In any other state, in any other year, you'd think it would be a sure bet that a politician like Rick Perry would be headed for defeat - he's the perfect example of the type of incumbent that should. Consider the following -
- Rick Perry had serious primary challengers from the right and left who spent millions attacking him and forced him to drain his entire bank account.
- Rick Perry has a serious Democratic opponent - the former Mayor of America's 4th largest city, who's done the impossible in matching the GOP's typical money advantage.
- Rick Perry is the epitome of incumbent - having been in one office or another for a quarter century and having been Governor for a whole decade. This weekend he refused to rule out a bid for a fourth term should be be re-elected.
- Rick Perry doesn't have just one legitimate scandal, but multiple ones - shades of bribery, payola, land deals, hidden schedules, and countless cases of using his public office for personal or political desires. It's not like there is a debate on the question of whether Rick Perry has skeletons in the closet - we're just unsure of how many and what size.
- Rick Perry goes full steam ahead, opponents be damned. That includes casting the media as opponents - refusing to meet with editorial boards, answering reporters' questions, or engaging in any debate with anyone.
How Rick Perry campaigns is the very definition of arrogance. He's willing to ignore the Press, bypass direct mail & yard signs, and stake his campaign on Tweeter as if openly tempting fate - just to prove that he can do it. It's the most frustrating thing in the world - both for the media who want an honest account of how government is run, and for many a Democratic activist. And at the end of the day, there's little that we can do about it - at least, in the next 30 days. I think this all boils down to Rick Perry's Natural Advantage. I define this in two simple parts. - The Shrinking Media
- Blissful Ignorance
I'll start with the Shrinking Media: Multiple writers on this site including Glenn Smith, Matt Glazer, and Phillip Martin have all opined on the decline of the Texas Press - from the decreasing number of political writers, the closing of reporting bureaus, and the sideways to downward trend in circulation. With a state growing as fast as Texas, enough so to receive a whopping 4 new members of Congress in redistricting, even sideways reader growth is not enough to keep our citizenry informed. We live in a state of just under 25 million people. The top 5 major daily newspapers have a combined daily circulation of 1.2 million according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations. A rough estimate of the top 50 Texas newspapers by circulation still only gives newspapers a reach of 3.6 million; and many of those don't have dedicated political writers or the depth of coverage the major dailies are still able to produce for the time being. And while Texas has one of the largest political blogospheres of any state, the Texas Tribune is the only entity that appears to have captured any energy onine, with an aurience of 220,000 in July. Otherwise, upstart ventures like Newspaper Tree, the Texas Independent, Texas Watchdog, & The Austin Post, would be lucky if their readership broke 100,000 combined. I focus on print media because it is the one place where we can have long form articles, multiple part series, and the time to truly inform the public when it comes to political stories which we know are full of nuance, background, and angles. TV reporting is an important part of communicating to the public, but we still use it as a crutch, relied upon to amplify traditional political reporting. Even if you take TV and Print together, we're still talking about a depressingly weak saturation of the public with politically tinged news. Texas is a big state with dozens of media markets and major cities, the 4th highest illiteracy rate among US States, a younger than average population, and multiple widely spoken languages. We are not a state dominated by one city, one newspaper, or one TV station. Other than "Texan" we are not culturally unified. As a result, we rarely see the "Media" in any of its forms talking about the same story at the same time for a sustained duration, other than maybe faux news like the Governor shooting a coyote. Even major devastating hurricanes don't rise to this level as what's happening to Houston may not be the top story in El Paso or Midland. So how is this part of Rick Perry's Natural Advantage? When you take all of the components above as they relate to the Shrinking Media you are left with this- Texas has an electorate that is under-informed and near impossible to inform with even the most basic narratives. It's a simple statement, and seemingly obvious I know, but relates to the second component of my argument. The other factor is Blissful Ignorance: I'll illustrate this with Jason Embry's commentary in the Austin American-Statesman just a few days ago. Texas leads in job creation, but it faces a massive budget shortfall. Is anybody else confused? Gov. Rick Perry is ahead of Democratic challenger Bill White in large part because Texans see the state doing better than most others during a national economic nosedive. And yet this newspaper and others frequently print stories that detail the layoffs, spending cuts and accounting tricks that lawmakers will consider next year when they confront a state budget shortfall estimated to be as high as $21 billion. Multiple polls have shown that Texans who believe the state/economy is on the right track or getting better are overwhelmingly for Rick Perry. Conversely, Texans who believe the state/economy are on the wrong track or getting worse are breaking for Bill White. It's one of the strongest indicators other than political affiliation for predicting which candidate a voter will prefer. It's clear that voters are living in two different realities. - In one reality, Rick Perry's leadership has resulted in Texas doing less worse than most states and day to day life is about the same as it has always been- other than the loss of your BP stock's dividend in your 401k. You acknowledge that there will be a budget shortfall, but every state has one and it will be fixed just like Perry did last time without much fuss. And if the budget has to be cut, all the better, because government is bloated with services that you don't use anyways.
- In the other reality, the one that most reporters live in and are tired of writing about, the Texas economy is now feeling the pains of the rest of the nation. The foundation upon which the future economy is based has major cracks. This is due to an education system led by a state board that quibbles about facts, a health care system that leaves 1 out of ever 4 Texans uninsured, and a government that is prepared to cut deep into a social safety net which is threadbare to begin with. The fundamental basics of life for millions of people are just numbers on paper for a Governor who's too busy being a badass to engage in an honest conversation about the reality of his current 'economic success'.
This is Bill White's real challenge: It's not about convincing voters to choose between him and Rick Perry; it's convincing voters to choose between these two realities. He has to educate voters about the truth, the sad truth, and the whole truth that we live in the second depressing reality. The Shrinking Media gets it - they've been writing about reality for a decade. But they are tired, bored, and even as an ally in truth, talking to relatively fewer and fewer voters- voters who don't want to know or believe the truth because it is upsetting, unpleasant, and frankly repetitive. After all, it's far easier, not to mention human nature, to remain Blissfully Ignorant. And that's the terrible truth that I see as Rick Perry's Natural Advantage. Overcoming it in the next 25 days will be nothing short of a miracle, but overcoming it, eventually, is nothing short of mandatory for the sake of our state, our system, and our sanity. |
