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The Perry Plan: A Good, Long, Low-Hanging Start

Jimmie | October 15, 2011 | Comments (0)

Rick Perry released the first part of his economic plan today. It’s a bit long (almost 8400 words, plus a couple dozen graphics) and it makes a couple very large promises, but it’s a serious plan and it deserves attention. Let me give you four initial impressions I took from it.

1) I liked the plan when it was called “Drill, Baby, Drill!”. I liked it even more when it was called “Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less.” This is not quite as large a knock on Perry as it might sound. He’s spent his life in Texas politics so of course he’s going to come out with a plan that addresses oil drilling and the EPA regulations that currently menace energy production in his state. Every candidate plays to their strength. Mitt Romney is a bureaucrat through and through, so his plan is large and ridiculously detailed. Herman Cain is a big-concept retail guy so his plan is broadly-appealing, easy to remember, and has a snappy name. Perry’s plan reflects what he knows best and he’s wise to pick the low-hanging fruit early. He will have to give us more though and soon.

2) The plan is several few thousands words and at least a dozen pictures longer than it needs to be. “Drill more and regulate less” is not a new or particularly complicated concept to explain in detail. Any blogger could have written a decent 1,500 word post with just as much detail and your rear end wouldn’t have gone numb reading it. I keep hearing that he has smart people behind him in his campaign, but this plan doesn’t exactly prove it. Yes, it’s good. We need to use our own natural energy resources, and the EPA is way out of control, but a smart group of advisers would have gotten a good writer to make those points concisely.

3) For all the words in his plan, he neglected to include the words “more domestic drilling means lower gasoline prices”. Heck, we know the very announcement that we would increase domestic gasoline production caused gas prices to drop almost a dollar in the Bush administration. How does that point, which has history behind it, not make a fleeting appearance in this monster of a plan? He did well to note that eliminating punitive EPA regulations would bring down the cost of electricity; he should have done the same for gas prices. It would be a simple and effective way to make his plan personal to each voter and would give him an easy talking point for interviews and debates.

4) Perry has taken a strategic approach to economic growth similar to the one Herman Cain took with his 9-9-9 plan in that he’s not attacking the whole economy in one big gulp like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman tried to do. The problem with a one-shot comprehensive plan is that it has to be big, too big for voters to digest easily and far too big for any campaign to explain fully. It makes a lot more sense to do what Cain and Perry have done, which is to break up your overall plan into sections that address one part of the problem at a time. Cain chose tax reform; Perry chose energy. Both will have a positive effect on employment, but we won’t know exactly how that will work until other parts of their plans click into place.

For what it covers, Perry’s plan is good. It could stand alongside Cain’s 9-9-9 plan (oh won’t that make Perry’s fans happy!), or augment a later spending plan without any real problem. It would get at least one industry moving forward again and, I suspect, drop gas prices by at least a dollar a gallon very quickly. He really does need to thin it down, though, if he ever wants to use it on the campaign trail.