Thank you, I remember 1988 very well. With all due respect to Zell Miller, he did earn the moniker of “Zig-Zag” for a reason, and that being he was all over the map. First he was Conservative, then he was a liberal, then he was Conservative again. While he was “fine” when he went to the right, he was hardly a stable element. Unlike in Texas, the Georgia Democrat party was close to 2 decades away from collapsing. Perry jumped ship just as it was sinking, and that was pure, unadulterated opportunism. If the TX GOP were at the same point in 1988 as the GA GOP was (or the TN GOP, which was dead, and had been since after Watergate until 1994), Perry would’ve remained a Democrat for a long, long time to come. He could’ve just as effortlessly been Clinton in ‘92 (or his running mate) or Gore 2000.
I expect that kind of flipflopping and opportunism in the Democrat party, but I don’t trust those that come over to the GOP, especially when they still cling to their same behaviors and actions. This guy is no reformist and no small-government type. He’s just another establishment pol we see in both parties. He’s fine with talking tough at election time, just like Gore’s “Conservative” schtick, but yet it just doesn’t match the walk. You see why many of us remain thoroughly unimpressed.
Democrats were winning majorities for many years to come in Texas.
http://cake.la.utexas.edu//txp_media/html/part/features/0400_02/slide1.html
Even as Republicans made electoral gains in statewide races they failed to win more than a handful of elections to the US House. Only after the controversial redistricting effort undertaken by the Republican-controlled Texas legislature in 2003 did the GOP finally overtake the Democrats by winning seventeen seats to the Democrats' sixteen.
I don’t trust those that come over to the GOP
We will just pass over the obvious examples. Texas had several of them besides Perry or those in California.
I do agree Perry is a political animal and based on that alone not to be trusted too deeply.