All Hair, No Brains Redux

Evan Smith is not a good ol' boy and he made Governor Goodhair squirm on camera less than a year ago. Today, The Atlantic's James Fallows ponders Goodhair's fortunes under intense 1-on-1 questioning on the 2012 campaign trail. View Goodhair on the grill and then consider James Fallows' take on Goodhair's ability to answer direct questions.

[x TX Trib]
Governor Rick Perry On Abstinence Education
Interviewed By TX Trib Editor-in-Chief/CEO Evan Smith (10/15/2010)

Watch live video from texastribune on Justin.tv

[Evan Smith, the former editor of Texas Monthly (2000-2009) and founding editor of The Texas Tribune (2009), is a graduate of Hamilton College with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a master’s degree in journalism.]

Copyright © The Texas Tribune

If this is a (fair & balanced) disclosure of all hair, no brains, so be it.

[x The Atlantic[
3 Points On Rick Perry
By James Fallows

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almost alternatives argued bernanke better broader comments decline democrats displays economy full going imagine intensity introduction katie level living looks mistakes months national-level obama operative opposing palin past perry points principle prints republican sarah seeing shocked starters subtlety support surest thinks toward treason triple-game understand view watching wherever worse year

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1) Until I saw clips of him in the past two or three days, I hadn't realized how much watching and seeing Perry is just like having George W. Bush back in our living rooms. Maybe this will be an ingredient for strong conservative support. I can't imagine that any sophisticated Republican operative thinks it's a plus in winning 270 electoral votes. When Republicans ran against the first post-Nixon Democratic president, in 1980, they didn't try to find someone who looked and sounded like Tricky Dick.

2) Just after Sarah Palin was nominated three years ago, I argued that anyone who moves all at once from state-level to national-level politics is going to be shocked by the greater intensity of the scrutiny and the broader range of expertise called for. Therefore that person is destined to make mistakes; the question is how bad they will be. For Palin, they showed up in her disastrous first few interviews, especially with Katie Couric. Perry is getting his own introduction to this principle just now.

3) For the past few months, Democrats have had the suspicion that Republicans are playing a double or even triple-game in opposing the Obama Administration on spending and deficit issues. At the most principled levels, they're upholding their belief in a smaller government. At the next level down, they're trying to limit Obama's operational successes wherever they can. And, most cynical of all, they understand the idea of "the worse, the better." The surest path toward beating Obama next year is for the economy to stagnate or decline.

Perry's comments about Ben Bernanke cut through any such subtlety. If Bernanke "prints money" in the next 15 months, toward the end of forestalling a recession or preserving jobs, Perry would consider that "almost treasonous." This is the kind of thing you just don't hear from national-level politicians, and for a reason. (For starters: the punishment for treason is death.)

Obama looks better the more the Republican field displays its outlook and temperament. Romney looks better the more the anyone-but-Romney alternatives come into full view. Ω

[James Fallows has been associated with The Atlantic Monthly for many years and has written nine books. His most recent work is Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (2009). His articles and essays have appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, and other magazines. He was also one of Nader's Raiders at Public Citizen and Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency, the youngest person to ever hold that job, being two months younger at the time than Jon Favreau, Barack Obama's speechwriter. Fallows attended Harvard, where he was president of the newspaper The Crimson. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1970 and then studied economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.]

Copyright © 2005 The Atlantic Monthly Group

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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



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