I’m glad Will Wilkinson lives in Iowa. We are all winning the future because of it. For instance, Will happened to be in a diner with presidential hopeful, Rick Perry, recently, and snapped some video of an exchange between Mr. Perry and an Iowa grad student. You should read the whole thing, because it’s a decent little snapshot of the Texas governor. This passage in particular, describing Perry’s reaction to the question, is quite wonderful:
I enjoyed witnessing this fleeting, close-up moment of flesh-pressing campaign politicking. Mr Perry’s skillful exit from the exchange, his calmly assertive demeanour (note the way his initially attentive eyes narrow into a challenging "kiss off" grin, the way he presses his index finger softly into Mr Hjelm’s chest) and the folksy leavening of his denigrating parting shot, all suggest to me a seriously skilled retail politician whose swagger remains mostly charming even when he’s being an impatient prick. Meanwhile, Mr Hjelm’s question and his follow-up blog post reveal an emerging line of attack on Mr Perry from the most fervently small-government precincts of the tea-party right: Mr Perry is a big-spending, lobbyist-loving, Al Gore-supporting ex-Democrat who is all pork and no tricorne.
Here’s hoping that the Tea Party is legitimately crazy rather than merely a reaction.
I’m not necesarily a fan of Perry at all but I don’t quite understand the kerfuffle over making him sounds like a maniac. The Bernanke quote yesterday and now this. They are a weird kind of hyper-sensitivity that I am not familiar with. If you get in someone’s face as they are trying to do their job and ask them gotcha questions – you have to expect a small amount of static.
Mr Perry is a big-spending, lobbyist-loving, Al Gore-supporting ex-Democrat who is all pork and no tricorne.
Who wants pork that has tricorneosis?
We live under a new covenant now.
I’m not sure if the video illustrates a good politician or a bad one.
What I do see is experience at the retail politics level — the politician realizes that he isn’t being asked a question, he’s being challenged by a partisan, and a long-winded one at that. He’s got hands to shake and babies to kiss; this isn’t the Policy Wonkery Hour.
I suppose that’s good political skills in this context. But it frustrates me to see an unanswered question. There will come a time that Governor Perry will have to answer challenges made by people who will not agree with his factual premises. A press-the-flesh event like this may not be that time. But a debate or a candidate forum is, and we’ll get to see a different side of him then.