Perry: South Carolina is not ‘our Alamo’

Rick Perry pushed back Tuesday on reports that South Carolina will be his campaign’s last stand in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

“I’m not gonna play the game of ‘what ifs’ and ‘what have yous.’ Our intention is to win,” Perry told reporters at a campaign stop in South Carolina, according to multiple reports. “This isn’t our Alamo, this is our San Jacinto.”

While the Texas defenders were mostly killed by Mexican troops during the battle of the Alamo, the battle of San Jacinto won the Texas Revolution with few Texas losses in 1836.

{mosads}Perry re-launched his campaign in South Carolina despite reports that he might drop out of the presidential race following a disappointing fifth place finish last week with 10 percent of the vote in Iowa.

The Texas governor also doubled-down in his attack on GOP rival Mitt Romney over his record at private equity and venture capital firm Bain Capital. Perry’s criticism is part of a larger pile-on by Romney critics, ranging from the Democratic National Committee to Newt Gingrich, who have grilled Romney over the past week on his record managing distressed companies for the firm he founded in 1984.

Bain Capital would provide financial and managerial advice as they sought to turn around struggling companies. In some cases their moves resulted in massive layoffs or bankruptcies. 

Perry called Bain “vultures,” a reference to so-called “vulture capital” firms that often pick weak companies clean for assets.

“They’re vultures sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton,” he said. “That’s the Wall Street mentality, ethics kind of get thrown out the door.”

The Wall Street Journal found in a report published Monday that 22 percent of the 77 businesses Bain invested in while Romney led the firm either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year, sometimes with substantial job losses.