In a video released Tuesday, Rep. Ron Paul takes aim at Republican presidential frontrunner — and fellow Texan — Gov. Rick Perry.
The clip, paid for by the Ron Paul Presidential Committee, seeks to hammer home the oft-noted point that Perry was a 1989 convert to the Republican Party, endorsing Sen. Al Gore’s unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination the year before.
“After Reagan,” the video declares, “Sen. Al Gore ran for president … pushing his liberal values. And Al Gore found a cheerleader in Texas named Rick Perry.” The video contrasts this record with “a young Texan named Ron Paul [who] was one of only four congressman to endorse Ronald Reagan’s” 1976 primary challenge against Republican incumbent Gerald Ford. The congressman also endorsed Reagan in his successful run four years later.
“Now,” the narrator continues, “America must decide who to trust: Al Gore’s Texas cheerleader or the one who stood with Reagan?” (RELATED: Ron Paul calls Perry ‘Al Gore’s Texas cheerleader’ in latest video)
The script does not differ from the narrative of the Paul campaign, whose activists lay claim to the legacy of the American Founders and American conservatism.
Ron Paul’s advertisements and legions of Internet fans often cite his Reagan endorsement, but its authenticity is in doubt. Paul’s 1996 congressional campaign refused to share documentation with The New York Times, and the Times reported that former Reagan attorney general Ed Meese “came [to Texas] … to insist that Mr. Reagan had offered no recent endorsements.”
Ron Paul’s own words don’t help his case. In 1987 the Dallas Morning News quoted Paul calling Reagan “a dramatic failure.”
And Paul has said his disenchantment with Ronald Reagan began well before 1987. In an interview that year with The Christian Science Monitor, he said, “It didn’t take more than a month after [Reagan’s inauguration in] 1981, to realize there would be no changes.”
And in 1988, the same year Paul’s campaign accuses Perry of not standing with Reagan, Paul told the Los Angeles Times: “I want to totally disassociate myself from the Reagan administration … [Reagan is] leading the country into debt and conflicts around the world.”
Paul’s opposition to what his current video calls “the Reagan Revolution” was so intense that he, just like Perry, did not spend 1988 as a Republican — resigning from the party and running unsuccessfully as the Libertarian Party candidate for president.
In his letter of resignation from the GOP, Paul wrote that because of Reagan, “big government has been legitimized in a way the Democrats never could have accomplished,” adding, “America will suffer from Reaganomics.”
Paul eventually ran again as a Republican in 1996, five years after Perry’s political conversion.