Rick Perry: Down But Not Out

After watching his fortunes decline precipitously in the last month, Rick Perry hopes to turn his campaign around. In recent days he has shaken up his campaign staff, hiring Joe Allbaugh, who ran George W's 2000 campaign. He has also hired pollster Tony Fabrizo, media consultant, Curt Anderson and Nelson Warfield who was a spokesman for the Dole 1996 campaign. Fabrizo, Anderson, and Warfield recently worked together on Florida Governor Rick Scott's successful campaign.

Perry has also picked up the endorsement of magazine publisher and two time presidential candidate Steve Forbes. Of course with Forbes comes support for the flat tax, an idea championed by Forbes in two presidential primaries. Endorsing the flat tax, as Perry has done, gives the campaign something other than the tired "it worked in Texas" refrain. Unlike Herman Cain's 9.9.9 plan the flat tax notion is simply and campaign tested. Cain's plan was simple at its inception but as criticism mounted he added carve outs and caveats like pizza toppings until he got a Rube Goldberg machine with everything on it. There was already a flat tax constituency before there was a Rick Perry on the national scene and every imaginable objection to it has been aired. Adopting the flat tax proposal may have been Perry's brightest decision he has made to date.

Charlie Cook, a very clever Democratic pollster, wrote a piece last week which I intended to comment on but never did. In it he sardonically refers to Romney as the bird in the hand candidate. In other words, he's good enough to win with but there are plenty of Republicans that don't like him. Cook argues that many Republicans very much want to vote for someone like Perry but Perry keeps giving them reason not to. On Herman Cain he says, "it's a good bet that Cain is little more than a place for conservatives to window shop while they decide what to do."

Give Perry two positives. His version of "drill baby drill" is popular and sound policy and will find plenty of support in areas that are just beginning to see the benefits of the drilling boom. His flat tax taps into a very real public yearning for drastic tax reform. Play around with the idea of receiving your tax withholding data from your employer on your smart phone, enter the number of personal exemptions, interest from your savings account, forget about capital gains and dividends from your broker and run it through an app and e-mail it to the IRS. This plan does not need a lot of selling.

Perry's worst mistake was his mishandling of the in-state tuition issue. He could have and should have noted it's a pretty small budget item. It has only cost Texas some $30 million over its ten year life. Also he should have noted that 12 other states have similar laws on their books and the Florida bill was introduced by then Speaker of the state assembly, one Marco Rubio. He should have said that the state of Texas would rather collect taxes from a recently graduated dental hygienist than give her food stamps. There is a lot Rick Perry can do to save himself and maybe he is beginning to do some of it.