Conservative News

Austin, Texas…  Texas Gov. Rick Perry is running for president of the United States. He is certain to shake up the race for the GOP nomination much to the delight of conservatives looking for a candidate to embrace.

Americans from all backgrounds and ideologies are sick of Washington politics and big-government, and Rick Perry wants to take Washington out of our daily lives.

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can,” said Perry, in making the announcement for his presidential bid.

Whether Perry can do that or not remains to be seen. The argument here is only noting why Perry can win, not whether he will do a good job if he does. In the election, what matters most is striking a chord with the voters, and we saw in the mid-term elections that many Americans feel strongly about smaller government.

I’ve also got a hunch that after the grisly debt ceiling talks — even though some key Republicans were responsible for the tone and mediocre results — Perry’s talk of smaller government to the people will resonate with many, particularly swing voters fed up with Washington’s big mess.

The Governor made his intentions known on Saturday while visiting South Carolina and New Hampshire just as most of his presidential rivals compete in a test vote in Iowa.

The word is that Perry’s entrance into the race came just hours before eight candidates, including GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, were to appear on stage during a nationally televised debate.

It wasn’t much of a surprise. The longest-serving governor in Texas history has flirted with a presidential run since spring and has spent the past few months courting Republicans in early voting states and laying the groundwork for a campaign. He met privately with potential donors from California to New York and gave rousing speeches to party faithful, casting himself as a fiscally responsible social conservative.

His intentions became even clearer over the past few days when officials disclosed that he would visit an important trio of states, a campaign-like schedule timed to overshadow the debate and the Iowa straw poll and, perhaps, wreak havoc on a field led by Romney.

 Perry will attack Obama for letting the federal budget deficit spiral to beyond $14 trillion and many voters will listen. We know that former President George W. Bush gets some blame for the deficit, and we know that Obama came into office just as the American economy fell into the Great Recession.

But we also know that voters don’t care. The bucks stops with the person in charge, the President of the United States.

While Obama talked a strong line at times about cutting the deficit during debt talks, many observers feel he was a bit too late to that game. With America in a recession and the federal budget bloating, he pushed through the controversial health care bill, as one example, when a bit more planning and cost assessment to get it right and spare the budget might have been a better move.

Regardless, Americans aren’t very good at history. They have a short memory. All they know is that Obama is the President of the United States at this moment, and at this moment the federal government has a deficit of $14.5 trillion — a figure that is about to bring this nation to its economic knees.

When Rick Perry says, “You cannot win the future by selling America off to foreign creditors,” he might as well be saying this: ”It’s the deficit, stupid.”

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