Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Friday that the next president of the United States needs to be someone with “deep experience as an executive,” naming several crises he had to deal with as the longest-serving governor in state history that nobody had explicitly prepared him for.
“I will suggest to you that the next president of the United States really needs to be someone who has deep experience as an executive,” Mr. Perry said at the “#FITN (first-in-the-nation) Republican Leadership Summit” hosted by the New Hampshire GOP. “And I’m talking about things that you can’t just learn with a book — things that you can’t just learn sitting down. … I’ll give you some examples.”
“They didn’t hand me a manual and say, ’Here’s how you deal with a space shuttle disintegrating in your state,’ ” Mr. Perry said. “They didn’t hand me a manual when Katrina came in to Louisiana, and there were literally hundreds of thousands of people that were displaced. They didn’t hand me a manual when all of those people showed up on our border last year or, for that matter, when Ebola ended up the shores of America in Dallas, Texas.”
Mr. Perry is working to lay the groundwork for another possible run at the White House after a 2012 campaign that came to be defined in part by his “oops” moment during a November 2011 debate in which he could not recall the third department of the federal government he had pledged to shutter.
He said Friday he’ll be able to pitch that executive experience to Americans if he decides to give it another go in 2016.
“That executive experience that you get from those years of work are invaluable, and I think that’s what, if I decide to run, the value that I’ll be able to lay in front of the American people,” he said. “Not only a record that I will suggest — I happen to think from a job creation standpoint, from an educational progress standpoint, from creating an environment where people are free — that is unquestionably the best that this country has at this particular point in time. And the fact is, if that is what Americans would like to see for the rest of this country, then that is, I think, where we need to have this conversation and talk about it in a civil and a thoughtful way.”
“That that executive experience is incredibly important to the next leader of this country, because we’ve spent eight years with a young, inexperienced United States senator, and I will suggest to you economically, militarily and foreign policy wise, we’re paying a tremendous price,” he continued.
The first three major Republican candidates to declare 2016 presidential runs — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Marco Rubio of Florida — are all first-term U.S. senators. Those three candidates, and other possible 2016 GOP contenders like Mr. Perry, have an opportunity to make their respective pitches at the two-day event in the early presidential state.
Mr. Perry said that being healthy is really important, reminding people that he was recovering from major back surgery he had during the summer of 2011, but that he’s also better prepared this time around.
“You got to be healthy, you got to be on your game, but more importantly is the preparation side of this,” he said. “And I will suggest to you that to be prepared to stand on a stage and talk about this myriad of issues — whether it’s domestic policy, monetary policy, whether it’s foreign policy — takes years of intense study.”
“And I spent the last three years in that mode — being able to stand up and discuss all of these issues and do it in a way that is very profound and impactful and sitting down with the Hoover Institute to the Brookings Institute and everything in between,” he said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.