Just got this release from Rick Perry:
Rick Perry: They called Reagan dumb, too
CBS News
Bonney Kapp
August 30, 2011http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20099519-503544.html
Texas governor Rick Perry called into the Sean Hannity radio program Tuesday afternoon, where he responded to questions about his intelligence first raised in a Politico article with the blunt headline: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”
Perry, who has surged in the polls since he announced his candidacy just over two weeks ago, shrugged off the speculation that has become fodder for cable news.
“It’s kind of the same old attacks that they made on President Reagan,” he said. “The better we do down here in Texas, my bet is the more they’re going to attack us and that’s fine. I think my record is going to stand the scrutiny of time across the country.”
Perry, who made many C’s and D’s as a student at Texas A&M, turned the attack on the Harvard-educated Barack Obama — whose transcripts have not been released to the public.
“What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers – over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster back in the ’30s and try them again in the 2000s — that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb,” he charged.
And he didn’t stop there.
Perry stoked the ‘book smarts v. street smarts’ flames by chiding President Obama for surrounding himself with academics instead of people who’ve had “real life experience.”
“They are intellectually very, very smart, but he does not have wise men and women around him. And I think that’s what his real problem is. He has listened to the academics,” he said….
Ummm… Y’all know what I think: I think Perry is going to win the nomination — unless Republicans start thinking strategically and look harder at a guy like Huntsman.
But gee, fella. Oh, yeah? Welll… they said that other guy was dumb, too! Kind of a weak defense. I think if people were saying I was dumb, I’d have come back with something sharper.
Of course, I don’t think like a partisan, and I guess among Republicans, “they said Reagan was dumb, too” is a heckuva powerful argument.
As for the “We’ve tried smart people and it didn’t work…” I’m not sure that’s a strong refutation, either…
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The “Rick Perry is dumb because he was a poor student at TAMU” line isn’t going to get much traction. It’s not a positive argument for anything, and there’s plenty of smart, successful people who didn’t do so hot in college.
The argument smacks of desperation and ad hominem. If you don’t think Perry has any good ideas, say so. But chiding him for getting a C or D in animal husbandry at TAMU in 1972 is laughable.
“They are intellectually very, very smart, but he does not have wise men and women around him. And I think that’s what his real problem is.”
Woah, back up the truck, Hoss. Wasn’t that Bush’s argument in 2000 when he said that Gore wouldn’t listen to those around him? Then he got into office and did a whole lot of listening. The kind of listening that involved packing the DOJ with law grads from Regent and and getting paid shills into regulatory positions? Then when that didn’t work he had to become the great decider?
Can someone please offer something original?
Interesting you should mention that.
When the paper endorsed Bush in the 2000 primary (the biggest argument I ever lost in my 12 years as EPE), the argument turned on that point.
I wanted McCain because I trusted HIM and HIS judgment. I wanted him making the calls. My publisher wanted Bush because he saw him as an administrator type who would not try to be the expert, but would hire good people and listen to them.
The difference was that each of us saw ourselves in those candidates. As a newspaperman, I was the pro from Dover. I knew how to do everything involved in putting out a newspaper (everything on the journalism side, not the business side), from reporting to writing to photography to editing to page design to production to… the list goes on. And I was quite good at most of them, and I fully trusted myself to call the shots. And I trusted McCain in the same way.
Fred, the publisher, was an administrator. He didn’t presume to know how to design a page or push it through production or edit copy or process a photo or any of those things. He was the boss. He hired other people, like me, to do things like that. And he thought that was the way the president should be (as opposed to a Jimmy Carter type, managing the White House tennis court schedule.) He didn’t want somebody who thought he knew everything. He wanted someone who could listen, then decide.
That was the way Fred operated, and he was a good publisher. So I saw the merit in his position.
So did others on the board. I went into that meeting (which started right after McCain left the room, a day or so after we’d met with Bush) thinking I had most of the board on my side. And I think I did.
But Fred brought a foot-high stack of papers in, and talked and talked and talked his way into winning half the room over to his position. And a publisher with half the board beats an editor with half the board. Kind of like a full house with aces over a full house with kings. Only less formal.
History would have been so different had McCain won in SC, then won the nomination (which he would have, had he won here), then won the election in 2000…
or if Gore had been sworn in–he actually DID win the election.
No, he didn’t. Ours is a society based on rules. And under the rules (including the interpretation of the rules Gore advocated in court), Gore lost.
The rules need to be changed. What we have is a very bad way of choosing the POTUS.
There is a quiet movement now that many states are adopting to circumvent the electoral college. States are passing laws that would require their state’s electors to vote for the person who received the largest number of votes nationally, regardless of how their own state voted. If states with 270 electoral votes pass this type of law then the man who wins the most votes automatically wins the most electoral votes.
I guess this is what we’ve come to in this country, passing laws to change something that can’t be changed directly. That’s why we have defacto legal marijuana in CA and some other states.
@ bud: Why all the hatin’ on the electoral college? I like the way it balances out the power between the states. Sure, it’s not perfect, but no system is perfect.
Also, changing the rules to a straight popular vote will affect the campaign. There will no longer be any “battleground” states. The candidates will simply go for the big markets where they can get the most people.
Say goodbye to campaign stops in small towns and small states. I like our quirky little system. It has a nice bit of charm and esoteric appeal. Long live the electoral college!
P.S. @Kathryn: If Gore had won his home state, he would have been President.
@ Bryan:
No man is hero in his own land.
Another comment about Gore being the legitimate winner in 2000. Recount after recount gave Bush the win in Florida and therefore, the presidency. The Supreme Court had to step in and stop the madness.
If questionable vote counting is to be brought up,refer to the Minnesota senatorial race finally won by Al Franken. They kept finding boxes of ballots in trunks that somehow didn’t get counted, disqualified votes, and an assortment of questionable actions that ended up with Franken declared the winner.
Oxen on both sides of the aisle have been “gored”. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Funny thing is, I don’t remember being clear about who I wanted to see win that night.
I tend to roam on election nights. At one point late that evening, I found myself dropping by Bud Ferillo’s office and watching TV with him for awhile. The reports went Bush… Gore… Bush… Gore. And as that happened, I couldn’t decide which of the two I thought was good news.
We had endorsed Bush, but I wasn’t that into him. And while I had problems with Gore after eight years of his trying to be a loyal Clintonista, I knew him from way back, and got along fine with him back in Tennessee.
It was a gut thing. I realized that, while we had concluded “Bush” on our endorsement, on an emotional level I just didn’t care…
Which made the bitter Long Count particularly painful to watch. To me, it was simply a matter of counting the votes under the rules in place on Election Day, and it fell out where it fell out (and it clearly, under three of four ways you could count it, including the way Gore advocated, fell out with Bush on top).
And it was even more painful to watch the way Democrats clung to their bitterness (and I’m sure, from knowing them, Republicans would have done the same), even to the present day. So that even today, perfectly reasonable, rational, good people claim that Gore won.
Thank y’all for not pointing out what my wife pointed out to me three days later… that not only with I refer to 2000 as 1980 above, but on one of my references to former publisher Fred, I said “Henry” — the name of the current publisher.
Hey, at least it was the name of a publisher. And at least 1980 was also a presidential election year…
I do that a lot — transpose decades — but usually catch myself in time. For instance, when I mean 2002, I’ll say 1992…