God May Hate Rick Perry, But Right Wing Activists Love Him... Despite That Whole Gardasil "Misstep"

Crony capitalism writ large-- America's worst political whore?

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed the anointed Republican Establishment pick, Mitt Romney sinking beneath the waves. Rick Perry-- despite God's clear signal that this guy is not His favorite-- is now trouncing him 38-23% among Republican primary voters. Karl Rove-- one of the Romney anointers-- claimed on ABC TV this morning that Perry's publicly outspoken anti-Social Security position is "toxic." Establishment types are nervous. Over at the Frum Forum, Frum found someone who finds Perry slightly more palatable than he does to write the story of Perry's impending triumph over Romney and Obama:

Although I think Mitt Romney would be a better president I think Perry actually has his finger on the pulse of the conservative primary voter. This is clear when he threatens to treat Ben Bernanke “pretty ugly." Romney also hasn’t written a campaign book which claims that the weak economy can be blamed on FDR, Woodrow Wilson, & Wickard v. Filburn so he is fundamentally out of touch with the current conservative assessment of what ails America.

As for the general election, I believe that if unemployment stays high and the economy fails to improve, that voters who would normally vote for Obama will be less inclined to do so. I think a weaker economy will energize Republican voters and that they build a large enthusiasm lead over Democrats. Yes, Democrats will claim they are running against a crazy theocrat but that didn’t really work in 2004.

A right-wing Super PAC backing Perry has vowed to spend $55 million in the primary to bury Romney. And big money donors have a good reason to be in love with Perry-- he's easily the most corrupt person running for president... and with a record to prove it. Perry's big donors have benefited mightily from favoritism in Texas. As TPM pointed out yesterday "Texans don't like the government interfering with their business, especially campaign donations, where state laws allow contributors to fork over unlimited cash. No one has benefited more from this arrangement than Rick Perry, who has raised $100 million over the last decade, nearly half of which came from just 204 ultra-wealthy donors." And both the L.A. Times and the Washington Post have crunched the numbers and found a clear pattern of big donors getting special concessions from Perry's administration.

The Washington Post looked at Perry’s top 50 donors, who collectively gave more than $21 million, and found that 34 received some benefit from Perry’s administration or the state, including grants, contracts and appointments. The donor list was compiled by the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice.

Twenty-three donors won Perry’s appointment to state boards, often the boards of regents at the University of Texas or Texas A&M.

Roughly one in three of the top Perry donors had business interests that secured grants, tax subsidies or project approvals under his administration, the Post review found. Five donors gained both an appointment and a state boost to their specific company or interests.

[San Antonio Spurs owner Peter] Holt, who owns the nation’s largest Caterpillar dealership, urged Perry to lure a Caterpillar manufacturing plant to Texas, and a company official told reporters in an interview last year that such a plant would help the dealership get equipment. Perry’s office agreed in 2008 to award an $8.5 million incentive grant for a proposed new Caterpillar factory promising 1,714 jobs.

...Perry’s largest single individual donor, who has given more than $2.5 million, is Bob Perry (no relation to the governor), the founder of a large home-building company.

In 2003, Perry Homes helped persuade the governor and Republican lawmakers to create the Texas Residential Construction Commission. One of the commission’s goals was to limit lawsuits by home buyers complaining of shoddy construction.

Bob Perry donated $100,000 to the governor as the commission was being formed. A top official of the firm, John Krugh, the general counsel, was named to the panel by the governor.

Is Perry a crook? Like we said last week: absolutely. And not just on a campaign finance level. He's enriched himself personally-- he's now a millionaire-- since working for the state of Texas. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram explained, he made himself rich with shady insider real estate deals, deals that should have landed him in prison long ago:

Back in 1993, there was a piece of ground that computer billionaire Michael Dell needed to connect his new house near Austin to city water mains. Dell neglected to appreciate the land’s importance. But Perry did discern it. He bought the land for less than $120,000-- then sold it to Dell two years later for a $343,000 profit. Uncanny. True, some detractors have wondered whether the sale was entirely on the level:

Texas Democrats have repeatedly questioned the sale over the years, in part because Mike Toomey-- an influential lobbyist who would later become Perry’s chief of staff-- closed the deal for Perry while Perry was out of town. Perry has always maintained he didn’t know that the land would be so valuable to Dell when he purchased the property.

Perry repeated similarly shrewd investments again and again in the years ahead.

Look at this transaction from the 2000s. A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator-- the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land-- back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000. Tidy. And how remarkable that Perry and his state senator friend could see a value proposition that the two professional real estate developers overlooked.

So it goes through investments in stock, load, and energy properties. Perry just kept seeing things that other people apparently didn’t.

Even more impressive: how Perry managed to find the time. There he was, governor of the second biggest state in the country, creating jobs from morning to night. Yet somehow he also was able to scour the vast landscape of Texas for under-appreciated little parcels of land with the potential to triple or quadruple in value in just a few months.

Can Romney and his Establishment, his Mormon and his corporate backers muster the strength to take Perry on? Or is it too late? Whatever power the White House has in this matter, is working frantically behind the scenes to make sure that Perry is the Republican nominee.