Rick Perry made national headlines in 2009 when, during a speech to a Tea Party group, he floated the possibility that Texas could secede from the union. But the governor’s substantive ties to the neo-Confederate movement may be deeper than previously known.
A 1998 voting guide published by a leading neo-Confederate group and obtained by Salon not only endorses Perry for lieutenant governor but also describes him as “a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.” Perry’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the governor’s possible membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
This is the document, published by the League of the South on its website DixieNet.org; it was unearthed by Edward Sebesta, a Texas-based independent researcher and co-editor of “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction.” (Click the image for larger size.)
The organization that publishes DixieNet describes its mission in openly secessionist terms: “The League of the South is a Southern Nationalist organization whose ultimate goal is a free and independent Southern republic.” Its core beliefs include the abolition of the income tax and central banking, a Southern republic that “revives the use of State Militias in place of maintaining large, standing armies,” and a society that “perpetuates the chivalric ideal of manhood.” The group rejects “the American Empire that now occupies the South.”
Perry, who in 1998 was Texas’ commissioner of agriculture running in a fiercely contested lieutenant governor’s race, was praised by the League of the South as a “solid, conservative candidate” who would provide a “tremendous boost” to efforts in the Legislature to proclaim April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. (A few months after the election, in April 1999, the Texas state Senate did just that, though it’s not clear if Perry played any role.) On Election Day ’98, Perry narrowly beat out Democrat John Sharp to become the state’s first Republican lieutenant governor since Reconstruction — an outcome that positioned Perry to rise to the state’s top job two years later, when George W. Bush left the governorship to become president.
What about the Sons of Confederate Veterans? Founded in 1896, it offers genealogical services, sells Confederate memorabilia and literature, and has lobbied to make Confederate flag license plates available around the country, and to keep the Stars and Bars flying at government buildings.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the group experienced years of internal conflict between moderate and radical factions, essentially between those who wanted to focus on maintaining historical sites and supporting research and those who were committed to glorifying the Confederacy — in some cases, out-and-out white supremacists.
The latter faction seems to be in the ascendancy these days.
Visitors to the Sons of Confederate Veterans website are confronted by a video of a man in a gray uniform who proclaims, “One hundred and fifty years ago the men of the South left our homes and families to protect them from an illegal invasion and to fight for the rights our states held under the Constitution.” He continues: “Too many in your time want to tell lies about us and the reasons we went to war. We fought for you. It is now your turn to stand up to the South.”
Slavery is not mentioned.
The group also says the “citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America.”
Ray Wainner, Texas division adjutant at the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told me that Perry’s name did not appear in the group’s membership records — but that they only go back to 2001. The national office of the Sons of Confederate Veterans did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And Perry’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Whether or not Perry was ever a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, we know for certain that he has a little-examined history of associating with neo-Confederates and expressing sympathy for their cause.
In 2000, for instance, Bush was locked in a heated South Carolina presidential primary contest with John McCain in which the question of the Confederate flag and its presence atop the state’s capitol played a prominent role. (Bush basically punted, saying it was a state issue.) At the same time, back in Texas, the NAACP demanded that two plaques bearing Confederate symbols be removed from the state Supreme Court building. The plaques were ultimately removed (sparking a decade of litigation pushed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans), but not before Lt. Gov. Perry weighed in on the side of the neo-Confederates.
According to the Washington Times (via Nexis), in March 2000 Perry fired off a letter to Denne Sweeney, Texas commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans: “Although this is an emotional issue,” he wrote, “I want you to know that I oppose efforts to remove Confederate monuments, plaques, and memorials from public property. I also believe that communities should decide whether statues or other memorials are appropriate for their community.”
(Sweeney, for his part, later ascended to the position of commander in chief of the national Sons of Confederate Veterans, where, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, he presided over “a purge of some 300 members, accused of disloyalty for criticizing racism in the SCV.”)
