"Dear Yankee"

"Dear Yankee"

Via HotAir, I found this Texas Monthly piece by a local journalist who, though obviously no fan of Governor Rick Perry, hasn't much patience with the establishment's usual attitude toward the state that has filled the White House for 17 of the last 48 years. Don't misunderestimate the man, he warns:

The first place you need to go to understand Perry is Paint Creek, where he grew up. Paint Creek is not a town. It’s a watercourse that runs through the cotton fields of southern Haskell County. Perry’s parents were tenant farmers, and not just tenant farmers but dryland farmers, which is as hard as farming gets. In a June 2010 interview with TEXAS MONTHLY editor Jake Silverstein, Perry described an incident involving a new couch that his parents, who “rarely ever bought anything,” had just purchased. “There were places in our house that you could see outside through the cracks by the windows,” the governor recalled, “and this dust storm came in and there was a layer of dust all over that new couch. And it just, you know, kind of—it was a hard life for them.” In the interview, Perry also described taking baths in the number two washtub and using an outhouse until his father built indoor plumbing in his early years. “We were rich,” Perry said, “but not in material things. I had miles and miles of pasture, a Shetland pony, and a dog. . . . I spent a lot of time just alone with my dog. A lot."

For someone who hasn't entered the race yet, Perry is polling amazingly well. It's such a confusing field. There's a huge groundswell of "anybody but Obama" sentiment that hasn't yet found a challenger to coalesce around. Perry has such high negatives that I was hoping someone else would float to the top; I really am not looking forward to another round of hick-bashing and cowboy jokes (and Aggie jokes, too, this time). But I can see how a multi-term governor with budget-balancing credentials might do very well despite the firestorm he can expect from the media. The man has a lot of hard bark on him. He's not yearning for adulation from the masses.