Texas Governor Rick Perry formally entered the 2012 White House race yesterday, looking to muscle aside Mitt Romney as the US Republican frontrunner to take on President Barack Obama.
After months of campaigning in all but name, Perry made his candidacy official on his website Saturday yesterday, joining a crowded field of rivals in what is already shaping up as a slugfest for the GOP nomination.
“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 last Thursday, highlighting his opposition to taxes and regulation in tandem with his Christian faith.
The next day, he wowed conservatives at a Republican dinner in Alabama where he railed against the Obama administration’s regulation of corporate America.
“Unless we break this chokehold that Washington has on the private sector, the consequences are going to be unthinkable,” he said.
Romney, a multimillionaire investor and former governor of Massachusetts, has been making the most of his private sector experience on the stump, but faces lingering scepticism 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.
And even before the announcement, Perry’s Republican rivals and Obama’s top re-election strategist, David Axelrod, were training their guns on the late-comer 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 last 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.