WASHINGTON —With Washington gripped in deadlock between two starkly opposed visions of what the role of government should be, both sides agree that it will take the upcoming presidential election to decide the fight.
Into this clash steps Rick Perry, whose candidacy promises to draw the lines between the parties more sharply than ever.
The Texas governor, who is expected to announce his run for president on Saturday in South Carolina, offers the potential for the clearest contrast with President Barack Obama of governing approaches, whether or not Perry ultimately claims his party’s nomination.
In Perry and the state he has led for more than a decade, Republican voters are being offered the Platonic ideal of the GOP model for economic growth — low taxes, scant regulation and limited public services.
Texas has no income tax, ranks 46th overall for the taxes it collects per capita and has the strongest job growth in the country. The state has accounted for between 30 percent and half of the net new jobs in the country in the past two years, depending on who is counting.
While Obama points to his universal health care as a historic achievement, Texas is often cited as an example of the need for health-care reform: A quarter of Texans lack coverage, the highest share in the country.
While Obama seeks to increase federal funding for education, Texas ranks 47th in the country for the level of state spending on schools. And while the Obama administration clamps down on pollution, Texas ranks highest in the country for the levels of toxic chemicals released into the water and carcinogens released into the air, according to Scorecard, an organization that tracks nationwi de pollution data.
Perry not only defends the Texas approach but has taken the lead in resisting the Obama administration’s activism on health care, education and the environment, going so far as to raise the specter of secession from the union.
“On the one side you have the Washington way of doing things — big spending and the idea that the heavy hand of government has to be present in economic life,” said Joshua Trevino, of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “And on the other hand is the model of very limited government and explicitly low taxes. That is such a stark contrast.”
Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state legislator from Houston, sees the contrast from the other side. The Texas approach, he said, is “that you can step on the feet and hands and neck of your citizens and still make people rich and have low taxes. This is the new model and Perry is saying (to the rest of the country), ‘let me show you how to do this.’ “
Perry is eager to set the two models side by side. “If you want to just get down to the pure epicenter, the nucleus of the problem in Washington, D.C., is they’re spending too much money,” he said in an interview with Time magazine this week. The Texas alternative, he said, is to “have a tax structure that’s fair, and as low as you can have it, and still deliver the services that the people require.”
Several of the other presidential contenders voice a conservative philosophy similar to Perry’s, among them Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.). But as a state legislator and member of Congress, she has no state or city she can point to as evidence that she could put such a vision in place.
For now, the person most directly challenged by Perry’s brand of conservatism could be Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor is seeking to secure his status as the GOP front-runner by demonstrating that he would be the toughest opponent for Obama.
But Romney offers Republican voters a less than clear-cut contrast with Obama. He was the moderate governor of a liberal state who helped create a universal health-care program that served as the model for the national health-care law signed by Obama. This week, he faced questions over his 2004 invocation of state tax increases in attempting to secure a top credit rating for the state.
Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman both considered some of the tools used in the Massachusetts health law as they were crafting their own reform proposals as governors of Minnesota and Utah, and both also supported a cap-and-trade approach to limiting carbon emissions.
If Perry has any weak spot in this regard, it is that Texas relied heavily on federal stimulus funds to balance its budget, despite Perry’s criticism of the initiative.
But by most measures, his contrast to Obama is sharp. Texas has refused to enforce federal emissions rules for power plants and refineries. And Perry cannot be accused of considering elements of “Obamacare” because his administration — unlike those of Pawlenty, Huntsman and Romney — has not tried to expand adult health coverage at all.
“Rick Perry would be a more credible standard bearer against Obamacare than Mitt Romney simply by virtue of the fact that Mitt implemented Obamacare in Massachusetts and Perry did not do so in Texas,” said Michael Cannon, of the libertarian Cato Institute.
Perry also presents a more subtle challenge to Romney on health care. Romney is arguing away the similarity between Massachusetts’ health care law and the national law by invoking federalism. The approach was right for his state, he says, but it should not be imposed across the country.
This makes it hard for Romney to score any points on what might otherwise be a vulnerability for Perry, the high rate of uninsured in his state. If Romney believes health care is up to the state, what can he say against a state whose leaders have decided against taking action to expand coverage?
Romney has so far steered clear of the Perry challenge. Asked this week about Perry and Texas’ impressive jobs numbers, he offered a slightly inscrutable response. “He’s a fine man and a fine governor and the record of Texas, I think, speaks for itself,” he said.
Obama’s re-election team has hinted that it welcomes Perry, whose hard-edged profile it believes would be a tough sell in a general election. But the arrival of a candidate who so refutes everything the Obama administration has stood for is also likely to spur anxiety among some liberals, who accuse Obama of being too conciliatory toward Republicans.
If Obama seizes the opportunity, then he can point to Texas as the example of “what happens if you get close to the ideal of the current Republican vision of how government should work,” said Norm Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “No social services, close to the worst social safety net of any state in the union, and low taxes, which help to bring in large numbers of low-paying jobs and high budget deficits.”