Rick must read my blogs... nails it on immigration on national television...

I made a blog early Monday morning with some comments about all of this immigration controversy (link). Rick has the right plan, the right ideas, but his relative lack of public comment on the issue has let some activists seize the issue and use it against him...

Just hours later... problem solved.

Rick delivered in a big way yesterday on a big platform... Fox News (link). Excerpt follows...

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that he won't attend a meeting of border state governors if it isn't held in Arizona, which some of the participants are boycotting in protests of the state's tough new illegal immigration law.

For 27 years, governors representing U.S. and Mexican states along the border have met to discuss common interests. The annual conference rotates location, and this year it was slated to be held at a Phoenix resort.

The Texas Tribune's Elise Hu also has more (link). Excerpt follows...

FOX doesn't seem to have an embeddable video option so check out Perry's segment on the FOX Business site. He talks more extensively about immigration in a separate clip.

On whether he will attend the border governors’ meeting if it’s not held in Arizona:

“I talked to Jan (Brewer) early on and I said, ‘Listen we’re not going to be coming to the meeting. Regardless of what anybody else is saying…We’re going to support you. It’s supposed to be in Arizona, and if other Governors decide they don’t want to come in some type of protest, frankly that’s their business and it’s their loss.’ That’s my call on it. I won’t be there.”

On the Arizona immigration law:
“Every state is different. I totally respect Jan’s position of being able to do what she feels and her legislature feels they need to be doing on that border. We’ve got 1200 miles of border and have been actively pursuing this issue of border security. You cannot have an immigration reform debate until you secure the border.”

On Texas’s relationship with the White House:
“We don’t get a lot of calls from this White House. I have frankly never had a call from them ... This is an Administration that clearly has Texas on its radar, and it’s in a bad way.”

On the Administration’s new moratorium on deep water drilling:
“That’s like shutting down all the airlines because one aircraft has crashed. It makes no sense.”

The upside to these national shows is that Rick can get his message out in a less filtered way, and the national shows sometimes cover issues activists are actually fired up about whereas the Texas press seem to talk a lot about issues such as the TAKS test that only a few insider political media junkies care anything about... the downside of the national shows is that he always gets the questions about whether he is running for president and that is not a good thing if you are running for something else...

For someone as telegenic and on message as Rick, he should really be on television as much as he can up to the point just before he becomes overexposed...

Bill White should not do television... ever... or radio... or 10 page policy memos...