Texas Gov. Rick Perry is bringing his swagger and his job-recruiting campaign to Missouri this week.
He’s backed by $206,400 worth of TV and radio commercials that tell Missouri business owners why they’d be better off in Texas. And he has an unusual ally: The Missouri Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber is supposed to promote the interests of Missouri businesses, not expose them to someone who’d like to steal them away. But the Chamber was a big backer of the income tax cut that was vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon, and it is lobbying hard to convince the Legislature to override that veto.
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Inviting Perry to speak at a Chamber lunch on Thursday at the St. Louis Club is part of that effort.
“Yes, he is coming to tout Texas,” said Dan Mehan, president of the Missouri Chamber. “He’s doing what governors do. When Gov. Perry meets with our group he’s also going to be sharing the success story of tax cutting in Texas and how they market it very aggressively.”
A commercial running on Missouri radio stations says: “Vetoing a tax cut is the same thing as raising your taxes. But there is a state where businesses flourish and jobs are created: Texas.”
The ads emphasize that Texas has no state income tax, a fact that Missouri tax-cut proponents have also mentioned frequently. Mehan says both the veto-override campaign and Perry’s visit are about competitiveness: “We want Missouri’s governor to have an additional tool in his toolbox, another arrow in his quiver, when he goes on trips.”
Perry took even more aggressive ads with him this year to Illinois, California, New York and Connecticut — all of which, not coincidentally, have Democratic governors. In Illinois, one spot told businesses to “get out while there’s still time. The escape route leads straight to Texas.”
Scott Holste, Nixon’s spokesman, said in an email that he found it “unfortunate that Governor Perry feels the need to make misleading attacks on another state.”
Holste said Nixon sometimes meets with out-of-state employers, as he did at the Detroit Auto Show in January, but he hasn’t attempted to steal jobs from another state.
“Certainly we do not do ads that attack another state’s policies. That’s a big difference here,” Holste added.
Perry’s trips and ads are paid for by TexasOne, a public-private marketing partnership. The Texan has stirred up controversy wherever he has gone, with Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn calling Perry “a big talker” and California’s Jerry Brown dismissing the ad campaign as “barely a fart.”
Kenneth Thomas, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has studied the economic competition among states. He says Texas “is definitely one of the most aggressive, and because of Perry the most publicity-seeking in its efforts.”
Thomas said he wasn’t surprised to see the Missouri Chamber providing a forum for Perry. Its member companies benefit when states compete to lure them away, and they also benefit if Perry can scare the Legislature into a competitive tax cut.
“They want to use Perry to increase their profits without having to move,” Thomas said. “It serves their purposes, and it serves Perry’s at the same time.”
Still, it’s one thing to criticize your state’s policies; it’s quite another to host a brash competitor who wants to poach its jobs.
One St. Louis radio station, KTRS, dropped the Texas ads last week, saying it didn’t want to be disloyal. Too bad the Missouri Chamber has no such qualms.
David Nicklaus is business columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Subscribe to his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter @dnickbiz.
