Rather than rehash the bad ideas that Gov. Perry has tried to push in Texas over the years (TTC, shots, tax increases, etc.) these are my biggest beefs with him as a GOP candidate for POTUS:
He’s had a decade to do something of substance to shrink the role and size of the State government and he’s done basically nothing.
He’s had a decade to do something of substance to take on the federal government and force it to respect Texas’ sovereignty as defined by Article I, Section VIII of the Constitution and the 10th Amendment, and he’s done basically nothing.
And the really sad thing is, he’s had the perfect opportunity since Obama became POTUS to really step up to the plate and finally change the way he governed in a more conservative direction, especially during his re-election campaign last year.
If he were a real conservative, rather than a slick talking establishment RINO, during last year’s primary campaign leading up to his reelection he would have “stolen” Debra Medina’s legitimately conservative small-government platform (getting rid of property taxes, eliminating the business tax - which is basically just an income tax - that he enacted a few years before, nullifying unconstitutional federal programs like Obamacare, the EPA, and federal gun laws, cutting off gov. benefits to illegal aliens to “disincentivize” illegal immigration, just to name a few) and begun implementing it since HE WAS ALREADY GOVERNOR AND HAD A GOP STATE LEGISLATURE.
Instead, he just keeps doing the same old, same old stuff as governor... and the state government is bigger, more expensive, and more intrusive than every before, and the State of Texas is less sovereign now (in practice) than it was when he became governor. If he’s not even going to move us in the right direction as Governor of Texas... what reason is there to think he’ll move us in the right direction as POTUS? He’s just an establishment Republican who’s perfectly content to keep the existing status quo in place (just like McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Pawlenty, to name a few)... which is the opposite of what we Tea Partiers should be looking for.
As small-government conservatives, Tea Partiers, and the modern-day standard bearers of the principles of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers We should be holding out for someone like Senator Mike Lee (Utah) or Senator Rand Paul (Kentucky) - yes I know neither of them is running - who is actually willing to talk about how to start dismantling huge chunks of the federal government, rather than someone like Rick Perry who (based upon how he has governed for the last decade) seems to think that pretty much everything the US government did/set up during the 20th century is basically alright (you know... just needs to be “scaled back” or “reformed” a bit),
I think Bachmann, Cain, Pawlenty, Gingrich and Huntsman all have one thing in common; no chance to win the nomination. It will probably come down to a choice between Perry and Romney if Perry runs and Palin does not. Who are you going to vote for if it goes that way? You can talk about holding out for the perfect candidate all you want but it looks to me like Perry may end up being the more conservative choice. Staying home and letting Obama win is not a good option either, a lot of conservatives did that last time and it has not worked out too well so far.