The Mainstream Advocate

Even the presidential primaries are too far away for me to be invested in any particular candidate, yet, but perusing my Sunday Providence Journal, I found it a little disconcerting to see that every section of the paper that appropriately touches on politics had a piece attacking Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Ed Fitzpatrick threw a jab on the presidential candidate and climate change. Letter writer John Bush Jones likened Perry to a clown based on his comments about the Federal Reserve and (again) climate change (letter not online).

Most striking, though, was a McClatchy piece by Dave Montgomery that the Projo carried in the Nation section, questioning Perry's role in Texas's booming economy:

No issue is closer to the heart of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's presidential campaign than his claim to be responsible for the state's impressive record of creating jobs. Is he? The answer is less black and white than a shade of gray. ...

"The jockey in the horserace is very important, but which horse he gets on also matters," said economist Terry Clower, director of the Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas.

To be sure, outside a totalitarian dictatorship, the chief government official will never be the sole party to praise or blame for economic activity. My view is that, as a rule of thumb, the government does best when it tries to do little, so it would be particularly difficult to claim that the top official has ownership of success. At the very least, one can say that the governor knows what a thriving economy looks like from the top political office.

Whatever the case, it's too bad the mainstream media didn't spend this much time questioning the effect that a short-term Senator (much spent campaigning) had had on, well, just about anything, before the American people elected him to the Presidency in a fit of romantic irresponsibility.