The Contrarian

Another day, another poll bearing good news for Rick Perry. This time it’s a Rasmussen survey that puts Perry 10 points ahead of Kay Bailey Hutchison among likely GOP primary voters.

The Dallas Morning News has the details.

Burka seems ready to jump off a bridge. A few months ago, Burka was overly confident in Hutchison’s chances. Now, he has swung too far in the opposite direction:

“What is the case for a Hutchison victory at this point? There’s only one argument that I can think of, and that is she can expand the primary turnout. That seems a lot less likely today than it did when she first got into the race. It’s hard to beat an incumbent with 76% favorability and 74% job approval.”

Whoa. Let’s not write off Kay Bailey just yet.

I’ve always viewed Perry as the odds-on favorite in a Republican primary for these reasons. But Hutchison still has a decent chance.

For one, I disagree that her only path to victory is to expand the primary, as Burka argues. Yes, she needs moderate Republicans and cross-over Democrats to vote for her, but she can’t rely on them to win. Hutchison also must snare a big chunk of the hard-core Republican primary crowd. And that’s doable.

How? Run as a right-wing populist.

Right wing populism — combining socially conservative views with the sense that the common man is getting screwed by the government, by Wall Street, by insurance companies….you name it — has become a powerful political force the past year. If you doubt that, you haven’t been watching enough Glenn Beck. Limbaugh and O’Reilly have been spouting right-wing populism too.

Perry is vulnerable on that front, with his fealty to big road builders, big home builders, big insurance companies. Those high favorability ratings of his may come cashing down awfully quick during a tough campaign. Millions worth of negative advertising has that effect on people.

Hutchison sounded a bit like a right-wing populist the other day at her press conference. She ripped Perry for presiding over a state with the highest home insurance rates in the nation, high property taxes, high electricity rates, and one of the nation’s highest drop-out rates. All the while touting her conservative credentials.

Can Hutchison — who’s been called the senator from Highland Park — pull off populism of any kind? That’s a good question. I would guess not even Hutchison knows the answer.

But it offers her a way to beat Perry. And we shouldn’t count her out.

I don’t generally like slippery-slope arguments. The people who can’t tell you why they’re opposed to something — save for some imagined slippery slope — might be the only debaters more irritating than devil’s advocates. 

So normally I’d be skeptical of conservatives — and insurance industry advocates — who argue that a government-run health care plan (which Congress is considering as part of a major reform bill) would be a slippery slope toward single-payer public health care or, as conservatives prefer to call it, “socialized medicine.”

But, in this case, they have a point.

We talked a little about the so-called public option part of the health care reform bill last week. More info is here.

Members of the administration have said that a single payer system — in which everyone is covered under a government plan, as it’s done in much of Europe and in Canada — isn’t on the table. And they also claim that the public option is in no way, you silly dears, a path to single payer. “This is not a trick. This is not single-payer,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told NPR recently.

I suspect that Sebelius is being disingenuous, as are other Democrats who claim the public option isn’t leading toward single payer.

Of course it is. Just look at the basic economics.

The insurance industry knows full well it can’t compete with a public plan.

For one, the private sector has enormous overhead, mostly spent on disqualifying from coverage anyone who will be too expensive to insure. A government plan won’t have to worry about that.

And two, a public plan also needn’t concern itself with making a profit.

Once a public plan enters the market, it’s likely that hordes of individuals and employers will flock to it. Under that scenario, the public plan would keep expanding until we essentially have single payer.

That’s the scenario envisioned by George Will. (His preferred cliche for the public option is “stalking horse.”) And it’s hard to argue.

On the other side, if you want single payer, you shouldn’t feel betrayed, as some lefties clearly do. You should be supporting an unfettered public option.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry is desperate to put constraints on a possible public option — by either limiting how low its prices can go, or by capping its enrollment.

We like to think of the insurance industry as some kind of all-powerful behemoth. And, quite often, it is. But right now insurers should be fearing for their survival — no matter how many assurances they get from public officials. 

Single payer may not be in the administration’s plan right now.

