He was the Ag Commissioner of Texas. His political power to stop the Federal Health Care reform was not much of anything.
Trying to make a public request to not screw over the farmers was a stretch at that.
How much did the Ag Commissioner in your state do to stop the Federal Health Care reform in 1993?
It was clear to all of us that the plan was to impose a big government program to mandate a universal health care right.
I mean, that is what they said at the time the goal was.
The question is, was Rick Perry a conservative at the time or not?
If he was someone who really understood and believed in conservative principles, as a politician he could have been trying to rally opposition to it. It is a straw man to say he didn’t have the power to single-handedly stop it. No one did, it was a combined groundswell of opposition that stopped Hillarycare, much like the battle against comprehensive immigration reform.
If you want to argue that back then he was a liberal or that at the time he was simply a professional politician with no strong beliefs gauging where the wind was blowing, and only later came to be a true believer in conservatism, that would be a more tenable argument.