After Bush was elected president and Perry became governor, he maintained his warm relations with Confederate-affiliated groups. Perry was featured in the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine for a July 2001 visit to the 25th anniversary celebration of a library that had been given an archival collection of Confederate materials. (Click the image for larger size.)
(The United Daughters of the Confederacy is the group whose patent was opposed in 1993 by Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, which in turn earned her the opposition of the League of the South in that 1998 voter guide above.)
Fast-forward to 2007, when, after being reelected for the second time in a landslide, Perry invited right-wing rocker Ted Nugent to play at his inauguration ball. Nugent showed up in a Confederate-flag shirt (and toting a machine gun, picture here), prompting a minor outcry from black groups. But Perry’s spokesman went on the record saying that Perry would have invited Nugent even if the governor had known in advance that Nugent was going to wear the flag shirt; and Nugent himself said Perry called him in the days after the event and, speaking about the controversy, encouraged Nugent to “give ‘em hell.”
In 2008, Perry was featured in the pages of the Confederate Veteran, the magazine of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He is pictured presenting a state flag that had flown over the capitol to Billy Ford, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans camp in Corsicana, Texas. That group’s mission statement says it exists “to preserve the memory of the Confederate soldier, and to help to spread the truth of the cause for which he fought.” (Click the image for full size.)
So how does the Perry of 2011 — the likely presidential hopeful who will have to appeal to plenty of Northerners — view the Civil War and these neo-Confederate groups? We may find out soon. The Sons of Confederate Veterans is pushing for a Confederate-flag license plate in Texas, but when the state motor vehicle board voted on the matter back in April, it was a 4-4 tie, with one absence. Since then, one member died and the board is waiting for Perry to appoint a replacement. Stay tuned…
UPDATE 7/14/11: Perry spokeswoman Catherine Frazier issues this denial: “[T]he governor never joined that group nor has he ever paid any dues to it.”
I’ve asked her if he has a position on the pending license plate issue, and if I hear back I will update this post.
UPDATE 8/8/11: Sweeney disputes the SPLC’s characterization of his tenure at the national Sons of Confederate Veterans. He emails:
The part about the purge is absolutely false — there were no such purges, even on a small scale. At one point, some members proposed that we purge those few dissidents who were trying to overthrow the elected leadership of the SCV in court, but I and other members of my administration quickly put a stop to such actions, which were against the SCV bylaws. Also, there were no criticisms of racism — this is a myth started by the dissidents when they lost in court; they then tried to destroy the SCV at the state level by alleging that the SCV was being overtaken by racists. I personally investigated this matter and no one was ever able to supply me with any names of alleged racists.
We take our history and heritage stance very seriously and would quickly remove any members who proved to be racists. As a result, we have a number of African-American members and are actively seeking more. Any man who is descended from a Confederate soldier is welcome to join the SCV.
Mitt Romney accidentally said he likes firing people the other day, sort of. A fair reading of his statement, in context, is much less damning. He was talking about insurance companies, and he was saying he likes the idea that a consumer can “fire” someone providing them a service and choose someone else to provide that service, which is well and good.
(I happen to think the “fire people” gaffe did reveal something essential about Romney’s character: Not that he’s a heartless capitalist robber baron, but that the man is incapable of speaking off-the-cuff without saying something bizarre and tone-deaf. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” is just a really weird phrase, and an odd way of expressing a perfectly reasonable sentiment.)
Of course, his rivals for the Republican nomination wisely ignored the greater context and promptly turned “I like being able to fire people” into a ringtone. Which they are supposed to do, because they’re running for president against this guy.
But Gingrich and Huntsman and Perry are seizing on this “gaffe” in the midst of a campaign against Romney that has grown increasingly (and to an outsider amusingly) class-based, to the horror and disgust of conservative elders.
Rick Perry, in particular, has basically become a communist:
“Now, I have no doubt Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, of all the jobs that they killed,” Mr. Perry said. “I’m sure he was worried that he would run out of pink slips.”
