Is it any wonder Chris Christie doesn't want to get mixed up in that crapfest? Plus Larry McMurtry on Rick Perry

I don't know what exactly you'll see in this clip; unless I'm imagining things, it seems to play differently every time I start it up. But it's all from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's press conference today announcing that he's definitively (he says) not seeking the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

by Ken

It's not exactly a surprise that Chris Christie decided to stay the hell out of the GOP presidential crapfest. While I dislike the guy as much as anybody I'm aware of, one thing I would never suggest is that he's stupid, and there really wouldn't have been much upside.

I could swear I just wrote about this here, but I'll be damned if I can find it. (Maybe it was in a draft that never became a post?) But the thing is that once upon a time someone in Christie's place, hearing those ego-stroking pleas of sideline GOP-ers to please please be their savior and get in the race, might have done so on the premise that (a) there was always the possibility that everything might fall his way and he could snatch the prize, and (b) if not, it would be a good showcase to position himself for the next opportunity. he just might be able to copy the nomination and even if not would be establishing himself on the national scene.

Nowadays, though, especially among Republicans -- Saint Ronald's 11th Commandment be damned! -- the "competition" has become bloodsport. Or haven't you noticed that the inauguration of President Rick "Dumber'n Doody" Perry, as of several weeks ago scheduled for January 2013, has been put on indefinite hold?

I'm not going to say that I would have predicted the collapse of the Perry hot-gas balloon. I think it's foolhardy to underestimate the depths of crapitatiousness to which large numbers of Republicans are willing, or even eager, to sink. But then, I wasn't all that confident in 2008 that the Sarah Palin bubble would burst, despite the rapidly evident obviousness of her total lack of competence and her personal vileness. Among Today's Wacko Right, the only variety in which Rightness apparently comes these days, incompetence and vileness are the flavors du jour. Nevertheless, there are limits.

There's irony, as Howie and other commentators have been pointing out, that what has probably doomed the Perry candidacy are his only acts of even minimal decency. But don't think all he's done to establish his Wacko Right credentials has gone unnoticed by even slightly less crazy Republicans, who quickly enough grasped that this clown, even if nominatable, is almost certainly unelectable, which kind of defeats the purpose of nominating him.

Which is the cruelest irony from the Wacko Right perspective: because this nomination, unlike the ones that usually devolve into such nattering hair-pullers, is really worth something. Given the effort President Obama and the team of rodeo clowns who make up his "brain trust" have put into assuring his unreelectability, any halfway decent GOP candidate should be able to walk into the White House without breaking a sweat. That's the trouble. The Republicans don't have any halfway decent candidates. They've got this band of life forms only slightly smarter than the average amoeba, and unfortunately also slightly less personable. A lunk of dismal mediocrity like Rick Perry can't easily hide the emptiness permanently. Even "Chimpy" George Bush was found out eventually.

Given the value of the prize, I don't blame Chris Christie for taking the time for one last good, hard look before renouncing the contest. If he got the nomination, hateful though he is in his way, I think the president would be lucky to salvage a few states. But given the current temper of his party, he surely understands that his only reward for getting into the fray would be to be battered and bloodied.


SPEAKING OF "DUMB-ASS" RICK,
IT TAKES A TEXAN . . .

"There is, by now, a good deal of evidence that what Rick Perry has really done, from childhood on, is hustle."

-- Larry McMurtry, in a NYRB blogpost, "The Rick Perry Hustle"

Nobody sees through Texans like other Texans, and we've had no shortage of "good" Texans (and the people I consider good Texans are some of the best people, politically, I know -- owing in good part, I would think, to what they've had to endure all their political lives in their home state) telling us stuff we need to know about the Rickster, even if none of those voices quite replaces the one we really want to hear, that of the late Molly Ivins.

Maybe the best stand-in I can think of is that singular Lone Star sage Larry McMurtry, who's got a fine post up on the New York Review of Books website, "The Rick Perry Hustle."

Here's a sample:

Clearly the GOP has a problem. Except for those aging sinners Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, all its candidates seem synthetic. It's become the party of stale air; and now who should come bounding in but another slicked up trashmouth, Governor Perry of Texas, a man whose only salient principle seems to be that all attention is good. Pop off a few times outrageously: the Fed is "almost treasonous"; Social Security is "a Ponzi scheme"; Texas might "leave" the Union "if Washington continues to thumb their nose" at us; climate change is a fraud: this even as the climate changing smoke from some of the most-destructive wildfires in Texas's history wafts through the statehouse in Austin, a place like many not defended by very many firefighters since the Governor pared them down for budgetary reasons.

What Perry has brought to the Republican muddle thus far is his abundant, if unfocused, energy. He rushes from debate to debate, gives many interviews, gets his picture on the cover of Time; yet all his politicking is curiously affectless. He makes sounds, but where's the personality? Hillary Clinton has a personality; so does Sarah Palin. Either of those women could cut Governor Perry off at the knees, and will if given the chance.

It's not been said so I'll say it: as a politician Rick Perry is fundamentally lazy, so far as actual governing is concerned, content to run things mainly by sound-bite. He makes lots of decisions but lingers on no issue very long; there's little follow-through. . . .

Perry's political life, McMurtry, suggests, "has always been dogged, never flamboyant." He points out that "Perry often plays the hick, but he has actually seen more of the world than most hicks ever do," in the Air Force after college, and via the 23 trade missions abroad he's attended as governor ("although that doesn’t mean that he’s particularly well informed about the world"). In his two terms as state commissioner of agriculture, McMurtry writes, "he soon got comfortable with Big Agro, Big Oil, Big Pharm and whatever Bigs may be."

What really touches Rick Perry I don’t know, but rumors of scandal don’t interest him at all. In 2005 The Austin American-Statesman did a long investigative piece about Perry’s libido-life. Austin, a fishbowl of a town, was agog with rumors of Perry’s gayness, or, failing that, at least some garden-variety infidelities. Anita Perry’s departure was several times predicted; but Anita is still there and the newspaper drew a complete blank. The Perrys, apparently, just laughed it all off.

And as he looks at Perry's sorry record as governor, and the booming energy industry for which he likes to take credit, McMurtry notes that Texas in fact has a large quantity of jobs it can't fill because of the difficulty of finding "Texans who are willing to work" -- certainly not for the two million jobs reported to be developable in South Texas oil shale.

What was largely been unreported is that the Western work ethic is not what it used to be. My brother-in-law is a small oil producer; he has four rigs but can rarely find roustabouts to keep even two of them in operation. Meanwhile, in other industries, just this August the state lost 1,300 jobs.

And there's another problem, McMurtry says, "never mentioned in talk about huge prosperity in the oil patch": crystal meth.

Speed in one form or another has always been the drug of the oil business: workers who find themselves doing twenty- or thirty-hour shifts need a boost. But meth is virulent in its force, and hundreds of hamlets and small oil-patch towns bear its scars and will forever. Rid the oil patch of that drug and you’ll find a lot more takers for those two million jobs.

Drugs, meth particularly, cast a long shadow over the Texas workplace today, a fact that, to my knowledge, is never mentioned by Governor Perry, though it’s at its most devastating in rural places, where he comes from.

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