Would a Perry v. Obama Contest Be a Confederacy v. Union Rematch?

Editor's Note: Video of Gov. Rick Perry's Sept. 13, 2011 address to Liberty University appears on the last page of this article.

The history books tell us that the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, with the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox. But underlying the present dynamics of American politics is an uneasy sense that the war never really ended -- and the Confederacy never quite surrendered.

President Barack Obama often looks to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln for inspiration; Texas Gov. Rick Perry, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, once named Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as one of the historical personages he'd like to include at a fantasy dinner party. At Perry's 2007 gubernatorial inauguration celebration, rocker Ted Nugent performed wearing a shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag emblem.

Should Perry win the GOP presidential nomination, an obvious subtext of the presidential contest will be "Confederacy v. Union -- The Rematch." And, at the visual level, the theme will be conveniently reinforced by each man's respective race.

Earlier this week, Perry delivered a speech from the stage of the 10,000-seat amphitheater at Liberty University, the evangelical institution founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, one of the early leaders of the religious right and an opponent of school desegregation. "When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line," Falwell told his flock in 1958,  according to a report by Sarah Posner for AlterNet.

In introducing Perry to the Liberty U audience this week, Falwell's son, Jerry Jr., lauded the Texas governor "for having the guts to say things that weren't exactly politically correct, like when Gov. Perry said Texas might secede one day from the union."

Indeed, Perry made such intimations more than once during the rancorous debate over the president's health-care reform legislation. At the time, Tea Party leaders were vociferously talking up the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves to the states all powers not enumerated within the document, as the means for challenging the health-care bill's mandate for individual purchase of health insurance. The impetus for all the 10th Amendment love comes from states' rights advocates, often known as Tenthers, many of whom view the Civil War as the result of unlawful usurpation of power from the states by the federal government.

In 2009, Associated Press reporter Kelley Shannon asked Perry to respond to reports associating him with the idea of secession or state sovereignty. "I think there’s a lot of different scenarios," Perry replied. "Texas is a unique place. When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that. You know, my hope is that America and Washington, in particular, pays attention."

He continued. "We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that? But Texas is a very unique place and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot."

He made similar remarks that year to a group of tech bloggers, saying [video], "[W]e can leave [the union] anytime we want...So we're kind of thinking about that again."

Later that year, in a spot interview with Perry at the Values Voter Summit sponsored by the Family Research Council's political arm, FRC Action, I asked Perry why he thought the 10th Amendment was getting so much attention.

"I think people are watching a federal government that's overreaching, a federal government who is scaring them with their programs, and they can count. And what I mean by that is, they see the amount of debt that is being piled on, not just current people but future generations, and they're really scared..." Perry said. "I don't care whether you're the Democratic governor of New York or you're the Republican governor of Mississippi -- you want people in Washington, D.C., tellin' you how to run your state? I think not. They've historically used our money as the bait to get states to do their bidding. And my instinct here is that there are just a lot of people starting to say, hey, wait a minute -- we're not sure here that the squeeze is worth the juice anymore."