Has Rick Perry Awakened Liberals and Progressives?panic fires up the left

As noted in many previous posts, Barack Obama has been a huge disappointment to me and many others who voted for him in 2008. Indeed, his re-election stratagem seems to boil down to a campaign based on the mantra "I'm not as bad as my opponent." Enter Rick Perry into the GOP presidential candidate field and the Obama approach seems to have been given much credence. Obama - despite his many failings - suddenly looks pretty good compared to Perry's scary insanity and frightening approach to government. And not unexpectedly, liberals and many in the Democratic Party base have been driven to panic at the thought of a Perry presidency. Politico looks at how Perry is energizing the left in general. Here are some highlights:

In his two weeks as a presidential candidate, Rick Perry has done something that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney could do: wake up the left.

Perry panic has spread from the conference rooms of Washington, D.C., to the coffee shops of Brooklyn, with the realization that the conservative Texan could conceivably become the 45th president of the United States, a wave of alarm centering around Perry’s drawling, small-town affect and stands on core cultural issues such as women’s rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the separation of church and state.

The epidemic of lefty angst isn’t just a matter of specific Perry policies though; it goes to the heart of the liberal worldview. His smashing debut on the presidential stage suggests that the victory of an urban liberal Democrat, Barack Obama, wasn’t a step toward a more progressive nation, but just a leftward swing of an increasingly wild pendulum, now poised to rocket to the right.

[E]ven as the primary is fought on conservative turf, liberal leaders say they and their constituents see Perry as far worse than your average, hated Republican, and indeed as bad — if not worse — than his hated predecessor in Austin, George W. Bush. And progressives who might have had a hard time getting worked up about Mitt Romney find themselves struggling for superlatives with which to express their fear of a President Perry.

Barry Lynn, whose Americans United for Separation of Church and State is on the front lines of keeping religion out of public life, also labeled Perry an extreme figure. “He doesn’t just go to religious right gatherings — he creates religious right gatherings, and that’s a big difference,” he said, citing The Response, a 30,000-person event Perry led in Houston in early August.

Lynn said last week’s polls showing Perry in the lead among Republicans had startled his group’s supporters. “Any time there’s a very viable candidate who has taken on the mantle of a crusader for Christ and ignorer of the Constitution, that makes very many people who care about the real Constitution very nervous,” he said.

But Perry isn’t necessarily far outside the Republican mainstream in, for instance, his implacable opposition to taxes and abortion, or his support for religion in public life. His stated support for states rights might, in theory, make him less likely to intervene on social issues than some of his GOP rivals. . . . . Perry’s combination of policy, Southern style and an easy, unstudied adherence to contemporary religious and political conservative doctrine has put him beyond the reach even of some Democrats who sometimes cross the aisle.

“Whether he’s the nominee or not, he absolutely helps fire up our base,” said Jennifer Palmieri, president of the liberal Center for American Project Action Fund. “To the degree to which progressives are disaffected and unenthusiastic — this is their ‘holy sh**’ moment.”