Rick Perry: savior of the GOP or slick opportunist with forked tongue?

By David McElroy · August 17, 2011

The most evil man I’ve ever personally experienced was almost elected lieutenant governor of Alabama. I met him years before that, though, when he was about to run for his first office. Our first meeting at his office was surreal.

He had the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen. His voice was flat and monotone. But he had a presence that you might expect from a senator or a governor. He seemed to feel entitled. He seemed to feel superior. Strangely, none of his words matched what I felt in his eyes. He talked a good game about morality and ethics and feeling guided by his Christian faith to run for office. The scary thing is that I think he believed what he was telling me. I’ve worked with enough charming liars to know the difference. This guy felt evil, like a psychopath.

I didn’t work for the guy, but he was elected to his first office and became a powerful man in state politics. I heard plenty of things about him from friends inside his campaigns that gave me a great relief that I never worked for him. I felt a sigh of relief when statewide voters barely rejected him.

What I’m about to say is terribly unfair, because I don’t have enough facts to know the truth about this man. I’m well aware of that. But I get the same feelings about Rick Perry that I got from that psychopath long ago. I think he’s scary.

It’s way too early to make a prediction about the 2012 election — and I honestly don’t believe it matters who wins — but I have a sneaking suspicion that Rick Perry is going to be the GOP nominee for president.

There are plenty of places you can read about things you like or don’t like about Perry. You can read about how he supported Al Gore for president back in ’88 (when he was a Democrat), but now seems to forget what Gore stood for. The best brief summary I’ve read of who Perry is, though, came from a writer at Texas Monthly, so I recommend his story as a starting point.

Perry looks the part of a president. He says all the things that the conservative and angry voters in Republican primaries want to hear. He’s like a man sent down from Central Casting to play the leader who arrives in a disaster to save the day. I can guarantee that’s the way many people will see him. So why do I see something sinister in him instead?

I admitted to you right up front that I’m not being fair. He might not be evil. He might not even be a lying opportunist. I can’t say for sure yet. I just know that all of my political and psychological instincts tell me that he’s a man to be feared — and that he’s a man who people will follow. Right now, I’d say that I expect him to win the GOP nomination — but I reserve the right to change that as things go along — and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he turned Barack Obama into a one-term president.

When evil comes to us, it doesn’t announce itself and pull out a business card saying to contact him at devil@hell.org. Instead, it looks a lot like Rick Perry. I’m reminded of these lines from the 1987 movie, “Broadcast News,” in which a character speaks of someone who he finds dangerous, but who everyone else believes is wonderful:

“What do you think the devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I’m semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance … just a tiny bit.”

Do I believe Perry is the devil incarnate? I certainly don’t mean that in the religious sense. Beyond that, I’m honestly not sure yet what to think about him. I just know that when I look at him closely, I feel some of the same things — on a gut level — that I’ve seen in other politicians who I’ve found to be cold, calculating and scary to sane people who see them for what they are.

It might turn out that I’m terribly wrong about Perry. He might simply be a very sincere but misguided statist who’s no different from the rest. But I suspect we’re looking at a very competent and shrewd politician with the intelligence and ruthlessness to get what he wants by manipulating the populist masses. In that respect alone, it makes me suspect he’s a Republican Bill Clinton — at his very best.

The nation-state is at the end of the road, but men such as Perry will use its coercion in ugly ways as it gasps its dying breaths, whenever that might be. The thought of Perry with that much power is chilling to me.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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