Matt Browner Hamlin covered this earlier today (see here, including video), and Paul Krugman adds his thoughts:
[E]veryone I’ve read seems to miss the bit about Bernanke playing politics — implying that anything he does would be in the interests of helping Obama get reelected.Krugman reminds us that "as early as 1993, Republican Senators would joke about what might happen to Bill Clinton if he visited their states, and the Broders of the world pretended not to notice".
That’s a hell of an accusation to make — especially when you bear in mind that Bernanke was a Bush appointee. But this is apparently how people like Perry think.
After this, I suspect that Perry is a shoo-in for the nomination.
It's an interesting trap to put Bernanke in. If he helps the country recover by borrowing money at ungodly low rates (if you were the government, wouldn't you borrow money at less than 1%?), he's "playing politics" since that helps Obama.
This is, in effect, telling Bernanke that he has to let Obama fail (by letting the economy fail) — because anything that helps Obama is political. This is like the Scalia SCOTUS saying that counting the Florida ballots interferes with George Bush's right to be president. Helping the economy succeed interferes with Obama's demise and the Republicans' right-of-return.
This also follows Limbaugh's Rule: "The dirty little secret ... is that every Republican in this country wants Obama to fail" — and will do anything needed to achieve that goal.
I suspect this latest salvo will fly, and that after the right amount of "just joshin'" language, the media will give Perry a pass. And if it does, that will be a sign that Krugman is right — Perry is the "hair apparent" (so to speak) of the Republican crown.
Don't forget, as Texan Jim Hightower noted on The Last Word, Perry was hand-picked by Karl Rove, and Rove can definitely pick them. Quoting James Moore:
[Karl Rove] said, I saw him walking up, and he was wearing boots and blue jeans, and a brown leather bomber jacket, and he had these steely blue eyes, and he was smacking gum. He had this thick curly hair, and you could see the tobacco circle pouch in his back pocket. And Rove said, I thought he was just the coolest guy in the world. I wanted to be like him.That's Rove on Bush. Later, Rove picked Perry to run against Hightower. The man definitely has an eye for talent.
GP
