Rick Perry should harness an imploding Europe to define his message to GOP voters.

It is said that history is written by the victors. In the case of the 2012 election it’s hard to see how that’s even possible given that with the current trajectory of the GOP primaries we’re all going to end up losers.

Rarely does it occur that choices and consequences of government policies are so starkly presented for an electorate as they are today. Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the GOP field as an alternative to our big government president.

Today, the national debt stands at approximately $15 trillion, or almost $50,000 per American citizen. $4.6 trillion of that debt was run up under Barack Obama. That exceeds the combined amount of debt accumulated by every president from George Washington through the first George Bush. Everyone knows that too much debt is a bad thing. Even Candidate Barack Obama knew enough and told us on the campaign trail:

The problem is, that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, # 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome so that now we have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back, $30,000 for every man woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.

So what George Bush accomplished in eight years, Barack Obama has accomplished in three. And it's only going to get worse. By Candidate Obama’s rationale that must make President Obama über unpatriotic.

Well, the President will tell you that the policies behind that spending were necessary to save the country from a depression and are finally beginning to bear fruit. He’d point to December’s unemployment rate that dropped to 8.5%, from a peak of 10.1% in November of ’09. As the fourth best president in our history, he’s obviously doing something right.

Or maybe not… When Barack Obama took office the population of the United States was 306 million and there were 186 million people working with an additional 14.9 million people looking for work, resulting in an unemployment rate of 7.4%. (14.9 million / 201 million) That 201 million is called the Workforce and it’s the key to understanding unemployment numbers. Workforce is defined as the following:

Total number of a country's population employed in the armed forces and civilian jobs, plus those unemployed people who are actually seeking paying work.

Today, three years after Barack Obama took office the population has grown to 312 million but the workforce has actually shrunk from 201 million to 199 million. That means that despite adding 6 million people, the number of Americans working or actively seeking work has dropped by 2 million. Add to that the 4 million working age new Americans and you have a total of 6 million more people not working or even looking since Barack Obama took office. That’s how you get to 8.5% unemployment; you get people to stop looking for a job in the first place. He’s definitely doing something, but it’s not good. Nor is it unprecedented.

The big government policies that Barack Obama is shoving down American’s throats are this very day showing themselves to be utterly unsustainable a mere 5,000 miles away. Within the last week S&P downgraded the debt of nine (9) European countries, including EU giants France, Italy and Spain. The Euro is on the brink and the economies are disasters. If that were not bad enough, unemployment in Europe is so high (10% overall and 9% in France, 14% in Ireland, 18% in Greece and a whopping 23% in Spain) that a continent already unable to replace itself is shrinking even faster as an increasing number of its citizens emigrate to seek jobs elsewhere. In Greece the economic problems are so bad that parents are now abandoning babies and children at hospitals and churches across the country.

Which brings us back to the American election of 2012. The big government policies of Barack Obama are bringing the train wreck that is Europe to our shores. Unfortunately, the candidates leading the GOP charge to unseat him are little better, despite their protestations to the contrary. They claim to be conservatives, but they are not. They are big government advocates, just less so than Barack Obama.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that the only candidate in the GOP field who actually has a record of pursuing small government policies is seemingly unable to articulate those ideas to the average voter. If that candidate, Rick Perry, is to have any chance at all to resurrect his campaign he will have to do something dramatically different and he’ll have to do it soon. He should drop the oafish Bain Capital attacks and instead focus in a laser like fashion on smaller government. That is the one issue that every American can relate to regardless of age, sex, race etc. The rapacious nature of government must be demonstrated in a way they understand. In South Carolina, where the NLRB just tried to kill a Boeing plant, that message should resonate particularly well.

And how should he do that? With PowerPoint of course. PowerPoint might be a stretch, but not by much. The image of a burning Europe with its big government economies in ruin, double digit unemployment, rioters in the streets and babies abandoned on the sidewalks makes a perfect foil for the big government policies of both Barack Obama and the rest of the GOP field. Those are the kinds of images that voters can relate to because they see more and more of them on our own shores. And of course PowerPoint would come in handy when trying to remember what agencies to cut…

It would be a shame if when the history of the 2012 election is written Rick Perry is reduced to a 53 second footnote. Particularly because that means that some big government advocate won. Despite how damaging that sub one minute episode was, it need not be fatal to his campaign, but the time is getting short. With only 2% of the delegates decided, Rick Perry still has an opportunity to resurrect his campaign and maybe change history. His only hope is to harness the power of what Americans clearly don’t want, which is on such brilliant display right across the pond. With the images of Athens on fire, London under siege of by rioters and Naples covered in trash, even the least engaged voter can understand the correlation between big government and economic ruin and social failure. It’s up to Rick Perry to figure out how to make that case. If he does he has a shot at winning. If he can’t he’s destined to be a footnote in American political history.

