Perry lauds Texas job creation record amid increasing scrutiny about his claims

WASHINGTON – Texas Gov. Rick Perry is hitting the campaign trail touting his job creation prowess, riding a bus emblazoned with the slogan “Get America Working Again” as he officially begins his run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Perry has only been in the field for three days, but he’s already considered one of the front-runners in the race to unseat U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012 with a “Texas Miracle” campaign theme that will likely resonate with recession-weary Americans.

In a country that’s bled jobs over the past three years and is frantic for a job-creation strategy from the White House, Perry’s aiming to bulldoze Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann with his apparent bona fides on the issue. Pundits predict job-creation fireworks given Perry’s handy disposal of a primary challenger in Texas last year.

“I happen to think the biggest issue facing this country is that we are facing economic turmoil, and if we don’t have a president that doesn’t get this country working, we’re in trouble,” Perry told about 300 Republicans in a ballroom in Waterloo, Iowa, on Monday.

“And I’ve got a track record.”

Since 2009, 37 per cent of all new jobs in the United States have indeed been created in Texas. But Perry’s job creation claims are coming under increased scrutiny.

“Gov. Rick Perry enters the presidential race with one big advantage and one big impediment,” Canada’s David Frum, a one-time George W. Bush speechwriter who’s now a respected conservative pundit in the U.S., wrote Monday in a column for CNN.com.

“The advantage: his record of job creation in Texas. His impediment? His record of job creation in Texas.”

Frum points out that while Texas has in fact been the country’s job creation leader over the past two years, many of those jobs pay only minimum wage. Texas, along with Mississippi, has the country’s highest percentage of minimum wage workers.

“Must Americans choose only between the two ugly options: no jobs versus low wages?” Frum asks.

Others point out that Perry can hardly take personal credit for Texas’s advantages in the 11 years he’s been governor. Perry, they say, lucked out, with the state’s oil and gas boom keeping the Lone Star state in good shape relative to other parts of the country.

“It is way overblown to suggest that the job creation in Texas is squarely on the shoulders of his policies,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, pointed out on CBS this weekend.

“It is extremely difficult for him to deserve credit for job creation when you have rising gas prices that created oil jobs that he had nothing to do with, when you had military spending as a result of two wars that created military jobs that he had nothing to do with, when you have the Recovery Act championed by President Obama that created jobs in Texas that he had nothing to do with.”

For the past 20 years, Texas has also experienced much faster population growth than the rest of the U.S., thanks in part to immigration from neighbouring Mexico.

High population growth generally leads to job growth because the influx of newcomers stimulates the local economy, which in turn leads to job creation. In short, the state can’t help but create jobs to provide goods and services to its burgeoning population.

Rapid job growth also keeps wages low; new immigrants take many of those low-income jobs. Those wages and Texas’s low cost of living have, in turn, encouraged corporations to set up shop in the state.

But Perry certainly has his admirers. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, among others, credits him for overseeing a state with no income tax, loose regulations and recently passed tort reform measures that crack down on frivolous lawsuits.

Such praise will be front and centre as the governor attempts to push past Romney and Bachmann for the nomination.

Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has based much of his campaign for president on his job-creation record. And yet Massachusetts ranked an abysmal 47th among the states in jobs growth at the end of his tenure.

That isn’t something Perry is likely to ignore if his attack last year on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a moderate Republican who challenged him in the gubernatorial primary in Texas, is any indication. Hutchison, with the backing of former president George W. Bush, entered the race with a 25-point lead over Perry.

But he soon made mincemeat of her, portraying her as a big-spending Washington insider who voted in favour of multi-billion dollar Wall Street bailouts. He dubbed her “Kay Bailout” in addition to attacking her record of support for so-called pork barrel spending, labelling her the Earmark Queen to the tune of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in one famous campaign ad.

“You can spend, you can bail out, giving away all the cash,” went the lyrics to the song. “Fund that pork, waste that money, you are the earmark queen.”

Perry ended up beating Hutchison 51 per cent to 30 per cent in the primary.

On the campaign trail in Iowa on Monday, Perry was already providing entertaining copy with his lobs at his two chief opponents.

“Give him my love,” Perry said of Romney, blowing kisses at the camera, after telling reporters to compare his record to Romney’s as governor.

He suggested that Bachmann lacks experience.

“Understanding how that process works, but more importantly making that process work, of which we have done in Texas, is unarguably better than … anyone who is aspiring to be the president,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Yet not all Republicans in the state of Texas are impressed by Perry.

Vickie Ratliff is a Texan Republican nearing retirement – and therefore in a state of near-constant anxiety about her retirement funds – who’s representative of many Republicans in terms of her lack of enthusiasm for the party’s stable of would-be nominees.

“I’m not sure whether he’s the right man for the job,” Ratliff says. “Sometimes he is a little bit too smooth and egotistical for his own good, but we’ll see. Right now, no one’s looking good.”