But it’s a slippery slope.

So who’s more anti-Washington: Rick Perry or Kay Bailey Hutchison?

The governor has portrayed Hutchison as a big-spending Washington insider.

But yesterday — in what the state media is hyping as the unofficial start of the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary — Hutchison countered Perry’s criticism, saying she too is an anti-Washington candidate.

So who’s the true anti-Washington crusader in this race? Well, let’s examine the contenders.

First there’s Texas’ senior senator, who’s served in D.C. for nearly 15 years, and brings home her share of federal pork, which, of course, is her job. She also voted for the first Wall Street bailout, though she later opposed the Obama stimulus package.

That led Perry to say she was for the stimulus before she was against it (eat your heart out, John Kerry.)

The guv, meanwhile, talked for most of the year like he’d rather jump off a bridge than accept stimulus money from the feds. And he did reject federal aid for the state’s unemployment fund, at the behest of the Texas Association of Business.

But he also signed a budget that was balanced with $12 billion in federal stimulus money. Most recently, Perry requested another $4 billion in stimulus funds for education, bringing Texas’ stimulus total to $16 billion.

So Hutchison’s folks could have said that Perry was against the stimulus before he was for it. (They didn’t say that; instead they just called him a hypocrite.)

Behind the rhetoric and posturing, they’re both neck-deep in “Washington,”  and they both know it.

In fact, Hutchison got it right yesterday — albeit unintentionally so — when she said, “I”m just as anti-Washington as [Perry] is.”

Sounds like she nailed it.

Tom Schieffer — the former U.S. ambassador and at this point the only declared Democratic candidate for governor (except for maybe this guy) — announced his fundraising total earlier today.

“It gives me the greatest pleasure to announce that my campaign has raised almost $800,000 in contributions and loans for this reporting period,” Schieffer said in a statement.

At first glance, $800,000 is a piddly sum compared to the many millions raised in the first six months of the year by Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

But Schieffer is a Democrat, so we have to grade on a curve.

Compared to some previous Democratic statewide candidates — Chris Bell and Rick Noriega come to mind — the $800,000 raised about 18 months before election day looks pretty good. I mean, $800,000 can buy a lot of stuff (by the way, Mr. Schieffer, if you decide to bag this whole running-for-governor thing and just want to give me the cash, I’d be OK with that.)

But when you examine the donor list released by the campaign, it turns out that more than half ($450,000) of Schieffer’s total came from just three individuals, including $255,000 from his own campaign treasurer (Lyndon Olson).

Schieffer also received $200,000 from Edward and Evelyn Rose of Dallas. Edward Rose runs an investment firm and was a major donor to George W. Bush.

This isn’t the kind of fund-raising total that will scare off other potential Democratic candidates. Kirk Watson, for instance, says he has $1.4 million in the bank.

Kay Bailey Hutchison wrapped up a press conference with reporters in Dallas a few minutes ago in which she announced that she would soon announce that she’s running for governor.

That wasn’t a major shocker.

After all, I watched streaming video of the event on a web site emblazoned with the slogan “Kay for Governor.”

(By the way, if you’re curious, she said she’ll make a formal announcement in August.)

Hutchison also announced that she had raised $6.7 million for her campaign in the first six months of 2009. That will be the day’s headline news. Her total eclipses Rick Perry’s $4.2 million haul.

The senator said she has more than $12 million in her campaign account, which would give her a $3 million edge over Perry.

Both candidates claim widespread support. Hutchison said she received donations from 231 of Texas’ 254 counties and that 98 percent of her contributions came from Texas.

The campaign finance reports won’t be posted for another few days — the filing deadline is July 15. So, at this point, we have to take the candidate’s word for it.

When the reports are made public, we’ll have a more detailed examination of who’s backing these two GOP heavies.

Hutchison disputed the results of recent polls showing Perry with a double-digit lead. She claimed her campaign’s internal polling had her out front. “I know I’m ahead,” she said.

So just to be clear: She’s not in the race yet, but she’s winning.