Rick Perry bills himself as "Main Street" candidate in new ad
With just a two weeks left to win the support of Iowa Republicans, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is casting himself as the only true Washington outsider in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The Perry campaign's new 30-second ad breaks down the race as a choice between candidates who represent Main Street, Wall Street or K Street.
The ad contends that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney represents Wall Street after making millions "buying companies and laying off workers" for Bain Capital, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich represents K Street after he "made millions off of Freddie Mac."
Perry, meanwhile, is the Main Street candidate who promises to "overhaul Washington and toss out the corrupt insiders," according to the ad. Perry campaign communications director Ray Sullivan said Perry will keep that promise by creating a part-time Congress, balancing the budget by 2020, curtailing government spending and cutting the federal tax rate.
Perry has trailed behind the other GOP candidates for weeks, but polls suggest there's plenty of room for movement. In the latest CBS News poll of national Republican voters, Perry garnered just 6 percent support, but 17 percent said they were undecided, and another 19 percent said they wanted "someone else" in the race.
When asked today what he would ask undecided voters to consider, Perry said, "'Outsider' would be the one word that I would ask people to really consider," CBS News/National Journal campaign reporter Rebecca Kaplan reports.
"Newt's been on the inside, he's practically the grandfather of earmarks," Perry continued. "[Romney and Gingrich] both were for individual mandates at some point in time, and I would suggest to you as late as 2010 Mitt was talking about the individual mandate [as a good policy] not just for Massachusetts but for the country... So the issue's gonna be do you want an insider -- whether it's Wall Street or whether it's Washington -- or do you want an outsider like myself."
Romney maintains that while he implemented an individual health insurance mandate in Massachusetts, he never intended for the state law to serve as a model for the nation.
