The following piece – below the fold – is one I've written at a new site I began about a month ago. This diary is my formal introduction of On The Road 2012 to the DailyKos community, of which I have been a part (as PocketNines, orginially) since 2004.
I've covered 9,434 miles in the last month driving from California, through Montana, to Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa again, South Carolina again. Florida for the debate is next. I've seen Michele Bachmann and her fabulous husband nine times, Perry eight times, Romney six, along with a smattering of the other candidates. I've been to debates, forums, meet & greets and town halls. I was in the backyard with a few other reporters in Cedar Rapids when Perry said Ben Bernanke was treasonous.
This is independent, original reporting based on initiative and moxie, and, at the moment, self-funded. Like last time, when I conceived, designed and implemented the 14,211-mile On The Road journey for FiveThirtyEight, I'm out here reporting what I see and hear. A lot of thought and work goes into it. I hope my reporting and analysis is work you find compelling, and that you'll make my site – still some construction work in progress – a regular stop throughout the campaign.
Colonel Perry Orders the Code Red on Social Security
September 8, 2011
Lt. Weinberg: “You think you can get him to just say it?”
Lt. Kaffee: “I think he wants to say it. I think he’s pissed off that he’s got to hide from this.”
– A Few Good Men
Rick Perry’s existence may be grotesque and incomprehensible to you, but he knows he’s saving America.
On Social Security as “Ponzi scheme,” Perry was finally Fed Up! with the snot-nosed media quoting his book at him. Gutless former allies, too. Rove, you’re dead to me. Cheney, you liar, I’ll pull out the gun I jog with and shoot you in the face. And now, a grown man named Mitt is mocking me?
You’re god damn right I said Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, burst Perry at Wednesday night’s debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
“It is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme,” Perry thundered.
“If Vice President Cheney – or anyone else – says that the program that we have in place today, and young people who are paying into that expect that program to be sound, and for them to receive benefits when they reach retirement age – that is just a lie.”
He knows what he said, you ankle-biting punks. He doesn’t have to have it read back to him.
“You cannot keep the status quo in place and not call it anything other than a Ponzi scheme. That is what it is. Americans know that,” Perry repeated minutes later.
Perry has a greater responsibility than his former advisor Karl Rove could possibly fathom.
“Karl has been over the top for a long time in some of his remarks. So I’m not responsible for Karl anymore.”
Make no mistake, Perry’s swaggering, unapologetic rhetoric is why he has completely dwarfed the other Tea Party candidates in the race. As critics from across the political spectrum piled on after Perry suggested to several of us in a Cedar Rapids backyard that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s job performance was treasonous, Perry’s regular base voters pulled him aside to beg for more of the same.
“Don’t let ‘em back you down. That was wonderfully put. Really well put. But don’t talk the way they want you to, ok?” Tea Party voter Kristy Hansen pleaded with Perry after his Walcott, Iowa event the next day.
Perry understands what his voters want. Mitt Romney does too, because God knows he’s been confronted by enough nice old ladies in New Hampshire town halls on Social Security, and Romney desperately needs to win New Hampshire this time or he’s through – again.
Perry, of course, doesn’t need to win New Hampshire. He’ll put Iowa and South Carolina on lockdown, and let every other candidate jab away at Romney’s polling lead in the Granite State.
Perry’s shotgun blast last night on Social Security now gives Romney – as Monday’s debate in Florida looms – an opportunity to present himself among the Republican field as the program’s moral savior, even though he admitted in Lebanon, N.H. that for Americans under 55, he wants to “talk about it,” and raising the payroll cap is off the table as a fix.
In an excellent piece of on-scene reporting, Huffington Post’s Jon Ward noted Romney top strategist Stuart Stevens telling reporters in the post-debate spin room that Perry was “wrong morally” for his approach to Social Security.
Writing that Governor Perry’s camp was “defiant under fire,” Ward asked Perry’s steely top spokesman Ray Sullivan five separate times to deny that Perry wanted to “end” the program his candidate had just repeatedly asserted was “a monstrous lie” and a “Ponzi scheme.”
Sullivan would not.
Indeed, Perry’s strategy is to force the issue to the forefront and take his chances. Following the debate, top strategist David Carney argued that Americans were ready for Perry’s head-on confrontation with the most popular and successful government program in the history of the country.
“It’s clear from listening to people around the country, they want an open and honest discussion about this,” Carney said. “It’s naive for the political elite to think that Social Security can’t be discussed, can’t be fixed, can’t be done better in this new, modern era. It’s just crazy.”
By done better, for example, Perry means that state and local governments should be able to opt out of Social Security, as he told Eliot Spitzer on CNN last year, and as he wrote in Fed Up!, the idea-filled campaign book Perry wrote less than a year ago.
Those kinds of radical arguments might get him the nomination, given that he understands his seething, radical base. However, they’re probably fatal in a general election where Florida’s 29 electoral votes in Barack Obama’s column would virtually ensure his re-election.
It’s a huge gamble. Most politicians, when confronted with a particularly radical idea – and Perry is alone in his ideas about “opting out” of Social Security – tend to avoid dangerous territory. Not Col. Perry. He sleeps on that wall. He doesn’t have the temperament for avoiding confrontation, especially when goaded by sniveling second-guessers.
“Regardless of what anyone says ... and that’s provocative language – maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country,” Perry said last night, speaking directly to voters like Hansen.
Florida voters, please guard the Colonel.