Bad blood with Bush haunts Perry campaign

Austin, Texas: Here's the still-beating heart of the rift between Texas Governor Rick Perry and his predecessor, George W. Bush: When Bush was governor he refused to appoint Perry's brother-in-law to the Texas appeals court bench.

With Perry now running for president, the spotlight is shining on the tense relationship between the two Texans and their allied camps.

In public, both Perry and Bush shrug off any friction.

"Between the Bushes and Rick Perry there is absolutely no rift at all," Perry recently told conservative radio show host Sean Hannity.

When Bush was asked in a separate interview about it, he mentioned Karl Rove, one of his most trusted advisers, and said: "Maybe with Karl. Not with my brother, with my dad, not with me at all. I admire him."

Despite all the niceties, Perry didn't hold back when asked during a recent Republican debate about Rove's comments that Perry's 2010 book Fed Up! contained such explosive language that it could be "toxic" in the general presidential election.

"Karl has been over the top for a long time in some of his remarks," Perry said.

Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, also has chastised Perry for branding Social Security "a Ponzi scheme".

Denied request

Perry responded to that by saying, "If Vice-President Cheney or anyone else says that the programme that we have in place today, and young people who are paying into that expect that programme to be sound and for them to receive benefits when they reach retirement age, that is just a lie."

These were just the latest tiffs in a spat that goes back to 1995. Perry was the state's agricultural commissioner and Bush was the newly sworn-in governor. Perry lobbied for the appointment of his wife's brother, Joseph E. Thigpen, to a vacancy on the 11th Court of Appeals in Eastland. Bush turned him down.

Bill Ratliff, who was Perry's first lieutenant governor, said Perry blames Rove for denying the request. "It created some friction between the two and Karl got blamed."

Bill Miller, a veteran Austin political consultant, confirms Ratliff's recollection. "The staff always takes the blame," Miller said. "Karl absolutely was the surrogate."

Hispanic support

Does President Barack Obama have a Hispanic problem? In recent Gallup polling, his approval rating among Latinos dipped to 48 per cent, the lowest mark of his presidency and a significant dropoff from the 60 per cent approval among the group he carried as recently as January.

Obama's approval rating among Hispanics is now just seven points higher than it is among the general public in Gallup data, a major decline from earlier in his term.

And polling conducted by Resurgent Republic, a conservative-aligned group, shows Obama underperforming his 2008 totals in key swing states with large Hispanic populations. In Florida, where Obama won 57 per cent of the Latino vote in 2008, 48 per cent of Hispanics say he deserves a second term.

Ditto in New Mexico, where Obama carried Latinos with 69 per cent but now sees just 58 per cent of that voting bloc willing to say he should be re-elected.