Enter Rick "Dubya" Perry

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g.html?hpid=z3
Enter Rick ‘Dubya’ Perry
Posted at 03:10 PM ET, 08/16/2011
Enter Rick ‘Dubya’ Perry
By Kathleen Parker

Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry can resist the comparison all he wants, but he’s more like George W. Bush than George W. Bush.

The comparisons were unavoidable. They’ve both been Texas governors. They’re both fluent in Bubba, and both unapologetically have been brought to their knees by Jesus Christ. The last two categories hardly constitute a lonely hearts club. If you are born again in the GOP, you have friends.

Perry instinctively rejected the Bush comparison. He’s his own man after all. And, as yet, history has not rewarded Bush’s efforts to democratize the Middle East with plaudits of prescience. The jury is taking its sweet time.

“I am Rick Perry and he is George Bush,” Perry told reporters at the Iowa State Fair. “And our records are quite different.. . . I went to Texas A&M. He went to Yale.”

This not only makes Perry different. In these anti-elite times, it makes him better.

Moreover, how insulting to any man — or woman — to be disqualified on the basis of shared geography. But the similarities between these two are both more and less than that.

Upon meeting Perry, you can’t help thinking that he’s just like Dubya. They share not only the same speech patterns, but they also have that same je ne sais quoi that corresponds to the way a confident Southern male asks a girl to take a spin around the dance floor: “Wanna dance?”