The Best Perk in Politics

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

We have been hearing a lot about important politicians and private jets.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas seems to have spent his entire career as governor aloft on someone else’s dime. In India, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh was recently charged with sending a jet to buy her a new pair of sandals in Mumbai, although perhaps we should leave that one to the Indians. Free private-plane travel figures in the upcoming John Edwards trial, but when you’re arguing about who paid to keep your secret mistress and love child out of the public eye while you were running for president and your wife had terminal cancer, the airfare is the least of it.

So, Rick Perry.

This week in The Times, Mike McIntire reported that as governor, Perry had received $1.3 million worth of free flights in private jets from corporate executives and wealthy donors. Some of them involved trips to Washington to lobby on behalf of matters of interest to the plane owners.

This is the same Rick Perry who recently told The San Francisco Chronicle that he was the sort of leader who could go to Washington and “take a wrecking ball, a sledgehammer — whatever it takes to break up the good-old-boy corporate lobbyist mentality that is putting this country’s future in jeopardy.”

(More here.)