Aug 22, 2011 4 min read

The latest Republican battle cry is “We know we can beat Barack Obama, as soon as we find somebody who can do it.”

It’s apparently not as easy as it seems. There’s been a weekly Republican presidential “front-runner,” it seems, for months.

Remember president-elect Trump?

These days, all you have to do is to show up at a mall, claim Obama is the son of Satan, and you too might get serious Republican consideration.

Enter Rick Perry. He’s the three-term Texas governor who leaped into the “top tier” of the presidential sweepstakes, moments after he declared his candidacy.

That says more about the paucity of highly regarded Republican candidates, than it does about Perry’s governing skills.

Oh, he looks the part. Even if he sounds eerily like that guy who makes many Democrats ask, “Hey, haven’t we already had one too many of these ex-governors from Texas in the White House this century?”

Those Republicans who get all gushy and nostalgic for George W. Bush (and I can’t figure out why) might automatically throw their support behind Perry.

But unlike Bush, Perry is an ultra-conservative flame-thrower, who just might sail to the nomination.

But he’ll have a devil of a time convincing moderate Democrats and Republicans he’s not going to try to shrink the federal government to the size of a postage stamp.

There are already fact-checkers claiming that Perry’s boasts about Texas’ job growth during his time as governor are the stuff of myth.

Some economists have weighed in, and they’ve said Perry’s influence on new Texas jobs is minimal.

Yet, he’ll run on the promise of fixing the nation’s unemployment problems, while he throws in some exotic ideas about the role of the U.S. Constitution and how it grants states rights that have long been interpreted as nonexistent.

He’s already been quoted as suggesting (twice) that if Washington doesn’t do what he’d like it to do, secession is an option.

He may have the presidential swagger of Ronald Reagan, and the Texas accent of George Bush, but his extreme views seem more closely aligned with those of Barry Goldwater than any president or presidential candidate of the past 50 years.

That’s not a compliment

Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign brochure, by the way, reads like a series of Rick Perry campaign slogans.

Goldwater was antipathetic toward government bureaucracy, the growing influence of labor unions and the “welfare state.”

He stood firmly for states rights. You know, say, if a Texas governor doesn’t get his way, he can always disconnect his state from the rest of the country.

Goldwater’s more famous quote, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” could be used in any Perry stump speech.

Within two days of Perry’s announced candidacy, he told a crowd of Iowans that if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke prints more money before the 2012 elections, it would be “almost treasonous.”

“I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas,” added.

Those words even caused his fellow conservative, Karl Rove, to respond.

He simply called Perry’s bluster “not presidential.”

Rove knows that calling people “treasonous” can solidify the allegiance of the kinds of voters who would have supported Barry Goldwater in 1964, but it won’t help him get elected president in 2012.

And further, Perry supporters should know that the man they called “Mr. Conservative” (Barry Goldwater) lost to Lyndon Johnson by a landslide in 1964.

He’d only managed to win in his home state of Arizona, and five states of the Deep South.

But even more instructive is the softening of Goldwater’s stands in his later years.

He eventually became a firm supporter of a woman’s right to choose abortions, and he had no problems with gays serving in the military — you know, the kinds of things that, today, would even prevent “Mr. Conservative,” from winning the Republican nomination.

Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.