Ross Ramsey is about as smart a Texas political analyst as there is, and he’s laid out three things Rick Perry must do to wage an effective campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Ramsey, writing for the Texas Tribune, listed them in this order: (1) stay the course while the field thins out; (2) get rid of the prosecutor who’s trying to convict him of abuse of power; (3) do well in the debates.
If Ramsey was listing them in order of importance, I’d flip the first and second points.
http://www.texastribune.org/2015/06/04/analysis-three-steps-perrys-comeback-trail/
Those “pesky prosecutors” represent every possible stumbling block for the former Texas governor.
Perry, who today went to Addison to announce his candidacy, appears to the be the first major candidate ever to run for president while facing felony indictment. A Travis County grand jury indicted him for abuse of power and coercion of a public official in 2014.
The history is out there. Ramsey goes through it in the link attached here.
If Perry cannot shake those prosecutors, then it’s game over.
And by “shaking” them, he must get the indictments tossed out.
As Ramsey notes: “Perry and his legal team have argued that the case is a political one brought by liberal prosecutors in a liberal county to a liberal grand jury, that his veto was legal, and that the whole thing was designed to spoil his political future.”
The veto might have been legal, but it also was done with considerable public-relations fanfare, which is why — in my view — the coercion charge might be the one that sticks more stubbornly than the abuse of power allegation.
All the then-governor had to do was veto the money appropriated to the Public Integrity Unit without making such a public case about the district attorney’s arrest for drunken driving and his public threat to veto the money if she didn’t quit her job as Travis County DA.
Was it legal? Sure. Was it a matter of coercion? Yes to that, too … allegedly.
Ramsey is correct on this other point: “The better (Perry) does, the bigger the indictment obstacle becomes. It’s a bother now. It’s a potential deal-breaker if he becomes a real contender.”