Perry's BLuNt Views in Books Would Have To Match His BLuNt Lips/vice versa
Perry’s Blunt Views in Books Get New Scrutiny as He Joins Race
Lee Celano/Reuters
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, at a signing in June, uses his books to denounce the income tax and shrug off climate change.
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
WASHINGTON — Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, believes thatclimate change is a “contrived, phony mess.” The federal income tax was the “great milestone on the road to serfdom.” And the Boy Scouts of America are under attack by “a radical homosexual movement.”
Ed Andrieski/Associated Press
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, at a signing for “Fed Up!” in July.
Mr. Perry also thinks that senators should be chosen by legislatures, not the people. And he says that Social Security, the retirement program for the nation’s elderly, is a “failure” enacted during a power grab called the New Deal and is “something we have been forced to accept.”
Those blunt assertions are in two books Mr. Perry wrote while building a deep base of support in Texas among evangelical voters and Tea Party supporters. But the books have drawn new scrutiny now that Mr. Perry, a Republican, is running for president.
On Wednesday, Mr. Perry is likely to be asked about some of the statements he makes in the books when he takes the stage in his first nationally televised presidential debate. How he responds, and whether he defends the ideas or distances himself from them, will be an early test of his campaign.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Perry talks in broad, vague terms about the need to get America working again. But his words are much more specific in the books.
So far, Mr. Perry has stood by his statements in his books while allowing aides to distance his campaign from the writings. His spokesman has called “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington” a “look back, not a path forward,” but when a reporter in Iowa asked Mr. Perry himself whether he stood by his statements, he claimed not to have “backed off anything in my book.”
Mark Miner, a spokesman for the governor, said Mr. Perry wrote the book to “foster discussion and to encourage his fellow Americans to think about how we choose to govern ourselves.” Mr. Miner said that the governor “trusts the American people to govern themselves” and said that principle would guide his thinking during the campaign.
But Mr. Perry’s own words at the beginning of “Fed Up!” suggest that he did not intend for it to sit on a shelf. “It is not enough to be fed up. We must act,” he wrote in the first chapter.
Touching a potential political minefield, Mr. Perry unleashes a critique against Social Security as “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.”
Mr. Perry’s assault on the retirement program is not a throwaway line or two. He asserts that the social programs of the New Deal — including Social Security — “never died, and like a bad disease, they have spread.” He says the Social Security trust fund is an “elaborate illusion cooked up by government magicians.”
Asked about the book recently, Mr. Perry went even further, calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme for these young people” and a “monstrous lie on this generation.”
But his words skim over the financial reality of Social Security. Economists of all stripes agree that the program, while stressed, would exhaust the money in the trust fund by 2037. But even then, taxes would pay for close to 80 percent of the benefits currently promised.
In “Fed Up!,” Mr. Perry contrasts himself with politicians who represent places like Massachusetts — who he said support same-sex marriage and state-run health care. The passage, written less than a year ago, seems squarely aimed at his current rival, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.
When it comes to health care, Mr. Perry writes that President Obama’s legislation on the subject was “the closest this country has ever come to outright socialism,” largely ignoring the fact that Mr. Obama’s plan relies heavily on existing private insurance companies, doctors and drug manufacturers.
He takes particular aim at the 16th Amendment, which gives the federal government the power to levy an income tax, and the 17th Amendment, which allows for popular elections of senators rather than selection by state lawmakers.
Americans, Mr. Perry said, “mistakenly empowered the federal government during a fit of populist rage in the early 20th century.”
His campaign has said Mr. Perry does not believe that either amendment should be repealed, though in the book he raises the possibility of a national sales tax to replace the income tax. A national sales tax could face stiff resistance because it could shift the tax burden to the poor and middle class.
Mr. Miner said the book merely “reflects the governor’s view of how our nation got into the mess we find ourselves in today.”
In his other book, “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts are Worth Fighting For,” Mr. Perry, a former Eagle Scout, offers a defense against criticism of the Scouts for not allowing homosexuals to participate.
He lambastes the American Civil Liberties Union and people who “claimed to be agnostics” for their battle over many years to change the membership policies for the Scouts.
In one much-quoted passage, Mr. Perry compares gays and lesbians to alcoholics who choose to drink.
“Even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender,” Mr. Perry writes.
His writings about homosexuality are a departure from many of his contemporaries in the Republican Party.
In Washington last year, Congress voted to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policyrestricting gay and lesbian service members amid survey evidence of a new acceptance in the military and in the broader community.
In the book Mr. Perry also takes on the A.C.L.U. as leading a campaign against religion in public life, accusing “a small minority of atheists” of trying to sanitize our civil dialogue.
“They protesteth too much,” he writes. “It’s as if the mere mention of a Creator is too powerful an idea for their own Godless ideology to withstand.”
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