Perry's Energy Plan: Drill, Baby, Drill
Texan aims to reinvigorate his presidential campaign with calls to dismantle the EPA.
| Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, at 4:32 PM
Photo by Richard Ellis/Getty Images.
Rick Perry has unveiled a groundbreaking new jobs plan. Literally groundbreaking, that is. Figuratively, it hardly breaks any new ground at all, the Washington Post points out.
The plan, essentially, is “Drill, baby, drill.” The erstwhile Republican presidential frontrunner called for oil drilling off the East Coast, on federal lands in the West, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He also called for dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency to get rid of its pesky pollution regulations. Perry said he would accomplish the overhaul through executive orders.
“My plan would make us more secure by tapping America’s true energy potential,” he said in the speech, delivered at a steel plant outside of Pittsburgh.
With everything else going wrong in his campaign, Perry has turned to concrete policy proposals in a bid to appeal to the Republican base and to be taken more seriously in Washington, the Post explains. How is it going over? Well, it managed to draw disdainful responses from the campaigns of both President Obama and Michele Bachmann. So it seems people are paying attention, at least.
According to Fox News, Obama’s campaign said Perry’s plan “isn’t the way to win the future, it’s straight out of the past—doubling down on finite resources with no plan to promote innovation or to transition the nation to a clean energy economy."
Bachmann, meanwhile, sarcastically thanked Perry, the Los Angeles Times reports. “I want to thank Gov. Perry for endorsing my energy plan, that he’s coming out with today,” she told journalists after an event at a small Christian college in Iowa.
The New York Times’ blog The Caucus, meanwhile, said the proposal “resembled a wishlist for the oil and gas industry.”
The latest polls show Perry slipping from as much as 38 percent support shortly after he entered the race in August to just 16 percent. "Polls are going to go up and down," he said Friday. "Now's not the time to be worried about your position in the polls. We know they change."