He said that people in nearby Gaffney, S.C., in particular, “would find his comments incredible,” because it is where Mr. Perry said Bain shut down a plant and fired 150 workers.
“That didn’t happen until Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, they looted that company with more than $20 million in management fees.”
This is an attack on successful corporate restructuring! Perry added that “there is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failures and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business,” which is basically a wholesale rejection of the free market system.
(Even the reasonable Jon Huntsman got shrill: “Governor Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.”)
Sarah Palin is among those attempting to stanch the bleeding by blaming the bad old liberal media for attacking Romney for his success, but everyone can plainly see who’s actually responsible.
It looks like Republican opinion leaders are beginning to coalesce around Romney due in part to disgust over anti-capitalist attacks being levied against him. Of course, his rivals wouldn’t be pushing this line if they didn’t think it was effective. The irony is that the Republican candidates are shameless enough to embrace the exact arguments conservatives and centrists have successfully shamed liberals out of making.
One frustrating fact of life for a lot of progressives and left-wingers is that full-throated economic populism practically doesn’t exist in the Democratic Party. What passes for “class warfare” nowadays is the the president apologetically suggesting that the top marginal tax rate eventually be restored to a level far below where it stood for the majority of the Reagan administration. (Or even simple defenses of the welfare state, in the case of that radical Elizabeth Warren.)
Republicans have continued to practice the “cultural” populism (or white populism or Southern populism) that has served them well since they absorbed the conservative Dixiecrat vote while Democrats have come to find class-based populism extremely distasteful and counterproductive, as neoliberalism took hold and the eastern Rockefeller Republican class became the effective center of power in the Democratic Party (which admittedly did counter the Reagan-era GOP’s massive fundraising advantage). Ron Paul’s newsletters and Newt Gingrich’s “food stamp president” line and Rick Perry’s massive prayer festival and every candidate’s constant invocation of dastardly “elites” are all the “acceptable” kind of populism: the kind based on amorphous racial and tribal resentments and not economics. But the reason the GOP and rich centrists cry foul when the other kind of populism is hinted at is because it works, really well, because unmitigated capitalism is really destructive and awful for huge segments of the population.
But desperation and shameless vote-grubbing makes it all too tempting to bridge the gap between the two forms of populism, as horrified conservative observers can now see. The “deal” has always been that you offer red meat to the rubes and all’s fair as long as once in power you devote your energies to ensuring that people like the Kochs can operate without scrutiny and perhaps with a bit of extra tax incentives. You’re not supposed to go after the real elites, though — just public school teachers and people who enjoy fresh greens.
I am all in favor of the GOP adopting economic populism, even if it’s for their own evil ends, because it makes it marginally more likely that leftists will be allowed to try it out themselves again, some day.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman (Credit: AP)
The flailing Rick Perry is trying to revive his sinking campaign by histrionically announcing he’s changed his views on abortion and now opposes it even in cases of rape and incest. Apparently Perry met a young woman who’d been conceived as a result of rape, and that changed his mind.
“Looking in her eyes, I couldn’t come up with an answer to defend the exemptions for rape and incest,” he said at a “tele-town hall” sponsored by far-right Iowa radio host Steve Deace. “And over the course of the last few weeks, the Christmas holidays and reflecting on that … all I can say is that God was working on my heart.”
It’s just one more step toward society’s political margins for the GOP contenders. Perry has already announced his support for the “personhood” movement, which declares that life begins the moment an egg is fertilized, a measure that was rejected by the deep-red state of Mississippi as too extreme. But Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum also back the personhood crusade. That’s your modern Republican Party: It makes Mississippi look liberal. They’d like women to have more rights before they’re born than after.
