Saturday Morning Post: The Weekly View from Washington

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry on Thursday became the tenth official candidate to jump into the Republicans’ 2016 free-for-all. And it seems likelier than not that he’ll be joined in short order by as many as five more governors, among others, crowding into a field already too unwieldy to fit on a single debate stage. As Perry relaunched this week — attempting to shake off his disastrous 2012 bid and elbow back into contention — he salted a red-meat speech about projecting military strength abroad and limiting government at home with some populist lines. “The American people see a rigged game, where insiders get rich, and the middle class pays the tab,” he told a crowd gathered at an airport hangar in suburban Dallas. “There is something wrong when the Dow is near record highs, and businesses on Main Street can’t even get a loan… Capitalism is not corporatism. It is not a guarantee of reward without the risk.”

It’s more modish than usual these days for White House aspirants to tilt against the power structure they’re seeking to lead. And for governors, the opportunity to highlight their distance from the Washington morass by playing up their independence is especially hard to resist. But Perry and the rest — a group that includes John Kasich (Ohio), Bobby Jindal (Louisiana), Scott Walker (Wisconsin), Chris Christie (New Jersey) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — face a credibility challenge. Over three terms as Texas’ chief executive, for example, Perry presided over his own brand of corporate welfare, doling out more than $6.5 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies to keep or lure big employers. We crunched data from Good Jobs First, a left-leaning group that compiles information on state economic development efforts, and found that among the governors likely to make the race, Perry was outdone only by Jindal in spending public dollars toward job growth. As Good Jobs First executive direct Greg LeRoy notes, the data comes with an asterisk, since the states abide by varying standards of transparency.

But everybody on the list paid dearly for ribbon cuttings. None can claim to have hewed to a free-market approach. And for several, the practice has spawned controversy at home. Kasich has caught heat for privatizing the state’s jobs agency and then pushing through legislation to close its books to the state’s auditor. Up in Wisconsin last month, an audit of one of Walker’s two economic development arms found financial controls so lacking, he had to abandon plans to merge them. Christie’s administration has disproportionately directed funding deals to campaign donors. Jindal has doubled tax giveaways in development packages while the state suffers a debilitating budget crunch. And Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund dished hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to outfits that never formally applied for them, a state auditor found — part of an economic development strategy the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page called out as his “crony capitalism problem.” It adds up to a glass-house hitch that should humble governors thinking of leaning on a corporatist critique of their Washington rivals.