Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry's main message to prospective 2016 voters is, if nothing else, very simple: You should vote for me because I'm pretty sure I won't screw up this time. In this particular instance "screw up" means not properly sucking up to the rabid chuckleclucks that make up the
Iowa Republican base.
On Monday, Perry said he’d learned his lesson from 2012.
“I parachuted in here and I didn’t give Iowans an opportunity to get to know who I was and talk to them about the issues,” Perry told reporters. “I will not make that mistake again.”
And won't that be fun, because there's no part of the Republican primary process that's quite as prone to nutty quotes and delusional panderfests as the initial pilgrimages to Iowa to let Iowa Republicans, the people who continue to prove their we-are-the-basest-of-the-base legitimacy by electing people like Steve Melon-Calves King and Joni The Castrator Ernst, get to know who you are. Or who you want them to think you are.
The former governor slammed Washington for collecting money through taxes and “using it to blackmail” states into meeting standards around infrastructure, education and health care delivery.
Those bastards. It's almost like we're a single nation or something.
“Then the economy grows. The resources come in that add to the tax coffers so that you have the dollars to hire the teachers, to build the transportation infrastructure, to deliver the health care … . If you don’t get that right first, at some point in time it starts deteriorating.”
Now I will freely admit here that I have no idea what the ex-governor of Texas is going on about in these lectures, and since I'm generally a person who can stay on top of these things I'm going to chalk it up to one of two most likely possibilities. One, Rick Perry is speaking in gibberish, things that sound like words someone might say when they are running for president but which have so little meaning as to merely be packing peanuts in the candidate's mouth: Having standards for infrastructure is "blackmail"? Collected tax money should be doled out to people like Rick Perry without stipulation? Rick Perry is
for hiring teachers and building infrastructure now?
Or two, he's already speaking that most foreign of American dialects, the Republican Running In Iowa dialect, the one in which every phrase is a dog whistle meaning 20 other things that the inner conservative heart feels deeply about but which to the rest of us comes across as "the feds are blackmailing us by wanting to give people health care" or similar word-sprays. In either case, Iowa Rick Perry has already evolved beyond our ability to parse out what the hell he is going on about, so the only pertinent question is whether Iowa Republicans think they know what he's going on about or, just as likely, whether they are as confused as we are.