Rick Perry may be most brutally candid Republican candidate

In the contest to see which Republican candidate can be the most brutally candid, I think we have a winner.

“For too long, we Republicans have been content to lose the black vote because we found we didn’t need it to win.”

When you’re a long-shot in a crowded field, you have to take risks to get attention. And I can’t think of a bigger gamble than what former Texas governor Rick Perry is doing.

He apologizes for his party’s treatment of African-Americans.

“When we gave up trying to win support from African- Americans, we lost our moral legitimacy,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean he’s become a Democrat; quite the opposite. He says more African-Americans are moving to Texas than to any blue state because Democratic policies have made the cost of living too high. And he said that if blacks can forgive the Republican party’s past racism, they’ll find its economic and education policies will leave them much better off than Democrats have.

“If we create jobs, if we incentivize work, if we keep non-violent drug offenders out of prison, if we reform our schools, and we reduce the cost of living, we will have done more for African-Americans than the last three Democrat administrations combined,” Perry said.

As you’d expect, the fact-checkers were all over his claims about the Texas economy and his claim that Texas has the highest graduation rates for African-Americans and Hispanics. And guess what? They found the claims to be … true.

Many Southern Republicans support the idea of taking down the Confederate flag, but it sounds to me like Rick Perry just set fire to it.