Rick Perry as an underrated politician?

Jim Geraghty:
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Most underrated politician of 2014: I think Rick Perry is considered an also-ran in most people’s minds discussing 2016, and I think he may end up being a much bigger player in the discussion than everyone thinks.

Hiring Steve Schmidt is a little ominous, but Perry clearly has a solid record, he’s going to learn from his mistakes from last time, the issue of economic anxiety hasn’t gone away, and so he’s a figure who can appeal to the conservative base who has some substance to him. I’m not saying he’s going to win the nomination, but it’s easy to picture him lasting a lot longer than last cycle.
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Rick Perry is good enough to win a lot of elections in Texas, but the liberals outside the state tend to see most conservatives as not smart enough to be President or in the case of Ted Cruz someone who is too scary to be President.

One of Perry's strengths  is that he finds solutions for problems that are easily understood.  He is not into the comprehensive Death Star approach to problem solving.

When I was a young lawyer prosecuting securities fraud cases for the state of Texas I tried to simplify indictments to a point that a jury would not get lost in the weeds of trying to prove everything the person did wrong.  The SEC tended to go the other route and their cases took longer to develop and try and were much more difficult to win so they tended to go for a consent decree.

I would try to limit the fraud counts to no more than three, but I always selected the ones that were inarguable.  As a result defense lawyers started coming in with agreements to plead guilty for prison time, something that was previously unheard of.  When they did go to trial we usually got guilty verdicts and long sentences and in one case I got the first maximum sentence verdict.

The bottom line is that my approach while simpler was also smarter and more effective, and I think Perry has shown the same success in Texas in growing the state's economy.

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