In Praise of Extremism
What good did bipartisanship ever do anybody?
The election is still thirteen months away,
but in certain coastal circles, the quadrennial wailing has erupted
right on schedule: “If that man gets in the White House, I’m moving out
of the country!” This time that man is Rick Perry, who might have been
computer-generated to check every box in a shrill liberal fund-raising
letter: a
gun-toting,
Bible-thumping,
anti-government death-penalty absolutist from Texas. And this time the liberals’ panic is not entirely over-the-top. Perry isn’t a
novelty nut job like Michele Bachmann.
He’s the real deal. It’s not implausible he could win his party’s
nomination and prevail in enough swing-state nail-biters to take the
presidency. He could do so because the times and the politician are in
alignment. A desperate and angry country is facing the specter of a
double-dip recession with zero prospects of relief from a defunct
Washington. Perry is the only viable declared candidate—as measured by
organizing savvy, fund-raising prowess, poll numbers, and
take-no-prisoners gubernatorial résumé—hawking an unambiguous
alternative to the failed status quo.
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