, after Perry had been sworn in for his second term, his team surveyed the Republican field and the wreckage of the Bush presidency and recognized that 2008 was destined to be a Democratic year. They saw no one in the GOP field who was capable of defeating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. (Best not to mention John Edwards.) But they also saw that the two leading Democrats were destined to be unpopular with older white males, the core constituency of the Republican party. The Democratic winner in 2008 was at risk of being a one-term president.

Will Perry's talent for identifying voter blocs, separating them and catering to those blocs which will make a difference transfer to the national stage?

Obama spent at least six years making those calculations and we can see the results. Rick Perry may well be the person the Republican Party has been looking for to defeat Obama in 2012 and if it looks like he is, nothing is going to stop him from getting the Republican nomination for President and taking a strong run against Obama.

Democrats need to learn the true lessons about Rick Perry

Perry is one of the finest politician working in America today. Most of what you have seen in the media is Perry catering to the key voters groups he needed for his next election. Do NOT underestimate the man!

Here is a revealing article on Perry in today's Houston Chronicle. It's called "5 lessons Perry learned in his political career." I have no doubt at all that Perry is the sharpest politician and the best placed one in the running for the Republican Presidential nomination today.

The second element "Trust your Team" is going to be important after he goes far right to get the nomination and then has to move to the center for the election. I am certain they already have that planned out as neatly as they planned his announcement to suck the wind from the sails of all the other Republican candidates during Iowa. If the very professionalism of that announcement does not just leave you with a feeling of strong admiration then you are not a true political junkie. Perry and his team have repeatedly demonstrated that level of skill here in Texas.

A second element stands out in the Houston Chronicle article. Like Obama, Perry has quickly become adept at using social media to campaign extremely effectively below the level of the MSM. Political wonks don't see this level so the results often come as a nasty surprise as the votes are counted.

The Republicans don't particularly like any other of the candidates for the nomination either. As soon as they see Perry is serious and moving on the nomination they are going to coalesce around Perry like salt crystals on a string in a supersaturated solution. (Do they still do that experiment in high school chemistry these days?)

One element of the coalescing is going to be to bury the embarrassing secessionist and similar statements in a mass of FOX and Limbaugh verbiage. It was done for "Shrub" and it'll be done again for "Good Hair" - but smoother and more effectively.

Don't plan on "Good Hair" making a major misstep on the national political scene. His reputation for being stupid is a self-defeating lie spread by his (very many) political enemies, much as Bill Clinton's Arkansas political enemies spread lies about him. If you believe it you'll never take the actions needed to defeat him. Unlike the other potential Republican Presidential nominees, to defeat "Good Hair" the Democrats will have to bring their A-game.

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Addendum 1:44 PM CDT
I just discovered Red Dirt & Sand. It's a blog on Texas politics, and the blogger has been focusing on Rick Perry.

I'd like to do a similar focus but with a family member undergoing chemotherapy I simply do not have the time I need. Right now I am more likely to spend time posting on care of the Central Venous Catheter, changing dressings and flushing. Nursing was not one of my preferred occupations, but you do what you need to do.

Go read Kenneth Franks blog. We are all going to need to know more about Rick Perry quite soon.

Texas; The inevitable long-term result of conservative philosophy in government

Texas under the control of conservative evangelical Republicans for more than a decade now is seeing the result of the conservative Republican low-tax low services small government business-friendly philosophy. The following information is from Texas Senator Eliot Shapleigh:

After a decade under Perry, Texas is last in the number of people who have a high school degree and near last in average SAT scores. Texas is second in population only to California; yet Texas doesn't have a single public university in the top forty while California has five. Perry’s own Select Commission on Higher Education and Global Competitiveness declared that:

Texas is not globally competitive. The state faces a downward spiral in both quality of life and economic competitiveness if it fails to educate more of its growing population (both young and adults) to higher levels of attainment, knowledge and skills.

Texans breathe air with more carcinogens than citizens of any other state. Perry’s highway department is broke; within two years, by admission of Perry’s former chief of staff, now chair of the highway department, the department will have no money to build new roads.

On the streets of Texas, predatory lenders now charge Texas families interest rates of 1100% per year.

