Does Rick Perry know much? This is the man that everyone will be fawning all over during his media honeymoon, but it is worth asking, is this man a nitwit?
It is clear from our history that you don’t have to be great brain to be president. It might matter if you are a successful president or not, but being a little short in the metal acuity department does not seem to be a disqualifier.
In some ways modern campaigning puts some selection pressure against the smart folks. Think about what campaigning really is. A candidate gets to do one of two things, give his stump speech and talk to donors so he or she has the money to go give his or her stump speech some more.
If you’ve never been in a position where you have to say the same words over and over and over again it is hard to appreciate how mind numbing it can be. Do more than a couple of hundred performances of anything, even Shakespeare and you are faced with the problem of keeping it fresh.
For a smart person this can be really wearing. They understand that there is an optimal way of presenting information and know they have to stay on message no matter how boring. A less intelligent person won’t have as much problem with that.
Take George W. Bush (please!), he is not a very smart fellow. But he was super at campaigning. He could say the same canards over and over and over without a break or any seeming boredom with it. It is a big part of his being able to become president (that and a Supreme Court that was supremely wrong in its reasoning).
Which brings us back to the newest Texan Governor to run for office. Gov. Perry has a long history of shooting off his mouth about a wide range of issues. Just since he announced his campaign he has questioned the president’s patriotism and has said that if Fed Chairman Bernanke would be treasonous if he uses the power of the Fed to print money to help the economy.
You could argue that it is just rhetoric to use the only crime defined in the Constitution, that there is not really any belief that it is “giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States” for the Fed to do its job of attempting to keep inflation low and employment high, but that would be willfully looking away from what passes as intellectual discourse in the modern GOP.
Then there is the whole “Response” religious event. Sure, the Religious Right is an important constituency in the Republican Party, but what kind of idiot thinks that having your name associated with a bunch of religious extremists, right before a presidential run that will need Independents to win is a good idea? Why not just go burn some crosses on the lawn of Mosques while your at it?
It has not been a boon to Republican candidates to have a lot of seeming intelligence for as long as I can remember. It seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of decades as the war in expertise has been jacked up higher and higher. When else could someone as perpetually confused and misinformed as Michele Bachmann been seriously considered for the highest elected position in the nation?
Can someone who is so loose at the mouth but light in the brains really get the Republican nod? Well, the evidence seems to point to yes. Just look at Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle. Neither of them were exactly lining up to be Rhodes Scholars yet they were the pick of the GOP for Senate in two wildly different states.
Like all Republicans Perry is going to toe the Tea Party line. He has walked back many of the mildly good ideas he had and implemented in Texas. The best, which he is no repudiating, was the insistence that girls be immunized against the human papillomavirus.
Of course since the Teahadists think that being protected from a virus that causes more than half of all cervical cancer is going to make young women more promiscuous they are against it. Which is why Perry is backing away. When a candidate has to pledge fealty to dumbass ideas like that it makes the job of determining his intelligence a lot harder.
Still between a long history of dumb statements and actions, a set of transcripts that show is he was not very focused in college and his vacuous manner I think it is safe to assume that this is man in the same kind of uncurious and narrow minded political view as George W. Bush.
All of this leads me to conclude, by paraphrasing George H. W. Bush, with this; Read my lips; No New Texans!
The floor is yours.