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Jim Geraghty replies to our blogposts on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s uncannily successful land dealings:
Last year the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Texas, Bill White, tried to make an issue of it, and Texans largely yawned. Some of these deals go back to Perry’s time as Texas Agriculture Commissioner in the early 1990s. Fascinatingly, through six statewide general election races in addition to some brutal primary fights (even by Texas standards), none of Perry’s rivals have managed to get the accusations to stick or persuaded voters that anything corrupt occurred. Throughout the 1990s, the Texas Attorney General was Dan Morales, a Democrat, who would seemingly have no partisan reluctance about investigating a bribery accusation of a Republican state officeholder.
Perhaps it is voter cynicism. Perhaps the cacophony of negative attacks in Texas politics makes voters tune out or discount all charges. Or perhaps, as Perry claims, he “did everything open and honest, at arm’s length” and there’s not enough there to justify charges, or even implicit suggestions, of corruption.
Some thoughts in reply:
1) This sequence of posts was inspired by the following remark of Jim’s in his indispensable Morning Jolt email:
Look, I have no idea whether Rick Perry is the kind of guy who would get confused if you invited him into the Oval Office and told him to sit in the corner. I do know that he’s been a C-130 pilot, has made a fortune in real estate, and has been elected governor of Texas three times.
People have been talking for years about Perry’s land dealings, but this was the first time I’d ever seen them cited as an affirmative credential rather than a troubling question mark.
2) I do not suggest that Perry’s deals are corrupt. As Jim says, “corruption” is a term with a legal meaning: an official takes money in exchange for a political favor. Nobody has ever shown Gov. Perry to have performed any favors for those with whom he has done profitable land business. Nobody has advanced evidence that any law has been broken.
3) At the same time, it’s asking a lot of the voters to believe that Gov. Perry scored these successes by acumen alone. The coincidences just pile up too thick.
So what?
Rick Perry is not the first politician to emerge from public life a lot richer than he started.
If he was offered access to sweetheart deals, again, he’s not the first to accept: remember Hillary Clinton and her cattle futures?
Many governors would regard active land investment as inconsistent with their public duties, even absent insider information and sweetheart deals. Haley Barbour of Mississippi put his wealth into a blind trust when he became governor. Mitt Romney not only put his assets into a blind trust during his governorship – but then forbade his trust to invest in Massachusetts municipal bonds, to avert any appearance of impropriety.
And no, it’s not just a Texas thing: George W. Bush put his assets in a blind trust when he became governor in 1994.
There’s more going on here than an issue of appearance of impropriety. There’s also a question about where a politician invests his time and energy. Successful real estate investing is difficult and time-consuming. Rick Perry may claim that his investments did not benefit from insider information and special favors, and as Jim notes, Texas voters have accepted his story sufficiently to elect and re-elect him. But Perry obviously cannot claim to have been 100% focused on Texas business during his many years in office.
At a minimum, the attempt to reinvent Perry’s business career as a rebuttal to negative allegations about Perry’s brainpower is … let’s say … ill-advised. Perry’s real-estate fortune is one of those subjects about which you’d expect Perry supporters to take the view: the less said, the better.
This whole series on Rick Perry’s land dealings is sooooo cute.
I’m reminded of the Katy Perry “Oh Honey” episode on “How I Met Your Mother”
http://preview.tinyurl.com/perryohhoney
David … have you ever heard the term “IOKIYAR”?
Do you REALLY believe that unless Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and WorldNewsDaily suddenly start attacking Perry over these things, that the average GOP Primary voter is going to care one whit?
You worked for a guy who had a litany of past sins that, had he been a Democrat, would have been hammered on daily until virtually any Rotarian in Kansas or good old boy in Alabama would have swore up and down that “Bush” was a synonym for “coke snorting draft avoiding drunken C-student rich kid frat boy whose myriad business failures were papered over by dad’s rich Arab friends money”. Since he was a Republican, endorsed by the machine, they proudly slapped W window stickers on their SUVs and F-350s and Lincoln Town Cars.
If Roger Ailes one day decides that Rick Perry should be toast, I guess you all can pat yourselves on the back and publish one of your “You Heard It Here First” columns after Fox start banging the “Rick Perry is a hustler” drum 24/7. But for now your attacks on Perry on anything but the actual issues is really just going to marginalize your site even more.
To be fair Frum is only rebutting Geraghty’s absurd reasoning about Perry’s business acumen. And it’s a fair point that could make it onto the national radar should Perry win the nod. It has the potential to become Perry’s cattle futures (aka. a political sweetheart deal).
Has this hit a nerve? You may be right, but the “but” of Mr Perry has to be shared somewhere. What I find interesting is that the mainstream has begun to make the GOP race a two person race now, Mitt and Rick. So maybe not now, but.
