A test for Perry

Rick Perry left the Pametto Forum in South Carolina yesterday to go home to tend to the Texas wildfires. This means he skipped out on a major event for those who are trying to out-do each other in pandering to the Tea Party --

My first thought was this was a convenient excuse for him to avoid the intense scrutiny of the one-to-one interviews before a Tea Party audience, with Sen. Jim DeMint and the head of National Organization for Marriage asking the questions. One HuffPost headline referred to it as "Stepping into a mine field."

DeMint is Mr. Tea Party in the Senate; and the NOW man is also a constitutional scholar who is pushing the 14th amendment dodge on abortion, as well as the anti-gay marriage campaign. Plenty of potential traps there for anyone who has made less-than pure ideological statements in the past and now being grilled one at the time.

But this does seem to be a real state of emergency in Texas. Perry was quoted tonight as saying the fires are "as meaning-looking as I've ever seen."

So . . . here is the real test for him now. The Republicans in Congress are saying "no disaster aid" without offsetting cuts elsewhere. That, of course, at best, means long delays while they fight it out. And Ron Paul has even called for the abolition of FEMA.

Now, when Texas is going to need a lot of help, what's a governor to do when he also wants to win the favor of the most conservative voters, and his opponents are out-T-ing him?

Perry has a history of complaining loudly that FEMA wasn't giving them enough relief on disasters in 2008 and 2010. So he can't claim long-standing opposition to federal disaster aid.

Ah, politics . . . Ain't it fun to watch the other side sizzling in the hot seat !

Ralph