Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a message for Wall Street during his second campaign that could just as easily come from a progressive candidate on the left: No special treatment from Washington.
"There is nothing too big to fail from my perspective when it comes to banks, or when it comes to big corporate entities. And I think Americans are fed up. I am," Perry said on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. " We're fed up by seeing Wall Street get treated specially. And you can't even get a loan from your community bank because of Dodd-Frank banking regulations. All that has to change."
In practice, he said that means regulations for Wall Street banks - something that is not always popular among the GOP.
"If they make bad decisions, let them live with those bad decisions. Don't bail them out," he said.
That doesn't mean he supports the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation signed into law in 2010. That law, he said, "is killing the community banks" because they can't make loans to small businesses.
"My home state, one of the things that we were successful with was finding that balance between protecting the citizens and allowing the freedom for folks to grow, to be able to get loans, to be able to do the things that really matter," he said.
Perry launched his second presidential bid last week, and he's hoping for a better outcome than the 2012 election during which a high-profile gaffe led to a long decline and an early exit from the race before the South Carolina primary.
"We're healthy and well prepared. So we've spent a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina. That pays great dividends just in itself," he said.
One of his principal arguments is that candidates who are current or former governors are better-prepared than their counterparts in the Senate to run the country.
"No one gave me a handbook that said, 'Here's how you handle Katrina and Rita and the hurricanes.' Nobody said, 'Here's how you handle Ebola. Here's how you handle a crisis on your border,'" Perry said.
To take on critics who say he lacks sufficient foreign policy experience, Perry has been studying up with experts to fill any knowledge gaps. When asked to name the most important thing he's learned during his studies, Perry rattled off a list of names of the people he has met with, ranging from former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger to think tanks and nonprofit organizations like the Hoover Institute and the John Hay Initiative.
"Obviously you've got to spend a lot of time with foreign policy," he said.
Later, he added, "You need to have a president who understands that all wisdom doesn't emanate out of Washington, D.C., that you've got to trust these governors and trust these states to come pick up with the right concepts and the right ideas. And to, frankly, experiment out there in America. And that makes for great competition and a stronger country."
Asked about a recent accusation from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton that he and other former Republican governors worked to suppress turnout among young and minority voters, Perry said, "I think that the people of the state of Texas overwhelming support voter identification. And that's what this is really about. Hillary Clinton believes that all wisdom emanates out of Washington D.C. She's the classic Washington insider."
"She's basically looking at the people of Texas and other states that have put types of voter identification laws into place and saying, 'We don't trust you,'" he added.
Poster Comment:
Throwing John Bailout McCain and Bush under the bus is a good thing. But is he ready to end the FED, and corporate welfare?
