Kurt Andersen does a great job of summing up the Perry phenomenon and along the way diagnoses America's autoimmune disease. He does it brilliantly, so read this excerpt but don't miss the whole truth -- and the diagnosis.
Rick Perry fits right into that winning contrapuntal pattern. He’s the very opposite of careful and sober and understated, in his first days as an official candidate suggesting President Obama maybe doesn’t love America (“Go ask him”) and that loose monetary policy is “treasonous.” (“Look, I’m just passionate about the issue,” he explained later about his anti-Federal Reserve outburst, before switching midsentence to first-person plural, “and we stand by what we said.”)
Yet the most troubling thing about Perry (and Michele Bachmann and so many more), what’s new and strange and epidemic in mainstream politics, is the degree to which people inhabit their own Manichaean make-believe worlds. They totally believe their vivid fictions.
Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Perry is even entitled to his opinion that states such as Texas might want to secede, as he threatened at a Tea Party rally two years ago. But he’s not entitled to his own facts. “When we came into the nation in 1845,” he’d earlier told some bloggers visiting his office, “we were a republic. We were a stand-alone nation. And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.” That special opt-out provision is entirely fiction, a Texas myth the governor of Texas apparently thinks is real. ... more here
If you want a contrast with Rick Perry's Texas, listen to or read the words of Lloyd Doggett, long-time member of the House from Texas. Doggett is (surprise!) straightforward and honest and very clear about the difference between Perry's Texas (best detoured around) and the Texas the rest of us love. And Doggett is the only and I mean only Representative I've had who could be counted on for a response and effective action.