It’s obvious the Tea Party is pulling the GOP even further to the right. While the movement’s fans used to insist it was about the economy, not social issues, in fact its House caucus has used its year in office working harder to stop all funding for Planned Parenthood than to reduce unemployment. The House even passed a bill that lets health providers “exercise their conscience” and refuse to perform an abortion even in cases where the woman would die without the procedure. (h/t Digby)
But their target is no longer just abortion, but contraception as well. At Tuesday’s “tele-town hall,” Bachmann lied about President Obama’s Plan B stance, insisting the president is “putting abortion pills for young minors, girls as young as 8 years of age or 11 years of age, on [the] bubblegum aisle.” Of course, Obama backed HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to override the FDA and refuse to allow Plan B to be sold on drugstore shelves, specifically citing concerns about young girls. Personhood legislation would make the IUD illegal, as well as any measure that interferes with a fertilized egg attaching itself to the uterine wall, including some fertility treatments.
Resurgent front-runner Mitt Romney stands apart from the far right on some of these issues. He hasn’t supported personhood legislation, for instance (yet). But in some ways Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion is as disturbing as his rivals’ extreme anti-choice fanaticism. Running for Massachusetts governor, Romney told voters he’d become pro-choice after a close family friend died due to a botched illegal abortion. (Salon’s Justin Elliott told the tragic story here.) What happened to his feeling for that friend? How could he flip-flop again, after a supposed moral and political awakening like that? And libertarian Ron Paul opposes full liberty for women: He’s antiabortion (though he’d leave it to each state to decide). The man who wants to deregulate industry wants to regulate women’s bodies. That doesn’t sound like libertarianism to me.
Will the GOP’s continuing shift right on abortion, clearly intended to court the religious-right base during the primaries, hurt the party in the general election? I have to assume so. Ever since Ronald Reagan campaigned with the blessing of the Christian right, there’s been a pronounced difference between men and women when it comes to their attitude toward the Republican Party. Women have been registering and voting increasingly Democratic, not just because of abortion rights or other so-called women’s issues. It’s also because women are more likely to believe in a government safety net, to back programs like Head Start, education funding and other services for poor families as well as Social Security and Medicare. I don’t think that means women are more compassionate than men; I think it reflects their greater economic vulnerability, since poverty rates are higher and median incomes lower for women than men. Clearly the far-right GOP is writing off increasing numbers of women, as well as blacks and Latinos, immigrants, and gay people. Good luck with that, long term.
There are two warring forces at work in the world: One is the empowerment of women, especially in the developing world. There is no magic bullet for global poverty, but the only thing that comes close is expanding education and human rights for girls. Educated girls have children later, and when they do become mothers, their children are healthier and better educated. Their family incomes rise, and so do the living standards of their community. It is clear that promoting the rights and status of women improves the well-being of the entire society; some people, and governments, get that, globally.
But there’s also an intensifying hostility to full freedom for women in all corners of the world. One of Wednesday’s most disturbing stories was the New York Times tale of an 8-year-old Orthodox Jewish Israeli girl spat upon and abused by ultra-Orthodox bullies because even her modest outfits didn’t conform to their stifling dress code for girls and women. Israel, which was once defended as a European enlightenment outpost in the supposedly backward Middle East, is facing a rising tide of far-right religious activism trying to ensure that women are neither seen nor heard outside the home. Literally. These crusaders believe in separate worship for each gender, because men are not supposed to hear a woman’s voice in public, not even singing hymns. On some bus lines serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, women are literally made to sit at the back of the bus.
Meanwhile, the Arab Spring hasn’t ushered in more rights for women. In the “new” post-Mubarak Egypt, men are using sexual assault and violence to suppress female activists. Islamic fundamentalists, like their ultra-Orthodox Jewish brothers, likewise want to make women second-class citizens.
