Labeling him the “right leader for this moment in history,” Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas endorsed Texas Governor Rick Perry for the Republican nomination for president.
“Rick Perry balanced budgets in tough economic times, signed the largest tax cut in state history and helped Texas become the national leader in job creation. On the most important issues of our time, his record of leadership serves as a blueprint for America’s renewal,” Gov. Brownback said in a written endorsement.
Perry returned the compliment. He said Brownback is “one of the most respected voices for conservatism in the country” and added that he was “glad he trusts me to get the job done as the next president.”
Gov. Brownback may have jumped aboard the right band wagon. Gov. Perry leads the Republican pack of candidates as of today. President Obama’s poll numbers keep falling and the worsening world economic scene promises to do him further political harm.
But as a candidate for president himself four years ago, our governor didn’t make it much past the starting gate. His hard right conservatism didn’t sell. Perry’s politics are even more radical — if he really believes what he wrote in his campaign book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.”
It is in those pages that he attacks Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and advocates the repeal of the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution. The amendments authorized Congress to tax personal and corporate incomes and provided for the direct election of senators.
The income tax, he wrote, is the “road to serfdom” — a phrase he borrowed from Frederick Hayek, an Austrian economist, who wrote a book by that title — and should be abolished. Allowing the people to elect senators rather than have them appointed by state legislatures as the Founding Fathers provided, weakens states’ rights, he believes.
It would be difficult to come up with two more radical changes in the way our nation governs itself and pays for government.
BUT PERRY was also Texas chairman of the Al Gore campaign for president in 2000. Gore not only was the most avid advocate for worldwide control of greenhouse gases, but took moderate-to-liberal stands on most other national issues.
It must be assumed that Perry agreed with those positions 11 years ago. Can he really have changed his mind on every one of them in so short a time? Or is he a very accomplished reader of political tea leaves who saw that the wind was blowing hard right in Texas and decided to go with the flow?
As the fight for the nomination continues a clearer picture of his political philosophy should emerge.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