Tea Party vs. the GOP establishment - Begging for a brokered convention...

For much of the last three years, I, like so many others who were so despondent after the election of 2008, assumed that the election of 2012 was finally going to provide the American people with a real choice of philosophies.

On the one side you have President Obama and the progressive / fascist utopia. (Fascist in the economic sense – where private property remains, but government dictates its usage – rather than the Nazi anti-Semitic / nationalist sense.) This utopia is where government plays the role of caretaker of the nation, where government tells citizens what they can and can’t do with their property, what they must buy and where they must invest, where unions have the power to coerce both government officials and private corporations that pay their members salaries.

On the other side the Tea Party was going to make sure that for the first time in 30 years a conservative nominee would be the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The platform would include radically smaller government, less intrusive government, and lower taxes coupled with a less complicated tax code – maybe even the Fair Tax – and a strict adherence to the 10th Amendment. Life was indeed going to be good again and prosperity would soon come roaring back.

Given the failure of everything progressive, from welfare to education to the USSR to practically the entire European continent, Americans would finally be given the choice between continuing down that well trod path to failure and a going down that forgotten path of economic liberty that was the foundation of American prosperity since the revolution.

Somehow, somewhere along the road leading to that fateful, Solomanic fork in the road, something went wrong. Not on the left. No, President Obama has indeed been as progressive as most of us feared, and in some cases far worse. Actually, the problem is on the right. Where many of us were hoping that the standard-bearer of the GOP would be a clean, if not perfect, conservative, increasingly it looks as if the nominee is going to be someone other than that.

In the one corner we have Mitt Romney who to this day refuses to renounce Romneycare, the Massachusetts disaster that spawned Obamacare. He also was an early supporter of cap and trade, was gullible on global warming, opposes a flat tax or the Fair Tax and shares an unhealthy affinity with Barack Obama for class warfare.

In the other corner we have Newt Gingrich, the guy who sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and told us to pressure our leaders to combat climate change. Although he finally admitted that was one of the stupidest things he ever did, there are other candidates for that title. He trashed Paul Ryan’s less than radical tax plan as “conservative social engineering”, supported the individual mandate in healthcare and now wants to harness local boards to determine which illegal immigrants should be allowed to pursue a “Path to legality”. I have to wonder how effective that might be in sanctuary cities around the country like San Francisco, Austin and Denver. As if all of that were not enough, after taking almost $2 million from Fannie & Freddie and praising their work and the GSE model itself, he now wants us to believe that the only thing he did for the money was tell them their businesses were going to fail. Really?

There are of course others in the race and they too are imperfect, but at least with Perry and Bachman you know they are true conservatives mostly dedicated to a smaller government. Unfortunately for the two of them, their campaigns barely register a pulse when it comes to the polls.

At the end of the day one has to ask, what happened to the Tea Party revolution? How is it possible that the two men leading the race for the 2012 GOP nomination are big government, crony capitalist chameleons who are far less inclined to upend the Washington applecart than work with the people driving it? Why are not the leading GOP candidates shouting from the rafters that they will radically slash government spending and regulation, that they will champion a flat tax and that they will impose a strict adherence to the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment?

Despite the best efforts of the media and the Democrats to paint the Tea Partiers as racist rubes and the Occupy Wall Streeters as noble sophisticates put upon by the evil capitalist system, the American people recognize the truth. The fact that the PR field is so heavily tilted towards OWS, yet citizens still have a more favorable view of the Tea Party, tells you everything the GOP needs to know about the coming election. If they would simply run a candidate who proudly articulates basic conservative principles, the next election would result in the country being freed from the tightening progressive noose around its neck. Without such a candidate, with just another standard-bearer Americans can’t distinguish from the big government GOP they’ve come to know, Barack Obama may indeed triumph.

With Gingrich and Romney sitting in the pole positions, I find myself pulling for a brokered convention that results in an opening for someone other than Frick and Frack to take the nomination. Someone like Sarah Palin, or even the forgetful but conservative Rick Perry. Sure that’s an unlikely scenario, but at this point the traditional route has brought us two paper tiger conservatives leading the pack. The Tea Partiers and the country deserve an opportunity to make a clear choice between progressivism and conservatism. Let’s hope that somehow the GOP can figure out how to give that to them. Otherwise it may be another four years of hoping for change.

