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GOP-Land is all a twitter, now that Texas Governor Rick Perry has announced that he’s ready to ascend to the White House.
His candidacy was actually launched the week before at a Prayer-A-Palooza he held in Houston, where he consecrated himself as the Christian candidate. Only about 30,000 evangelicals attended Perry’s public prayer spectacle in a cavernous football stadium, but the presidential wannabe got saturation coverage by the media, which has gone ga-ga over yet another small-minded, right-wing, Texas governor.
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If the media had any real journalistic curiosity about what kind or national “leader” this guy would be, they could have slipped away on that same day to the city’s convention center. There, a much larger crowd of 100,000 Houstonians had gathered in bleak testimony to Perry’s gubernatorial “leadership.” They were some of Houston’s many low-income children and parents, struggling to make ends meet in Perry’s hard-scrabble Texas economy.
These needy families had come to a citywide back-to-school event where backpacks, school supplies, uniforms, haircut vouchers, immunizations, and bags of food were being provided by the school district. Officials had expected 25,000 to show up, but four times that number came – some families had camped out for hours before the doors opened, and many were turned away as supplies were exhausted by 10 a.m. “It shows the need,” said a solemn school spokesman.
Perry is known in Texas as “Governor Supercuts,” not only for his spiffy hairdo, but also for cutting the budgets of schools and poverty programs and holding down wages. In his 10-year tenure, Perry has created more minimum wage jobs than all other states combined, and his superrich state now has more families in poverty than any other. Can you say “President Supercuts?”
“Prayer Rally Dwarfed By Texans Who Flock To Nearby Convention Center, Desperate For Free School Supplies,” www.thinkprogress.org, August 8, 2011.
“Run, Rick, Run,” The Texas Observer, May 30, 2011.
“Perry’s No Slam Dunk,” www.burntorangereport.com, July 6, 2011.
“Lege By The Numbers,” Texas Observer, March 9, 2011.