No, I’m not comparing the personhood movement or the GOP contenders to violent misogynist Egyptians or to the religious extremists who want to exclude women from Israeli or Arab public life. But the increasing extremism on choice that is now seeping into public policy on contraception reflects a related discomfort with full personhood for women. There is no freedom or equality for women without reproductive freedom. Having been raised a Catholic, I understand religious objections to abortion, and my only answer is, by all means, don’t have one. Work to make them less common. A rape victim who doesn’t want an abortion is of course free to make that decision. But a secular society has no business imposing one religion’s values on everyone. (Lost in all the insanity about abortion is the fact that the incidence of abortion has declined by at least a third since the 1980s.)
Michelle Goldberg and I talked about increasing GOP extremism on abortion on MSNBC’s “Hardball” today:
Ten contributors to the conservative blog RedState have collaborated on a post endorsing Rick Perry for the presidency. Yes, that Rick Perry. The one who hasn’t led a national poll of Republicans since late September. The one who only makes headlines when he says something amusingly stupid. “Don’t settle,” their headline urges. Don’t settle for someone who doesn’t routinely humiliate himself every single time he attempts to speak extemporaneously.
The post lays out Perry’s oft-told history of being a true conservative tax-cuttin’ god-fearin’ job-creator, says every other candidate is vulnerable and insists that Perry can win. But what about the fact that the guy appears to be the dumbest person in the room every time he’s in front of a camera? Oh, that’s a minor problem, really.
The one knock on Perry is that his poor debate performances and periodic campaign trail gaffes will open him to the same vulnerabilities in office as President Bush: an inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies.
Perry’s poor communication skills are easily overcome:
Second, debating skill takes on outsize importance in the primaries, when candidates have to stand out on a stage crowded with 7 or 8 people who all agree with each other 80-90% of the time. All Rick Perry needs to do is step onstage and everyone will know how he’s different from Barack Obama.
Well, that’s undeniable. (Emphasis mine.)
The “Not Mitt Romney” coalition — remember the internet petition? — is basically out of time. We’ll see, after Iowa, whether they give up or go with Perry, should he eke out a decent finish.
It’s actually within the realm of possibility that Perry could take the nomination, I guess. One poll has him at third place in Iowa again, with Gingrich declining. He has a lot of money.
But Perry is precisely the sort of toxic candidate that the White House would be thrilled to run against. (Most recent polls show Obama barely beating Romney, and handily trouncing Perry.) The two things he’s made headlines for recently have been going well outside the mainstream with desperate anti-gay bigotry and double dipping on his massive government pension.
RedState founder Erick Erickson has previously written a dejected post bemoaning the inevitable nomination of Romney, and wishing he could take back his rejection of Jon Huntsman. But it’s obviously too late for that. Erickson did not jump on the Perry bandwagon and isn’t likely to any time soon.
These guys are just nostalgic for that brief moment when Perry showed up to save the party from nominating that unlikable loser Romney, before the governor ruined it all by opening his mouth. It’s just about that mental image of Barack Obama and Rick Perry on a stage together, and fantasizing that the scales will fall from the eyes of everyone in America, and they’ll all realize that that is what a president is supposed to look like.
They quote a blogger (also highlighted by the great Roy Edroso) making the most intriguing argument for Rick Perry I’ve yet seen:
Until yesterday, I wasn’t completely sure why I liked Rick Perry so much. I have a list of reasons, but none of them really got to the root of why I like him.
Yesterday the reason finally dawned on me. I watched this wonderful 11-minute video from Ben Howe entitled “The Rick Perry I Know”…
… and I had a revelation: Rick Perry is just like my Dad.
And there’s the decision-making process of the conservative base, laid bare. Vote for dumb right-wing dad.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Which FTD Thank You bouquet do you think John Pike sent Rick Perry this week? Did he go for the “Sweet Splendor” or the “Because You’re Special”? Maybe he opted for the Hickory Farms sausage and cheese box? He must have done something grand, because who else but Rick Perry could have provided the Internet with the most funny-horrible thing since Pepper Spray Cop?
