In my view, the Presidency is not the place for the on-the-job training.
Of the top tier candidates with full awareness of his warts, Perry is the most proven pro-life, pro-RKBA and experienced candidate. He has my support.
We will have to agree to disagree then. I cannot vote for Perry at all, not with his record on illegal immigration and his poor showing in the debates.
He has mine, too.
I was very open to a Cain candidacy before I learned of his response to the hunting lodge with the bad name that Perry and his father frequented. That reaction was, to me, indistinguishable from what we are used to hearing from "race pimps" such as Al Sharpton. I thought it was so unworthy of what I had thought to be a solid man of good judgment and character.
Plus I'm with xzins on the 9% sales tax: So long as the 16th amendment is on the books, the last thing I want is another federal revenue source that Congress can abuse on top of its abuses of the income tax that already exist. (I.e., it has more to do with social reengineering than it has to do with raising revenue.)
Plus evidently Cain either doesn't understand the federal Constitution, with its separation of powers as between the federal government, the states, and the people; or he doesn't support the originalist principles on which it is based — which all conduce to the sovereignty and liberty of the people, to the rule of law, not of men. His statement to the effect that the RKBA is fundamentally a state matter screams of his ignorance of constitutional principles.
There are two fundamental qualifications that any candidate I can support for president must meet. (1) He/she must be of good character; (2) He/she must have a thorough understanding of the Constitution, and a profound respect for the originalist intentions and principles on which it was founded.
I think Cain makes the cut re: (1). But he's evidently totally clueless WRT (2).
And so, with all his warts, I strongly prefer Perry out of this field of candidates. Not even Ron Paul is more deeply schooled in constitutional principles and values. Paul seems to know "the letter" of the Constitution; but he's a total screwball in applying it, as we see (for instance) in his excoriation of the federal-government-ordered killing of Al Awlaki on grounds that he was a "U.S. citizen."
Oh really? Though born here of (non-citizen) Yemeni student parents, when was Al Awlaki ever a U.S. citizen in actual fact? When was Al Awlaki ever "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?" When did he ever give his allegiance to the United States? Paul's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment is totally obtuse, IMHO. And totally "by the book" — a "book" written by activist legal progressives, not constitutionalists.
Plus if Cain is calling for a Palestianian "right of return," I just find that totally naive. Such a thing is tantamount to calling for the destruction of Israel by other means. Is this how he would treat a close ally — to allow it to be swallowed up in a demographic sea of people who detest Israel because it is a Jewish state?
Plus also evidently he's totally squishy on the social issues that I most care about: the right to life and the defense of marriage.
Cain is a successful man (deservedly so), charming and appealing and I do wish him well. But I do not want him to be my president.
Perry has considerable executive experience, too. I support him because he is at once a social conservative, a fiscal conservative, and a conservative constitutionalist of originalist understandings. And this is what I WANT in a president. I believe this is what our times call for, if we are to reverse the decline of America and everything she stands for.
JMHO FWIW.
Thank you so very much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!