Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is being coy about his future plans after announcing yesterday that he won’t seek re-election, adding in an interview last night on Fox that “I don’t think you get provoked to run for president.”
“The fact is that people will theorize and people will try to estimate what is going on in my life. What’s going on in my life is I’ve been governor of the greatest state in the nation for 12 years,” Perry said.
“We have a very enviable record of job creation. Some 30 percent of all the jobs created in the last 10 years were created in the state of Texas. We have truly put together a state that shows the rest of the country how to create jobs. And that’s the real story here. For 12 years, we’re very successful. I think it’s time to pass the mantle of leadership on, and I’ll decide in the next year what my future path will be.”
Perry unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 2012, which went to Mitt Romney.
As far as another shot at the White House, Perry vowed to “make that decision in a year.”
“It certainly not may at all. For the next 18 months, I’m going to be focused, again, on talking about red state and blue state policies, how to make America more competitive and states competing against each other,” the governor continued.
“Our founding fathers really got it right. They understood that these laboratories of innovation, these states, we’re going to make decisions internally. And Washington being more inconsequential is what I’m trying to work toward, getting other states to understand that they really have the best ideas on how to deliver health care and to educate their children or build transportation infrastructure, for that matter,” he said.
Perry was a hit at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, arguing that the notion conservatism is dead might be true “if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2012 and 2008.”
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