You’ve seen the “Strong” video by now. Your friends have posted it all over Facebook, usually with a string of LOLs underneath. In a campaign ad that, unfortunately for Perry, strongly evokes both Heath Ledger’s tormented performance and his sartorial leanings in “Brokeback Mountain,” the man who uproariously still believes he has a shot at the White House says, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” He goes on to promise, “As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.” (Perry staffers are already distancing themselves from responsibility, with his top pollster calling the ad “nuts.”)
To Perry’s credit, he does manage to get through the entire 30 seconds without once losing his train of thought or laughing like he’s auditioning to be the villain in the next Muppets movie. Sure, he comes off like a man whose barrel is full of bullet-riddled fish when he declares he’s not ashamed to be a Christian. The Republican presidential field is otherwise littered with Muslims, Jews and atheists, I guess.
What Perry can’t do, however, is prove his mind makes logical associations – something that’s a pretty important qualification for our nation’s highest office. Perry’s prickly disdain for men and women who are serving their country would, by itself, be hateful and ignorant. But his assertion that there’s a “war on religion” interfering with Christmas celebrations? If kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas, I hope nobody tells all the tykes waiting to see Santa at the mall. But it’s that combination of those two vastly unrelated ideas that really makes the “Strong” clip pure gold. Is Perry somehow suggesting that if we can just push homosexuals back into the closet, we can then teach how Jesus fought the dinosaurs in the public schools? OK, you gays openly serving in the military! President Perry is going to mind-wipe everyone you’ve come out to! And then he’s going to put a Nativity scene in every classroom! Because that’s what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.
Excuse me, I have to go wipe these copious tears of derisive laughter off my cheeks.
It didn’t take long for Perry’s video – as brilliantly painful a piece of performance art as any of Katie Roiphe’s recent Slate columns – to become a viral sensation. It’s racked up nearly 3 million YouTube views. And though the campaign has disabled comments – no doubt in anticipation of a more critical response – on Friday the video was heading toward a half-million “dislikes,” a new YouTube record. The newly unseated “dislikes” champion, Rebecca Black, also owes someone an Edible Arrangement today.
Meanwhile, over on Facebook, Perry’s official page has drowned in thousands of comments, mostly expressing disdain. “Sure, I’ll share it,” wrote one woman. “I want EVERYONE to see ‘How to sink a campaign in 30 seconds or less.’” My personal favorite is from the person who congratulates Perry “on making Ron Paul the sane one.”
Elsewhere on the Internet, the Tumblr of Perry’s “unpopular opinions” and a cavalcade of parody videos have sprung up with the inevitability of hairy chests at a bears convention. Second City’s Andy Cobb was quick with a look-alike clip, noting that “The gay and atheist presidents didn’t get us into the war in Iraq, the financial crisis or turn your mortgage into toilet paper. It took some God-fearing vagina penetrators to do that.”
It’s likely we can enjoy the dreadfulness of Perry’s video – even as it disgusts us – because it’s evident his campaign is now as worthless as your 401K. There’s a degree of safety in this gasbag’s harmlessness, kind of like your racist uncle’s Thanksgiving rants. Offensive? Yeah. Effective? Uh, no. Yet even as we point and laugh — repeatedly — it’s sobering to remember that the sentiments Perry awkwardly expresses aren’t just the ramblings of one demented Texan. The guy did manage to get relatively far in American politics with Jesus and homophobia by his side. And though the outpouring of giddy contempt for his incompetence is encouraging, just imagine – had he been a more coherent candidate, that over the top “Strong” ad wouldn’t be funny at all.
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Scott Audette)
This is Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s moment. The GOP primary campaign has always been an effort to winnow the many candidates down to two: Mitt Romney and Not Mitt Romney. It’s got to be killing Perry (assuming he feels any pain at all) to watch Gingrich emerge as the latest Not Mitt.
