(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
No candidate is pure enough to meet the teabagger Seal of Purity. Even Michele Bachmann has availed herself of federal funds for pet projects and her family's farms.
So the GOP presidential pretenders are tripping all over themselves trying to erase those past transgressions and present the purest facade to Republican primary voters. Mitt Romney is the most pathetic of these, but Rick Perry will have tons of flip-flopping to do if he wants to be taken seriously.
Immigration
Perry isn't a liberal on the issue, by any measure, but he's certainly not in the Xenophobic camp.
Reflecting the close ties of his state to Mexico, Perry is to the left of the center of gravity of the rest of the party on the issue. Most significantly, he signed a Texas version of the DREAM Act back in 2001, allowing foreign-born children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition for college if they have lived in the state for three years prior to graduating high school [...]
He also opposed the Arizona immigration law. He criticized it on grounds that it would “turn law-enforcement officers into immigration officials,” and said it wouldn’t be right for Texas.
Perry opposes the federal DREAM Act because ... well, just because. He's running for president in a GOP primary, you know? It's kind of like Romney being against Obama's health care law despite the fact that it's essentially Romney's health care plan. And as much as Romneycare is an issue in the GOP primary, so might Perry's lack of overt hatred toward the children of undocumented immigrants. Witness Tom Tancredo:
Perry’s only true conservative positions on borders involve calling for an end to sanctuary cities and signing a voter ID law. While I support these measures, they don’t make up for the rest of his positions on immigration. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
NAFTA Superhighway
Have you heard about this conspiracy theory? It's a
Jerome Corsi special.
Ron Paul wants you to be scared. There's a conspiracy in the land—what he calls a "conspiracy of ideas"—to give up America's sovereignty. It's a shadowy scheme that begins with the NAFTA "superhighway," a road as wide as several football fields that will link Mexico, the United States and Canada. "They don't talk about it and they might not admit it," Paul said at the CNN-YouTube presidential debate last week. He didn't say exactly who "they" are, but perhaps one can guess. "They're planning on [taking] millions of acres … by eminent domain," warned the prickly libertarian. But elected government officials aren't acting alone. There's "an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments" pushing the idea, Paul wrote in October 2006. "The ultimate goal is not simply a superhighway, but an integrated North American Union—complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy, and virtually borderless travel within the Union."
Egads! Hide the women and children! But whatever the merits (there are none), fact is that Perry actually proposed a series of new highways interconnecting the various corners of Texas—an aborted scheme that many assumed was part of the NAFTA superhighway. Here's Tancredo again:
Despite all his talk about sovereignty and states’ rights, Perry proposed the Trans-Texas Corridor. This toll road would go through Mexico, but be run together with the Mexican government in the middle of Texas.
One columnist at the wingnut Townhall:
Move over Mitt Romney. Rick Perry has a bigger problem to defend from his tenure as governor. Remember the NAFTA Superhighway project? It was to consist of a two-mile wide $184 billion transit system of toll roads, rail lines and utilities from the Texas-Mexico border all the way up to the Minnesota-Canadian border, to make it easier to ship foreign goods from China and other countries into North America. It became so unpopular in Texas that the Texas portion of it, called the Trans-Texas Corridor, was renamed and mostly disbanded a couple of years ago. Perry was the only gubernatorial candidate in 2006 of four major candidates who supported it. Even the Democratic candidate opposed it.
Perry’s campaign website lists the Trans-Texas Corridor as one of his accomplishments.
Mandatory HPV vaccinations
Speaking of conspiracy theories, how about the one that vaccinating teenage girls for HPV will totally turn them into whores?
For years, Gov. Rick Perry has taken flak for his 2007 attempt to require girls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, the most commonly sexually transmitted disease and the principal cause of cervical cancer. At the risk of angering fellow conservatives, Perry has always insisted he did the right thing.
That unapologetic approach changed this weekend.
A few hours after unveiling his campaign for president, Perry began walking back from one of the most controversial decisions of his more-than-10-year reign as Texas governor. Speaking to voters at a backyard party in New Hampshire, Perry said he was ill-informed when he issued his executive order, in February 2007, mandating the HPV vaccine for all girls entering sixth grade, unless their parents completed a conscientious-objection affidavit form. The vaccine, Merck & Co.’s Gardasil, would have protected against the forms of HPV that cause about 70 percent of all cervical cancer, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
The fundies hate protecting girls from sexually transmitted diseases. In their minds, the sluts deserve whatever punishment they might get for having sex. Rick Perry was on the right side of that issue, until forced to cave.
10th Amendment
Apparently, pretending to stick to the 10th Amendment as a true guiding principle is freaking out social conservatives.
In recent weeks Perry has also sought to clarify his 10th Amendment-friendly statements on other hot-button issues. A few weeks before jumping into the race, Perry said in Aspen, Colo., that gay marriage should be left up to the individual states. Gay marriage in New York?
“That’s their business,” Perry said. Later, in Houston, Perry said he would allow states to set abortion policy if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned some day as he hopes.
The statements prompted criticism among Christian conservatives. Perry also took a pounding from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a struggling GOP presidential candidate and social conservative, who criticized his laissez-faire approach. Perry has since begun stressing the need for federal constitutional bans on both gay marriage and abortion.
You see? All that "states' rights" crap is just empty rhetoric. And now, Perry is being forced to abandon it lest it hurt his chances for the nomination.
Al Gore
Perry endorsed Al Gore for president in 1988. Nuff said.