Well if the 2012 Republican field of challengers arrayed against Barack Obama wasn’t interesting enough, we now have Texas Governor Rick Perry throwing his hat into the ring. Fresh off of an old timey religious tent revival meeting and not a moment too soon, mind you, as the Iowa Straw Poll will be conducted this Saturday.
Perry’s entry into the race certainly adds yet another twist to a already interesting if not bizarre field of candidates and pseudo candidates. Let’s see there’s one who doesn’t seem to know where the American Revolution actually started but would like to be president of the country anyway, one who is running for the umpteenth time, hoping beyond hope that being a Libertarian will somehow matter this time when it hasn’t yet mattered, a guy who wants’ to legalize marijuana, one who created a forerunner to Obamacare that now treats his creation like tar baby, one who having committed serial matrimony now has found God as a Roman Catholic and one who isn’t running but keeps showing up in Iowa or New Hampshire at the same time the actual candidates are in state.
To this we can now add Rick Perry, a man who just a few months ago publically mumbled that if things didn’t quite suit his fancy that the State of Texas might just leave the union. All this begs a rather interesting set of questions. If Rick Perry were to be elected and if his election were close, like the past three or four have been, would he then take the states that voted for him and leave the union thereby abandoning those states where he had not received enough popular votes to gain their electoral votes? If faced with divided government and stymied by an intransigent Democratic controlled Senate or House, would a President Perry, upon being frustrated, attempt to force a dissolution of the federal government or would he simply retreat to Texas and attempt to effect a recreation of the old Confederacy? We had a vice presidential candidate who, upon losing in the 2008 election, decided to resign as Governor of Alaska. Thus can we expect that a guy who suggested that his state should leave the union might just secede from the presidency himself if he were to find himself frustrated by divided government or the politics inside of the Beltway?
All of this has a bit of the tragicomic about it considering that while the country is in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, the Republican Party’s process for nominating a contender has become less like what one expect of the G.O.P. and more and more like a traveling circus every day. And all of this with the theatrics of the Tea Party movement as a backdrop. Well, at least it’s good for a laugh if nothing else.
sjg
8/11/11
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