Jimmy Carter is Rick Perry's biggest fan...

If Barack Obama were prone to conspiracy theories, he might think the last couple of weeks were part of a plot orchestrated by Jimmy Carter to salvage his own legacy.

First off the Democrats get the GOP to acquiesce to a debt ceiling bill that will result in the federal government raising taxes and increasing spending by over $7 trillion over the next decade. The immediate result is United States government debt being downgraded for the first time in history, something Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stated unequivocally would not happen only the week before.

Soon thereafter the Fed looked into their crystal ball and decided that economic prospects were so bad that they had to take the unprecedented step of publicly stating that they would be leaving interest rates near zero until mid 2013. It seems as if Keynesians never see – nay recognize - failure, they simply see another opportunity to try and do the same thing over again, only each time a bit bigger.

Up on Wall Street things weren’t going any better. The Dow dropped 600 points the day after the downgrade and it has spent the subsequent two weeks on a daily triple digit roller coaster. All together the market is down almost 10 percent since the beginning of the month.

Those things are tough, but they don’t really add up to much of a conspiracy. Hey, the unemployment rate went down… from 9.2% to 9.1%, that can’t be a bad thing. Unless of course that decline is the result of more people simply throwing in the towel and giving up looking for a job at all. Add to that the decline in productivity and the increase in labor costs and things start to look rather bleak. All this while Obama’s approval ratings slipped to the lowest levels of his presidency.

Across the pond, as if to add gasoline to the proverbial fire, the socialist Mecca of Europe is crumbling from within. In the UK you have waves of chaos and riots perpetrated by youth who’ve spent their lives suckling at the public teat. The little rascals are ostensibly rioting against the police and government budget cuts, but seem to take particular joy in burning businesses and stealing jewelry and electronics. In Greece strikes and protests continue unabated while in Italy Silvio Berlusconi is fighting to keep his country solvent. It’s so bad over there that George Soros is recommending that Greece and Portugal pull out of both the EU and the Euro.

While it’s unlikely that Carter had a hand in any of this, the fact that the Consumer Confidence index is at its lowest level since he was President must give him some hope.

As if an economy on life support was not bad enough, on Saturday Rick Perry finally made it official and announced he was running for the GOP nomination to succeed Barack Obama.

If Perry gets the nomination it will set up a match Vince McMahon could only dream of. For the first time since Jimmy Carter occupied the White House, Americans will have a crystal clear choice between two philosophies that are diametrically opposed to one another.

In one corner you have Barack Obama who is leading the progressive charge that seeks to turn the United States into the train wreck that is Western Europe. In the other corner you have Rick Perry, an avowed 10th Amendment fan, a fierce advocate of small government and an unabashed believer in American Exceptionalism.

Rarely is it the case that voters have such a clear choice between philosophies of government. One need look no farther than the housing market to understand the consequences of the choice to be made. (Pick up a copy of Thomas Sowell’s The Housing Boom and Bust for a full telling of the tale.) California, one of the most unaffordable places to live in the country – not coincidentally the most regulated state in the Union – has seen massive bloodletting in the housing market as a result of the burst of the real estate bubble. Tellingly, despite the massive declines the state is still one of the most expensive places to live in the country. Texas on the other hand – largely due to its dearth of regulation – never experienced a bubble and its real estate has continued to appreciate throughout the recession. At the same time while California has an unemployment rate sits near 12% Texas’s is at 8.2%. And of course the state’s economic growth rate is almost double California’s and it has no income tax while California’s is amongst the highest in the country.

Barack Obama of course is not the Governor of California, he is the President of the United States. California is however the embodiment of everything Barack Obama holds dear, overarching regulation, high taxes, enormous social spending, an illegal alien and union paradise all under the watchful eye of an unassailable green lobby. Given his druthers Obama would indeed turn the United States into California.

At the end of the day, the progressive vs. freedom comparison that Rick Perry offers does not bode well for Barack Obama. No candidate provides a starker contrast of philosophy, and more importantly, actual results, than does Perry. (During the decade he’s been governor Texas has produced more jobs than the other 49 states… combined.) Of course he still needs to secure the nomination, but don’t be surprised if FEC documents show a large donation to the campaign chest from an anonymous donor down in Plains, Georgia.