Yes, we know, David…Perry is evil blah blah you don’t like him blah blah you want a flaccid centrist blah blah….
Got it.
Ann Coulter likes Romney. How do you explain that?
Who knows why that coke-head whore likes anything?
I believe Carney, a poster extremely far to my right but still a rational being, was baiting Smarg, as Smarg has never to my recollection previously shown the slightest inclination to discriminate among opinion sources, so long as those sources are flattened against the righthand wall of public discourse. Of course you are right that listening to Coulter is an exercise in mental abuse, but Smarg clearly has nothing to worry about in that respect.
Carney’s real mistake was in thinking that it’s worthwhile even to bait someone like Smarg, who (if not a bot) posts here for no other purpose than to get the attention from people he is incapable of getting in any other way. He isn’t attempting to persuade, only to provoke. Every insult or gibe he receives is validation to him and his approach.
LOL! What a collection of pseudo-intellectual psycho-babble.
A+ for that one!
It just makes me appreciate how dumb Blagojevich really was. He obviously didn’t know how to do it.
DF: “As Jim says, “corruption” is a term with a legal meaning: an official takes money in exchange for a political favor.”
Actually I don’t believe corruption is a legal term. One could be corrupt and not have broken the law. The legal terms would be bribery, extortion, etc.
I think the real crime in this country is not what is illegal but what is not illegal for politicians. One could make a ton of money due to one’s position of power and still stay completely within the law. Proving a quid pro quo is very difficult at best. I can still view Perry’s real estate ventures as corrupt behavior even if not demonstrably illegal.
As it was in the beginning, is today’s official sinning, and will be evermore….said Kipling. When I read how Gov Perry had amassed his fortune it only made sense. It’s the inner club bringing along a useful politician. Anyone who thinks it’s original should read “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall”…which contributed this quote to American political life: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”.
So in that sense, God help me, Willard Romney is correct. Another career politician.
Statehouse Republicans in Texas,and the voters who elect them,live and operate in a bubble. Most Texans don’t even know about Perry’s sweetheart land deals in Texas. The kind of stuff that is and will be reported about Perry on the national level doesn’t get any air-time down here and Perry has never really had to answer questions about them. He wears Sharron Angle running shoes in Texas,does interviews only with Hannity-type pundits who throw softball questions to him and gives speeches to friendly audiences who don’t question anything he says.
Texas understands that their Gov. has to look the part of being the leader of Texas, and being poor just does not work. Hell if you’re poor why are you even running for office? Outside of Texas, the world is different. It’s okay to be poor and run for office, so a little bit of checking becomes the norm. Not to say that anyone cares, but Americans claim they don’t mind poor candidates. Right!
If a teacher in the public schools just happened to buy stock in a textbook company, then a couple of years later push for that company’s books to be adopted, then sold the stock at a profit she would be crucified in the press and the public would be in an uproar.
Perry gets to buy more boots and ride in the state’s plane. Unreal.
I appreciate David’s willingness to question that which smacks. I just wish he’d tackle the things that he knows WILL become national issues. Let’s talk about Perry’s insistence that physicians flooded into Texas solely because of tort reform (a blatant falsehood), that tort reform was good for Texas (not even close) and that tort reform helped lower medical costs in the state-a blatant lie.
Focus, David. Primary voters should care about what looks like political corruption, but they don’t because it’s something they’ve come to accept as a natural consequence of politicians who swing for big business. Give us a column on the things that have actually (negatively) affected Texans as an example of what Perry would have in store for the nation.
Geraghty’s response is mere propaganda. He refuses to engage the substance of the charges– that Perry has a pattern of sweetheart real estate deals with influential figures. All he has to say is, “he won elections, nyah nyah.” But as bdtex points out, we don’t even know if folks in Texas know about this stuff. And even if they do, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether these transactions were above board even if he has won elections since the story was first reported. What’s more, there is, and by right ought to be, more scrutiny of a president of the United States than a (constitutionally very weak) governor of Texas.
It’s a smokescreen, and not a very good one at that.
Needless to say, as we would expect of Geraghty, he had a very different reaction to the Rezko story, which nobody ever suggested made Pres. Obama wealthy: http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/10109/rezko-scandal-nutshell (The Wiki article looks like a solid place to start for background on that story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Rezko#Ties_to_Barack_Obama ).
(Incidentally, PracticalGirl’s point is probably the best big-picture point on this thread: “Let’s talk about Perry’s insistence that physicians flooded into Texas solely because of tort reform (a blatant falsehood), that tort reform was good for Texas (not even close) and that tort reform helped lower medical costs in the state-a blatant lie.”)