Gingrich is still surging in the polls – the latest to find him in first place is CNN – and while I think his history of selling himself to corporate America will ultimately turn off Tea Partyers, what do I know about Tea Partyers, anyway? I try to give them credit for ideological consistency – they supposedly hate crony capitalism, and Newt is its poster boy – but I may be politically naive in that.
That’s where Rick Perry comes in. The guy’s got enough money to be the Not Mitt. He’s never lost an election. Surely he’s got to have more substance than it’s seemed so far – he can’t really be a stoner frat boy let loose in a presidential race. Can he? I think he can redeem a series of horrible debate performances with a good pummeling of Gingrich Tuesday night.
And why not Rick Perry, really? He managed to hire some of the campaign staff who ditched Gingrich in June, after they figured out his campaign was mainly about shilling for Gingrich Productions and the Gingrich Group. And Perry hung on to them, even after some other Newt-ditchers returned once he became the new front-runner. Perry’s Gingrich veterans have to have insight into how to unsettle him. Gingrich has gotten a free ride so far in the debates because until the last week or so, he’s been an also-ran, the tiresome, has-been uncle everyone smiles at when he makes a clever quip, or when he implores them not to take the media’s bait and turn on one another.
Rick Perry, it’s time to take the media’s bait and turn on Gingrich.
First, a couple of things not to do:
Don’t mix alcohol and pain medication, or Five Hour Energy drink and pain medication. I’m not saying you’ve done that before, I’m just saying.
Don’t attack Gingrich for calling child labor laws “truly stupid.” It was an abominable thing to say, but given the nature of these GOP debate crowds, it could be Newt’s biggest applause line of the whole campaign. Let’s face it, crowds who’ve cheered for the death penalty, letting uninsured people die of treatable illness, and an electrified border fence, and who’ve booed a gay soldier as well as your own plan to let the children of undocumented workers pay in-state tuition at Texas universities – well, they’re not going to reject Gingrich for wanting to put children to work. Forget about that one.
So then, what to do?
Do make clear that Gingrich and Romney are ideological chameleons separated at birth, the brothers Flip and Flop. Gingrich has changed positions almost as much as the Mormon the Tea Party loves to hate, in the course of making millions. He supported the individual mandate and planning for “end of life care” until the Tea Party turned those things into Obamacare and “death panels.” I know this debate is about foreign policy, and that’s not one of your strong suits (you’re still trying to find a strong suit, besides fundraising). But Gingrich’s bald-faced fakery on the question of Libya is a great issue. It’s actually worse than Herman Cain’s long brain-freeze, because nobody expects Cain to know anything. Pretend Gingrich is that coyote who messed with your daughter’s dog. If that really happened. Which it probably didn’t. Pretend whatever works.
Do pretend Gingrich is President Obama. You’ve treated the president with such practiced, suave contempt. You questioned whether he really loved his country, and you said the discredited, disgraceful birther issue — questioning whether Obama was really born here, after he’d released his long- and short-form birth certificate — is “a good issue to keep alive.” Practice that Obama-contempt in the mirror, and then Tuesday night, in the debate, turn it on Newt Gingrich. He deserves it more than Obama does. The president got 66 million votes, 53 percent of the total, in 2008. Gingrich came from a small Georgia district and squandered the political “mandate” that made him speaker by being an arrogant grifter. Pick a worthy enemy, and have fun. You can’t get to Obama without going through Gingrich, at this point. Why not enjoy it?
I talked about Gingrich’s latest outrages — backing the reversal of child labor laws and telling Occupy Wall Street protesters to “get a job” and “take a bath” Monday night on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.” With Christmas approaching I realized that Gingrich, who once proposed putting the children of welfare recipients in orphanages, is a real-life Dickensian character who must, every year at this time, root for Scrooge.
Rick Perry 
Mitt Romney and Rick Perry (Credit: AP) 
Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman (Credit: AP) 
Rick Perry (Credit: AP/Eric Gay) 
Rick Perry (Credit: rickperry.org) 
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Scott Audette) 
