Why Rick Perry Is *Not* Headed to the White House

With Texas Gov. Rick Perry's announcement for the Republican Presidential nomination today, there's an article on CNN by James Moore arguing that Perry will win the election. Moore, author of a book about Karl Rove's role in George W. Bush's rise to power, is a Texan left-winger, strikes me as someone a little bit spooked by the rest of the nation's apparent willingness to consider his state's hideous governors. The first half of the piece is a rather sound analysis of why Perry will beat, most importantly, Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination. At this point I do think Perry's the favorite; Pawlenty's dead, Romney's a dead man walking (see the events of today), and Bachmann offers nothing Perry doesn't, while lacking the same level of established stature. But it's his "analysis" of the general election that strikes me as, well:

The general election will, quite literally, decide the fate of a nation. Every time Team Obama criticizes the Texas economy for its minimum wage job boom, the president will be accused of attacking the working men and women of America. (Texas has created a large share of the new jobs in the United States in the last decade but studies indicate many of them are at places like Wal-Mart and Carl's Jr.)

President Obama will also get beaten up for presiding over the first bond rating downgrade in U.S. history as well as high unemployment. When the cold rains fall in early November next year, unemployed voters in places like Ohio will step into the booth and dream of a minimum wage job in the Texas sun selling fishing rods at big box sporting goods stores or working in call centers; they will vote against Barack Obama.

And in the process, they will write the epitaph to set upon the tombstone of history's greatest democracy: Perry-Palin, 2012.

First of all, Sarah Palin is never running for Vice President again. She can't even get interested in running for the top spot these days. More to the point, "it's cold in Ohio so people there will vote for a guy from a hot state" is not a valid form of campaign analysis. No one will remember the S&P downgrade next November, and honestly I don't think Obama is particularly shy about discussing that topic, since the ones who look bad in light of the downgrade are Republicans and S&P. Obama won't have to attack the Texas boom, because he's the President. When you're the incumbent President, you run mainly on what you've done yourself. And there's the gist of my argument:

The title of this post slightly overstates the case. I can't say for sure that Rick Perry won't become President. But I don't think it's likely, because Perry is a weak general-election candidate for the Republicans. Looking at current state polling from PPP, I estimate that Rick Perry would need to make up approximately 8-10 points against President Obama nationally to be competitive. According to pollster.com Obama's national approval rating is around 43.5%; assuming that general election numbers move in concert with Obama approval, that suggests that Perry needs Obama to be around 38% approval to win. An incumbent President at 38% approval is rather clearly going to lose, more or less whoever his opponent. My take on this election has always been that each Republican provides the President with a certain handicap, a certain level of net unpopularity that he can endure and still win the election. For Mitt Romney, that handicap has looked quite small; for Sarah Palin, very large indeed. Current polling sort of suggests that the handicap Perry spots Obama is much more in the Palin range than the Romney range.

Maybe that could change. Maybe Perry's problem is that he is unknown, and maybe once he gets into the campaign against Obama it will turn out that he's a stronger candidate than he seems currently. Moore outlines a few ways that could happen, which I find rather unconvincing. But I think another thing that the article mentions demonstrates why Obama probably gets at least as much of a boost to his campaign dynamic as Perry would give to the Republicans. One thing Moore says will hurt Obama is that voters will blame him for high unemployment, which to a first approximation is true. But it's been sort of curious so far how much higher Obama's personal favorability and approval ratings are then they should be, given how awful the world is right now. One hypothesis as to why is that people still largely blame Obama's predecessor for the fact that the world sucks; indeed, polling tends to confirm this impression.

The problem is that "yeah, the economy sucks, but it's still all George Bush's fault" is kind of a wimpy campaign slogan. Unless, that is, your opponent is quite literally Bush's lieutenant and successor as Governor of Texas, who endorses the same program of low taxes, low regulation that Bush promoted. Now the slogan is more like, "My opponent continues to support the policies that failed us under George Bush." It feels kind of wrong for Obama to discuss George Bush vis-a-vis himself, but Bush is obviously relevant to Rick Perry. And as Obama attacks Bush in the context of attacking Perry, he'll be reminding people that, hey, this is still largely my predecessor's fault. Only he won't have been saying it.

So yes, maybe the overall political climate will be so bad in November 2012 for Democrats that just about any Republican could beat Obama. It's a possibility. And since Rick Perry looks to be a strong candidate to be "just about any Republican," I guess there's a realistic chance he gets inaugurated in January 2013. But that doesn't make him a strong general election candidate. Right now he looks like a weak one, and off the top of my head I would guess that a Perry vs. Obama campaign would develop more in Obama's favor than in Perry's. So, while my enduring confidence in Mitt Romney's ability to be less appealing the more people get to know him makes me think he's not as electable as he looks right now, I still think the Obama people should be rooting rather hard for Perry to knock Romney off for the Republican nomination. And that's an opinion that has nothing to do with the relative weather in Ohio and Texas.