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Politico...
Rick Perry
panic fires up the left
By Ben Smith & Maggie Haberman
8/30/11
In
his two weeks as a presidential
candidate, Rick Perry has done something that neither Barack Obama nor
Mitt
Romney could do: wake up the left.
Perry
panic has spread from the
conference rooms of Washington, D.C., to the coffee shops of Brooklyn,
with the
realization that the conservative Texan could conceivably become the
45th
president of the United States, a wave of alarm centering around
Perry’s drawling,
small-town affect and stands on core cultural issues such as women’s
rights,
gun control, the death penalty, and the separation of church and state.
The
epidemic of lefty angst isn’t just
a matter of specific Perry policies though; it goes to the heart of the
liberal
worldview. His smashing debut on the presidential stage suggests that
the
victory of an urban liberal Democrat, Barack Obama, wasn’t a step
toward a more
progressive nation, but just a leftward swing of an increasingly wild
pendulum,
now poised to rocket to the right.
“His
entry in the race is a signal and
a wake-up call,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told POLITICO.
Perry,
Sharpton said, “is looking to
go to the O.K. Corral and start shooting. … Rather than the left get
caught
sleeping, we better load up, because he is bringing it.”
For
Democrats, the pre-Perry GOP
primary process was hardly for the faint of heart, as the other
candidates have
jockeyed to show who dislikes Obama the most. But even as the primary
is fought
on conservative turf, liberal leaders say they and their constituents
see Perry
as far worse than your average, hated Republican, and indeed as bad —
if not
worse — than his hated predecessor in Austin, George W. Bush. And
progressives
who might have had a hard time getting worked up about Mitt Romney find
themselves struggling for superlatives with which to express their fear
of a
President Perry.
“His
work as governor is unparalleled
in its frontal assault on women,” said Siobhan Bennett, the president
of the
Women’s Campaign Forum, citing statistics on women living in poverty
and
without health care in Texas and Perry’s active opposition to abortion.
“He has
gone farther out on a limb legislatively in his capacity as governor
and has
been expressly anti-woman in the legislation he has done.”
“He
is beyond what we expect from
conservative Republicans on the gun issue,” said Dennis Henigan, the
acting
president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, who cited
Perry’s
support for gun rights on college campuses and said it was a sharp
contrast
with Romney’s “moderate” record. Perry’s rise, he said, had already
become “a
strong mobilizing force” for gun control activists, whose agenda has
been
largely ignored by the Obama administration.
“People
are perceiving a very real
threat that he could be the Republican nominee,” said Henigan, calling
the
prospect “quite frightening.”
Read
the rest of the story at Politico
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