Over the last few days, in the sharp glare of national headlines on health reform, Perry’s health record has become a national scandal. By percentage and number, Texas has more uninsured than any state in America, with one out of four Texans lacking health insurance. In some Texas counties, up to 40% have no health insurance. Contrary to the claims of some, even if non-citizens (who include legal residents as well as undocumented immigrants) were removed from the statewide estimate, Texas would still have the highest uninsured rate in the country with 4.1 million uninsured citizens.

One in six uninsured American children resides in Rick Perry’s Texas. In 2003, Perry cut over 200,000 kids from the state's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Over the course of his tenure, rather than insure more kids with the $958 million that the federal government specifically set aside for Texas to expand CHIP, Perry sent those taxpayer dollars back to Washington, D.C. so that other states like Illinois could use those dollars to provide coverage to all of their children. In 2009, when 29 of 31 Texas Senators voted to expand CHIP, Perry said he’d veto the bill.

Our state ranks in the bottom ten in the U.S. when it comes to the number of physicians, dentists and nurses per capita. Here in El Paso, with thousands of new troops on the way to Ft. Bliss, we struggle to provide care with fewer doctors and nurses per capita than any large city in the country.

Due to the lowest reimbursement rates in the U.S., nursing homes are leaving Texas just as baby boomers seek care. After years of opposition to basic public health education, Texas is second in the U.S. in teen pregnancies.

When it comes to care for our most vulnerable Texans, all 13 of Texas’ state schools for the mentally retarded have been under a Department of Justice investigation for systemic abuse and neglect. "Fight clubs" at the Corpus Christi State School, where staff pitted residents against one another, recently made headlines on CNN.

That is the reality of Rick Perry’s Texas today. When change is on the way, Perry talks of suing the U.S. government to stop it. Here’s what he said in recent radio interview:

I think you’ll hear states and governors standing up and saying 'no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their healthcare. So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats.

What philosophy was Perry talking about? President Obama’s plan to provide health care coverage to every American, even Texans.

Who benefits from Rick Perry’s reality? In Texas today, three of the most expensive hospitals in the U.S. rake in profits, with charges that are almost three times the national average. Brownsville Medical Center was #8. From El Paso, Sierra Medical Center was #37 and Providence Memorial Hospital was #46. All three are owned by Tenet Healthcare Corporation.

Is Tenet's priority patient care or maximizing profits? Let's look at some numbers. The average cost of cardiac care at Providence Memorial Hospital is more than $15,000 per day, and at Sierra Medical Center, it's more than $18,000 per day. At University Medical Center of El Paso—the "public option"—it's less than $4,000 per day. In other words, these Tenet-owned hospitals charge about four times what the public hospital charges. And that's why Tenet spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to kill our new Children's Hospital, another "public option."

Rick Perry’s Texas is also home to health insurance companies for whom record profit, not better patient care, is the prime value. Health insurance premiums have risen substantially over the last decade. From 1996 to 2006, the cost of family coverage in Texas increased 85.7%. Over the same time period, our incomes increased just 8.6%. With premiums growing 10 times faster than incomes, coverage becomes less affordable for more and more Texans every year.

Conservative philosophy is essentially the refusal to permit anyone to plan and work for long-term social goals combined with permitting wealthy individuals to prey at will and unrestrained on most customers in the economy. Conservatism is an abdication of social goals if those goals interfere with the effort of self-centered powerful wealthy individuals who want only to increase their own personal wealth. Senator Shapleigh provides the numbers behind the last decade and a half of conservative control of the Texas government, and it is almost all bad - unless you take the view that only wealthy families who want to get richer matters and everyone else should sacrifice to support them.

Removing Rick Perry as Governor in the November 2010 election is a start to correcting the conservative stupidity that dominates Texas today.

GOP - Party of Death and Torture, but Perry approves clemency once

Texas has executed 400 people since the death penalty was reinstated. As of today, Gov. Rick Perry (Republican) has approved this one act of clemency which will keep a man for going to the needle for a murder he didn't know was happening.

Perry's clemency approval is one more than his predecessor, George Bush, approved.

What I can't understand is what happened to Rick? Is the stalwart representative of God and the GOP who is Governor of Texas going soft? I doubt it. There must really be some political backlash that Governor "Goodhair" is facing. I wonder what it is?

Maybe the Texas GOP is finding that promoting executions and torture is becoming less popular with the voters? I sure hope so.