Rick Perry assails ‘trickle-down liberalism’

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) struck a populist note Friday in New Hampshire, firing up a crowd at the Republican Leadership Summit with an assault on “trickle-down liberalism.”

Perry, who is eyeing a run for the White House in 2016, criticized liberal policies that he said have expanded the size of government while crowding out the middle class.

{mosads}“When did the accountability in America work from the bottom up instead of the top down, when large corporations don’t pay taxes and single moms working two jobs have to?”

“We are not going to fix Washington by electing a president who is from Washington, of Washington, or of that matter for Washington,” Perry said.

The former governor said “trickle-down liberalism” is concentrating power within the government, and chastised President Obama for protecting the nation’s biggest banks.

“Since when did capitalism involve the elimination of moral hazard for the biggest banks while regulations are literally strangling our community banks?” he asked.

As he considers another bid for president, Perry has been traveling to early primary states including New Hampshire, the site of the first presidential primary in the nation. Nearly every potential presidential candidate in the Republican Party is speaking at the multi-day summit where Perry appeared Friday. 

The former governor catapulted onto the presidential shortlist with his 2012 bid, briefly seizing the front-runner status. But his campaign crashed and burned after an infamous debate stumble where he forgot which executive agencies he wanted to close.

Seeking to jumpstart a second campaign, Perry has been touting his experience as governor of Texas while taking shots at his 2016 rivals in the Senate.

“They didn’t hand me a manual when all those people showed up on our border last year, or for that matter when Ebola ended up on the shores of America in Dallas, Texas,” he said.

“That executive experience that you get from those years of work are invaluable and that’s what, if I decide to run, the value I’ll be able to lay in front of the American people.”

He focused the majority of his speech on foreign policy, criticizing Obama as spurring extremism in Iraq with the troop withdrawal, not following through on the “red line” in Syria with President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and failing to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He used the Russia point to pivot towards an attack on Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“She’s the one that literally brought the reset button to the Kremlin to re-establish those new relationships with Russia,” Perry said.

“They did reset us, that’s for sure. They reset us back to pre-1989, from my perspective.”

He called Clinton the “orchestrator” of much of Obama’s foreign policy, including the issues he mentioned. Clinton had pressed the administration to intervene earlier in Syria and cautioned against the troop withdrawal, according to former government officials.