Is Rick Perry A Crook? Well, Absolutely-- But Will Voters Even Care... IF They Find Out?

Tuesday we wondered aloud if Rick Perry is too stupid to win the presidency. Many people confuse "cunning" for intelligence. Perry may be lacking in education and even in intellectual capacity but he's an astute, instinctive and very cunning politician. He also seems to have figured out how to become a millionaire on a civil servant's modest salary... and stay out of prison while doing so. Right-wing polemicist David Frum explains how he did it:

Discharged from the Air Force in 1977 aged 27, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives seven years later, in 1984. At that time, the Perry family reported income of $45,000, largely from Mrs. Perry’s work as a nurse.

Rick Perry served in the legislature until elected Agriculture Commissioner in 1990. He climbed the ladder to Lt. Governor in 1998, then ascended in the governorship after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000.

Now it’s 2011, and Perry reports a net worth of $2.8 million. How’d he do it?

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram tells the story.

Perry made his money in real estate through deals like this:

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.

Clearly Rick Perry is a two-bit criminal and he should have been charged with accepting bribery. But he wasn't... and now he's the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination against the weakest and most pathetic Democratic president in our lifetimes. Yesterday Frum followed up on his post by complaining that Republicans are now citing Perry's corrupt practices as "an affirmative credential" in his thin resume. He doesn't personally want to charge Perry with an offense that could land him in prison but writes that "it’s asking a lot of the voters to believe that Gov. Perry scored these successes by acumen alone. The coincidences just pile up too thick... Rick Perry is not the first politician to emerge from public life a lot richer than he started."

There’s more going on here than an issue of appearance of impropriety. There’s also a question about where a politician invests his time and energy. Successful real estate investing is difficult and time-consuming. Rick Perry may claim that his investments did not benefit from insider information and special favors, and as Jim notes, Texas voters have accepted his story sufficiently to elect and re-elect him. But Perry obviously cannot claim to have been 100% focused on Texas business during his many years in office.

At a minimum, the attempt to reinvent Perry’s business career as a rebuttal to negative allegations about Perry’s brainpower is … let’s say … ill-advised. Perry’s real-estate fortune is one of those subjects about which you’d expect Perry supporters to take the view: the less said, the better.

There's virtually no chance the anti-inspiring Obama can win reelection. The only hope he has for another term is for the Republicans to nominate someone patently unelectable. The White House always hoped for Palin and then for Bachmann. Will Perry do the trick? Probably.

[I]f Perry ignores the growing questions about his record, he risks damaging the electability quotient that has helped rocket him ahead of Michele Bachmann by appealing more to Republicans beyond the Tea Party. But if he bows too much to critics, shifting his stances to be more in line with a mainstream electorate, he risks alienating those Tea Partiers who are still the voters Republicans running for president are afraid of.

So far, it seems that Perry is sticking with the Tea Party and letting the attacks fall where they will.

Here's an example: when his campaign attempted to back away from his book Fed Up!-- which contains attacks on Social Security that might make mainstream voters skittish-- Perry publicly rejected it, doubling-down on his claim that the popular program is a Ponzi scheme and maybe unconstitutional.

Democrats certainly seem to think talk like this is playing into their hands.

"For Rick Perry, the way he matches up with [Republican] voters has proven to be at least a short-term political bonanza for him," Bill Burton, the former White House spokesperson and head of Priorities USA Action told reporters in an email over the weekend. "But in the long term, his ideology could have devastating consequences for our country. Especially the middle class."

That's the fight Democrats want. And Perry faces a lot more than questions about his book. As ABC News cataloged Monday, Perry is coming under increasing scrutiny from all fronts. That's not surprising considering he's the frontrunner-- but it means awkward questions. Perry's dodged some and swaggered his way past others.

But will it be enough for Democrats, many of whom are beyond dismayed with what a grotesque disappointment Obama has been, to actually turn out and vote? They sure didn't in 2010... and Obama has just gotten worse and worse and worse. Before then, some think it's to early to recite Kiddish over Romney's political corpse and yesterday Bill Galston showed him a path to rebirth: going for Perry's very exposed jugular:

Perry’s entrance into the race has highlighted your key weakness: People still don’t know who you are and what you stand for. They’re yearning for clear, strong, unapologetic leadership, but they don’t know where your red lines are. And efforts to placate opponents-- such as fudging your long-held views on climate change-- will only make matters worse.

But Perry’s emergence also gives you a unique opportunity to define yourself-- against him. If you take it, you have a fighting chance of prevailing. If you duck it, you’ll lose, just as Tim Pawlenty did when he booted away his chance to take you on.

How should you do it? Well, to the extent that the Republican nominating contest is a rational process, it’s a search for a candidate with three characteristics. The nominee must be competent to serve as president, reliably conservative, and electable. You’re never going to be able to make your party believe that the longest-serving governor in Texas history isn’t fit to serve as chief executive. And despite some facts to the contrary, it won’t be any easier to challenge Perry’s conservative credentials. That narrows it down to one option: You must persuade the decisive portion of your party that Rick Perry is too extreme to be elected president.

Here’s your theme: Rick Perry wants to repeal the 20th century. I don’t. And neither do the American people.

That terrain of battle offers a target-rich environment. Where to begin? With Perry’s stated desire to repeal the 16th amendment? With his opposition to the 17th amendment, based on the odd view that taking the power to elect senators away from state legislators and giving it to the people of each state somehow amounts to a national power-grab? Maybe. But if I were you, I’d begin with Social Security. Here are Governor Perry’s considered views on the subject:

Certain [New Deal]programs massively altered the relationship between Americans and their government with regard to critical aspect[s] of their lives, violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles of federalism and limited government. By the far the best example of this is Social Security … . Social Security is something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now … . By any measure, Social Security is a failure. (Source: Rick Perry, Fed Up!, pp. 48, 50, 62)

So … Perry believes that Social Security is (a) unconstitutional, (b) an undemocratic imposition on an undefined “we,” and (c) a failure, however you look at it.

To be sure, there are real problems with Social Security, and lots of us have spent a good deal of time figuring out how to address them. In the long term, significant adjustments are necessary and unavoidable. But if you can’t figure out how to refute Perry, you don’t have the political intelligence to be an effective candidate. And if you’re not willing to say it, starting in September’s debates, you don’t have the guts to be an effective candidate. And you won’t be your party’s nominee.