In his August 29, 2011 Politico article titled ‘Is Rick Perry Dumb’ Jonathan Martin says, “Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: Is he dumb – or just “misunderestimated”?” But after reading the article you can only come to the conclusion that the longest serving Governor in the history of Texas is a street smart and skilled politician whose opponents underestimate him at his or her own peril.
No, Martin isn’t asking “ Is Rick Perry Dumb?” What he’s really asking is, are the voters of Texas dumb. And by extension he is also asking are conservatives and Republicans dumb. After all, Texas is a red state that gave us 2-term President George W. Bush, who most of the liberal elite considers to be less than bright – despite the fact he graduated from Yale.
Governor Perry, now in his 3rd term, is not an Ivy League graduate he attended Texas A&M. He’s exactly the sort of no nonsense, retail politician that can grasp the issues that he needs to understand to win elections and govern effectively.
Perry is also not the kind of Republican that elitist liberals like. He’s not a “deep thinker” and he’s not an academic or an “intellectual”. Like the old saying goes, “Those who can. do. those who can’t, teach.” Perry is a doer.
Martin's Politico article is a swipe at red states like Texas and their conservative voters. And columnists like Martin feel free to take these types of swipes at conservatives, because they feel they’re intellectually superior.
This begs the question, what does it say about liberals that repeatedly vote for a Senator like Edward Kennedy – an intellectual who left an innocent woman to drown to death?
Or for a Senator like John Kerry – another intellectual — who came home from serving in Vietnam then proceeded to slander his fellow servicemen in congressional testimony, only to then attempt to use that service again years later to inflate his standing as a presidential candidate?
We could also ask, what it says about voters that would reelect a governor like Duval Patrick, who refuses to allow his state to participate in the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program and stands by that decision even after an illegal immigrant who was arrested for assaulting a police officer, kills an innocent young man in a drunk driving incident?
It may say that the voters of Massachusetts are intellectuals, but aren’t particularly street smart. Or it might say that they lack the ability to elect leaders that have a moral compass.
