Count Rep. Darrell Issa as another skeptic of Gov. Rick Perry’s “Texas Miracle” – the catchphrase used to describe how the Lone Star State has added hundreds of thousands more jobs than any other. In a wide-ranging speech Friday in San Diego, Issa added another salvo in the Texas-California job-creation debate. Perry, who is expected to join the GOP presidential race Saturday, has drawn a mix of scorn and praise for helping to foster a business-friendly environment during his tenure as the nation’s longest-serving governor.
“Rick Perry’s entire claim to fame is that he kicked our ass. You guys can laugh. You can let it out,” Issa, R-Vista, said at a lunchtime fundraiser for the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. “But his entire claim to fame is all the jobs he created. He took almost all of them from us.”
California has been losing jobs to states with more favorable tax policies and less regulation. Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight, went on to praise Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who is not among the crowded field of GOP presidential hopefuls.
“He was my candidate because I saw him leave the Bush administration, go back to Indiana and become hated,” Issa said. “As governor he was hated by every Republican delegation. Mike Pence, one of the most conservative ones, wanted him just gone. He was just destroyed in the Indiana Republican Party because his reforms were too harsh.
“Now today they love him in Indiana because he took a state that doesn’t have a fundamental advantage over Michigan, or Ohio or the other surrounding states and he put them in a better position by real tough love.”
Issa also had praise for South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, saying “this is a governor who gets it.”
“They are a state that is scraping to do what is good for their people,” he said. “And, over time, they are going to build a great workforce of people who know they’ve got to move from job to job when the jobs are there, but who generally work steady and feed their families and have a good life.”
But he had no love for Perry.
“I’m not sure I could vote for a man whose only brag is that what we threw away he took in,” Issa said. “Because I don’t think he took the jobs. I think we drove them out.”
