Texas Governor Rick Perry may have flubbed a bit in his debate performance in Tampa on Monday, but he remains the front runner for the Republican Presidential nomination as of today, and it is looking more likely that he really could end up as the nominee of the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan!
This is dangerous for the party and the nation, as Perry has many shortcomings, as well as dangerous aspects in his background and viewpoints!
For the party, Perry represents a threat to the Establishment Republicans, the middle, the mainstream of the party in the past, and gives power to the extremists of the Tea Party Movement!
With Jon Huntsman apparently floundering, even though the author feels he came across very well in the past two debates, the only hope in the field of candidates is Mitt Romney, with all of his shortcomings and faults, but it will not be easy to overcome the Tea Party takeover of the party!
One could say that if the party nominates Perry, they will lose, and that will be, therefore, only their problem as to how to recover from a disastrous defeat in 2012.
But with the economy so bad right now, the idea is starting to develop that maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama COULD lose in 2012, giving us President Perry, and possibly a Tea Party Congress, enough to make one hysterical and give one nightmares, and the purpose here is NOT to joke, but be very serious!
Were Perry to win, we would face the following, with and without a Tea Party majority in Congress:
1. We would have a President who is not very smart, not very curious to learn, not open to new ideas, very rigid in his right wing beliefs, unwilling to compromise, arrogant, cocky, with a swagger about him, and not willing to be transparent in his activities in the White House!
2. We would have a complete takeover of right wing conservatism, leading to total deregulation, cutting of taxes even further on the rich, attempts to destroy several government agencies or make them ineffective in their work, and resulting in widespread corruption due to “cronyism”!
3. We would have a President who would be arrogant toward the outside world, create crises and possible interventions in other countries, and boast about “American exceptionalism”, undermining relations even with our allies and friends around the world.! The neoconservative view of foreign policy would dominate.
4. Civil Liberties would be violated worse than any President in modern times, and civil rights enforcement for Latinos, African Americans, women and gays would end!
5. We would see a theocracy develop, as Rick Perry would constantly invoke Jesus Christ, talk about God and religion more than any President, including Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush, and promote as much combination of church and state as one can imagine might happen.
6. The economy would NOT get better, and instead we would have more poverty, deprivation, and human suffering, similar to the reality in Texas under Governor Perry.
7. War would be declared on environmentalists, and scientists, in the name of industry and religion, undermining our education system nationally, as well as our health care programs.
8. Justice and fairness in the law would be undermined, as capital punishment would become a virtue, and the courts, including the Supreme Court, would become the most right wing in American history since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
9. The goal of a Perry Administration would be the destruction of Social Security, Medicare, and all other social safety net programs, and basically the repeal of the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, and the other reforms under Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
10. Fundamentally, America would go back a full century to the Gilded Age, with the total or near total repeal of the 20th century, which made America the envy of the free world!
This is serious stuff here, no joking, and all efforts must be made in the Republican Party to defeat Rick Perry, and if that fails, and even if it succeeds, do everything necessary to reelect Barack Obama as the only hope for moving forward in the second decade of the 21st century!