Sunday read: Texas pol emerges as Perry critic

“It was a little jarring when it started. But then I realized it was pretty cagey,” said Harold Cook, a veteran Austin-based Democratic consultant. “Doggett has a fight against him in a Democratic primary, and those voters aren’t Rick Perry fans. It’s a pretty good move on his part.”

– Related Stories –

New York Times | Published Aug. 20 2011 | By Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo – Perry mines Texas system to raise cash for campaigns – Mr. Perry leapt into the Republican presidential primary this month preceded by his reputation as a thoroughbred fund-raiser. But a review of Mr. Perry’s years in office reveals that one of his most potent fund-raising tools is the very government he heads.

Washington Post | Published Aug. 20 2011 | By Michael A. Fletcher | Perry criticizes government while Texas benefits from it – The Texas economy also has benefited from the huge sums spent by the federal government. The state is home to several large military installations as well as NASA, which helped Texas reap more than $227 billion in federal spending in 2009 — more than double its 2001 total, according to the Census Bureau.

By Alexander Keyssar, Stirling professor of history and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the author of “The Right to Vote: the Contested History of Democracy in the United States.” | The real grand bargain coming undone – [I]t’s difficult not to see a determined campaign to dismantle a broad societal bargain that served much of the nation well for decades. To a historian, the agenda of today’s conservatives looks like a bizarre effort to return to the Gilded Age, an era with little regulation of business, no social insurance and no legal protections for workers. This agenda, moreover, calls for the destruction or weakening of institutions without acknowledging (or perhaps understanding) why they came into being.

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Note: Austin-based U. S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett was first elected to Congress in 1994. He has represented Hays County and the 25th Congressional District since 2005. Doggett is now campaigning for reelection in a new 35th District. He is facing a challenge in the March Democratic primary from San Antonio State Rep. Joaquin Castro. The 35th is a long, narrow district that stretches from eastern Travis County south to eastern and southern Bexar County. It also takes in a slice of eastern Hays County that includes portions of Buda, Kyle and San Marcos. The 35th District may yet again be redrawn as the state's congressional redistricting plan, adopted earlier this summer by the Republican-dominated Legislature, is being challenged in federal court.

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Politico.com | By Alex Isenstadt
Published Aug. 20, 2011
Read the complete story

Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett isn’t running against Rick Perry, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he’s targeting the Republican presidential candidate.

While Perry’s actual opponents have so far taken only vague jabs at the Texas governor, Doggett, a long-serving liberal, has emerged as Perry’s chief attack dog.

He’s taken to MSNBC to hammer the governor over his handling of public schools in Texas. He’s spoken at an anti-Perry rally on the steps of the state capitol, tweaking the governor for carrying a concealed firearm and vowing to “sound the alarm” about Perry across the country. On his Facebook page, he’s poked Perry for his “boot-in-mouth syndrome.”

Doggett’s latest attack came Friday afternoon, when he hosted a conference call with reporters in which he railed against Perry’s assertion that he’s presided over a jobs boom in the state – a claim the Democrat ripped as a “Texas tall tale.”