Look At Him Now...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

NEAR BASTROP, Texas - The cops were stopping everybody, forcing motorists on Ranch Road 21 and State Highway 71, both usually passive thoroughfares into town, to turn around or into rural farm-to-market roads headed this and that way. The smell of something burning hung heavy in the air as Rick Perry flew into Bastrop to deliver his message of hope and help. Fires roared across the range here again Monday, driving residents away in droves, rusting horse trailers in tow.

Perry, the absent governor of late, had jetted back to Austin from a political party gathering in South Carolina to check on things he is responsible for, like the safety of the state's citizens. He will be in California on Wednesday night, tackling his Republican opponents for the party's 2012 presidential nomination. The questions there will come from moderators for the sponsoring television network, NBC.

Here in the picturesque geography of Central Texas, where windmills and faded-red barns still dot the landscape, the only question was: When will the firefighters whip the fires?

Perry managed a stop at the local convention center, where he fielded a few questions from the press about what the State of Texas was doing to avoid a larger disaster.

Almost too-quickly, as if to assuage scared locals, Perry said he'd already sent a letter to the federal government seeking a declaration of emergency that would bring federal resources to aid the firefight. For one shining moment, it was that other side of Republican Perry, the one that acknowledges belonging to the union and not the one who would like to secede from it.

Perry looked sort of agonized in forming the words before saying them for story-hungry reporters who full-well know his history of not knowing where he resides. For true Americans, it was that needed Perry comedown, the one most segregationist politicians get sooner or later.

He'll debate on Wednesday. He'll take on Bachmann and Romney and the others, but perhaps he will admit that, when the going gets weird, he goes to Washington, D.C. for help only the federal government can avail him.

An estimated 25,000 acres had been torched and some 476 homes laid low. That was something to behold, even from the highway. But seeing Rick Perry looking like a rube set-straight was priceless...

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