Hillary’s profits in commodity futures were a big deal – to some. I will watch in eager anticipation for the same people to make a big deal about Perry’s real estate deals.
I hope they don’t disappoint me.
The reason financial corruption of either the legal or moral variety doesn’t gain more transaction is because the entire US political system functions on the basis of legalised bribery and everyone knows it. Cash buys access and influence over the process. You can’t be too blatant about it but even small time shysters like O’Donnell have had their fingers in the cash register and got away with it. And there a million and one legal loopholes to reward players like Perry. Geraghty calls it business acumen, the proper name is wheel greasing.
“A New York Times article published during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign reported that Clinton and his wife had invested and lost money in the Whitewater development project.”
The NYT looked into this in some detail during Clinton’s presidential campaign, so it just makes sense to take this stuff seriously for Perry.
This is all very similar to what Clinton did:
“In Spring 1978, McDougal approached Clinton and Rodham with new proposal: to join with him and his wife Susan to buy 230 acres (0.93 km2) of undeveloped land along the south bank of the White River near Flippin, Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains.[7] The goal was to subdivide the site into lots for vacation homes, intended for the many people coming south from Chicago and Detroit who were interested in low property taxes, fishing, rafting, and mountain scenery.[7] The plan was to hold the property for a few years and then sell the lots at a profit.[7]
The four borrowed $203,000 to buy land, and subsequently transferred ownership of the land to the newly created Whitewater Development Corporation, in which all four participants had equal shares;[7] Susan McDougal chose[10] the name “Whitewater Estates”;[11] their sales pitch was, “One weekend here and you’ll never want to live anywhere else.”[9] The business was incorporated on June 18, 1979.”
“The Clintons lost between $37,000 and $69,000 on their Whitewater investment, a lesser amount than the McDougals lost, for reasons unclear in the media reports.”
The difference is that Clinton lost money while Perry made money. So if it was worth investigating for Clinton then it is also more than worth investigating for Perry. I say appoint a special prosecutor. I say lets have Kenneth Starr as the SP, as he was particularly aggressive with Clinton (going completely outside his mandate). Who knows what else we can find with Perry? Maybe he too was getting blowjobs from an Intern?
“Who knows what else we can find with Perry? Maybe he too was getting blowjobs from an Intern?”
Well, if they find something like this, IT WAS ONLY SEX.
It was “not sexual relations”..!! Rumor in TX for a long time is that Perry is gay. Maybe it won’t be a Monica, but a Michael.
Ouch! Tell me it ain’t so…a dick smoker??
Smegmalicker = Clown
Shaddap and go teabag your AIDs-infected boyfriend, goober.
Starr did not exceed his mandate. He was, as mandated by written law, investigating whether Clinton had a pattern of rewarding subordinates who yielded to his advances and retaliating against those who refused him. Such a pattern would be a violation of federal civil rights law. That’s why the specific nature of Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky was directly relevant to the Paula Jones civil rights lawsuit over being sidelined while Gennifer Flowers was given a sinecure, since Lewinsky got benefits highly unusual for an OEOB intern such as West Wing access and help getting cushy jobs at the Pentagon and in NYC, the latter from Vernon Jordan.
Starr’s own hand-picked ethics adviser and personal friend walked out on him saying that he was no longer acting as an independent investigator bur rather as an advocate for impeachment. Starr wanted Clinton’s scalp in his trophy case. He didn’t give a s*** about the law or the nation.
Carney,
Great, if you do not think he exceeded his mandate then lets appoint him as a SP to look at Perry’s transations and if he is too busy at Pepperdine then we can appoint a Democratic equivalent.
However, I suggest you go back and read why an SP was appointed in the first place, to look into Whitewater. It had nothing to do with “advances”, as you say.
Yes Carney it was worth all of $80 million to produce zippo other than that Clinton lied about sex which he undoubtedly did. It happens a thousand times a day under oath and not under oath. What a weird sense of proportion you possess.
These land deals are insider trading. If corporate insiders are precluded from benefiting from fore knowledge, then public officials should be held to an even higher standard.
WOW…!
DAMMIT…!
Top of the polls for just a week and…
Prevaricator…
Inside real estate trader…
Corrupted politician…
Tongue… lickin’ and ticklin’ “cajone” luver…!
Beejeebuss…Lord…
[b]WHAT THE… “HE’ double toothpicks”…
ELSE COULD GO WRONG…?[/b]
Time for your mid day nap, gramps??
“Rick Perry’s Land Deals: Why They Matter”
not as much as him overseeing the execution of an innocent man and then stopping the post-execution inquiry … gopers … so committed to the sanctity of human life … what a joke … they destroyed $13 trillion of the economy, started two unfunded wars placed on the backs of taxpayers, initiated the Medicare D scam … what a horrible political party