CHARLESTON—Texas Governor Rick Perry plunged headlong into the 2012 White House race Saturday, pledging to get Americans working again and slamming Barack Obama as a failed president who has heaped “economic disaster” on America.
In his announcement — first online and then minutes later in a speech before hundreds of supporters and conservative conference attendees in South Carolina — Perry said he would issue a “pink slip” to the present occupiers of the White House, who have “prolonged our national misery, not alleviated it.”
“We cannot afford four more years of this rudderless leadership,” Perry said, citing Obama’s inability to bring bitterly divided US lawmakers together over a debt-ceiling deal in time to avoid the country’s first ever credit rating downgrade.
“We cannot and must not endure four more years of rising unemployment, rising taxes, rising debt, rising energy dependence on nations that intend us harm.”
He slammed White House reassurances that America was in slow but steady recovery from a crippling global meltdown in 2008, saying: “That is not a recovery, that is an economic disaster.”
“A renewed nation needs a new president,” Perry said. “It is time to get America working again, and that’s why, with the support of my family and unwavering belief in the goodness of America, I declare to you today as a candidate for president of the United States.”
After months of campaigning in all but name, Perry officially became the latest Republican candidate to mount a 2012 White House challenge, joining a crowded field of rivals in what is already shaping up as a slugfest for the GOP nomination.
He was immediately considered among the frontrunners, alongside former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
As Perry declared his candidacy, Romney and several other contenders were in the heartland state of Iowa for a straw poll seen as a first key Republican test, less than six months before voting begins to determine the party’s presidential nominee.
“He’s got to be considered a top-tier candidate. He immediately jumps to the top of the pack,” said Matt Dickinson, a professor of political science at Middlebury College in Vermont.
“The reason why Perry’s a credible primary candidate… is that he’s from a state that created jobs in the recession,” Dickinson told AFP.
Obama’s most glaring vulnerability ahead of next year’s November 6 vote remains the sour US economy, still grappling with unemployment above nine percent as it struggles to claw back from the 2008 global collapse.
Perry, who succeeded George W. Bush in the Texas governor’s mansion in 2000, hopes to blend his strong credentials as an ardent social conservative and what his supporters call the economic “Texas miracle” into a winning political mix.
“I am a pro-business governor. I will be a pro-business president,” Perry told Time magazine in an interview released Thursday, highlighting his opposition to taxes and regulation in tandem with his Christian faith.
Multi-millionaire Romney has been making the most of his private sector experience on the stump, but faces lingering skepticism from core Republican voters for past moderate views on issues like health care and climate change.
Perry “poses a credible and a strong threat to Romney, because he (Perry) is in good standing with social conservatives,” who regularly define Republican presidential primaries, said Dickinson.
The governor has been nipping at Romney’s heels in opinion polls of Republicans over the past few months, amid widespread discontent among party insiders with their crop of candidates.
Even before the announcement, Perry’s Republican rivals and Obama’s top reelection strategist, David Axelrod, were training their guns on the latecomer to the pitched political battle.
“If people want to send to Washington someone who spent their entire career in government, they can choose a lot of folks,” Romney said at a Republican candidate debate in Iowa on Thursday.
“But if they want to choose somebody who understands how the private sector works, they’re going to have to choose one of us, because we’ve been in it during our career,” he said of himself and former pizza chain boss Herman Cain.
Cain shrugged at Perry’s entry into the race, saying “that’s just one more politician, and that makes this business problem-solver stand out that much more.”
Perry has taken heat for not taking part in the Iowa straw poll, but some see his timing as sublime.
“He’s very adroitly played this,” Karl Rove, the architect of Bush’s two successful presidential campaigns, told Fox News television, adding that Perry was carving out a “big piece of acreage” even as the other candidates duke it out in Ames.
The Texas governor has a reputation of a formidable fundraiser. In three campaigns for governor, he raised $102 million, according to Texans for Public Justice.