Susana Martinez Blasts Rick Perry: What Is She After?
By the latest accounts Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has surged ahead of the GOP presidential crowd. The most recent CNN/Opinion Research poll puts him at a comfortable lead over his closest rival, Mitt Romney, at 30% to 18%. So you’d expect what’s happened. The other Republican candidates are hammering at him, trying to lessen the lead.
In some cases Perry has handed them the hammer and held the nails in place, as Bloomberg reported about Perry’s now infamous statement about Social Security being a ponzi scheme:
“It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there,” Perry said during a Sept. 7 debate of the Republican presidential candidates, reprising a theme from his 2010 book “Fed Up.”
In Republican circles Perry’s record on immigration is another chink in his armor. The Tea Party led GOP stands firmly on a strict anti-immigrant line, and they accuse Perry of being a moderate – weak on the immigration issue because of his opposition to a border fence and for signing a bill that would provide in-state tuition for undocumented students at state universities. Again, you’d expect his opponents to hack away at this.
What was interesting because of it’s nuance was an attack from a fellow GOP governor, a neighbor governor at that, on a recent right wing radio talk show. New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez drop-kicked Perry recently on the Laura Ingram radio program and in the process voiced her opposition to the DREAM Act.
A couple of things to keep in mind. The first and most notable is that Martinez has admitted that her grandfather was an undocumented worker. She justifies her immigration position this way, as reported by Reuters:
“I know they arrived without documents, especially my grandfather, my father’s father,” she said in an interview with the Spanish-language television station KLUZ in Albuquerque on Wednesday.
“In those days, the law was very different,” she added, saying many people came to the United States without papers back then.
Never mind that “many people come to the United States without papers ” to this day. Martinez couched her attack on Perry by saying her concerns were a matter of public safety and fairness in general, and not about immigration and Perry specifically. The DREAM Act, she says, is piecemeal immigration reform and it puts people who “break the law” at the front of the proverbial line (the “line” in this case being the immigration entrance line, which is 18 years long for immigrants from Mexico).
I’m not sure what game Martinez is trying to play – vying for the Vice Presidential nod, maybe? She’s not a candidate for the presidency; her family history and her policy stance on immigration are counter-intuitive; she’s clearly playing to the immigration hawks on the rightest wing of her right wing party; and she did it on one of the most listened-to radio programs in the conservative media sphere.
Martinez has become the darling of the GOP. She’s up there, in the Republican Latino Pantheon, sitting close to U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. You have to admit that her comments about Perry on national radio came across as a calculated swipe. We’ll be watching to see what she does next.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by Robotclaw666]
