Saturday, December 31, 2011

Blaming Rick Perry

Rick Perry

The closing paragraph of POLITICO's Rick Perry campaign plays blame game caught my eye:

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a [Perry] strategist. “At least not at this level for this serious of a candidate. You see a campaign like this for Herman Cain, you say, ‘Well, that’s what you’d expect. But for a governor from one of the biggest states in the country and someone who can raise a ton of money? It’s mind-boggling. I’m more offended by that than losing.”

That reminded me of this October 13th Elgin Courier News story: Presidential hopeful Perry at private C’ville fundraiser:

CARPENTERSVILLE — Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry ducked into OTTO Engineering here Thursday morning for a $1,000-a-plate breakfast fundraiser.
Perry spoke to the invitation-only crowd of 100 people for about 25 minutes, said Jack Roeser, OTTO chairman and founder and president of Family Taxpayers Foundation.
...
“We are trying to get things done,” Roeser said of his decision to invite Perry to the Fox Valley. “We are interested in Illinois as well as the president thing. We want to increase (the number of Republicans in) the House and Senate in Illinois by six people each and get rid of the people who have given us the debt in Illinois.” 
Perry spoke “about what he had done in Texas, how the problems (here) are similar, and what he would do for the problems in our country,” Roeser said.
He said Perry “has workable solutions, not crazy stuff,” adding that he had interviewed other presidential candidates, including Herman Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO. “I found him highly arrogant and easily upset. I asked him about the (999 tax plan) … that is an embarrassment. He is unrealistic and it made him mad,” when he told Cain so, Roeser said. Cain has suggested ending the current tax code and replace it with a 9 percent flat tax on income, a 9 percent flat corporate tax and a 9 percent national sales tax.

In the first article we've got a Perry strategist belittling Herman Cain. In the story from last October, we have one of Perry's top fund raisers--he organized a $100,000+ breakfast fundraiser--calling Herman Cain "highly arrogant", "easily upset", and "unrealistic". Was it the Perry campaign that drove the negative stories about Herman Cain? Did Perry's strategists think that they would pick up Cain's supporters once the Godfather's Pizza CEO was out of the race?

We may never know, but if you were a Herman Cain supporter, you might want to look past Rick Perry. And, based on the latest polling out of Iowa, that seems to be what most voters are doing.

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