Politics & Power Quote by Rick Perry

“Recovery” is doing a lot of political work here, and Rick Perry’s line is designed to make it collapse under the weight of lived experience. He treats the word like a smug press release - something “we’re told” by distant narrators - then counters with a blunt, sensory rebuttal: “this sure doesn’t feel like.” That pivot from macroeconomic jargon to bodily intuition is the point. If recovery can’t be felt, it can’t be trusted, and therefore the people selling it can’t be trusted either.

The numbers aren’t just evidence; they’re a moral indictment arranged for maximum contrast. Perry starts with the headline unemployment rate (“more than 9 percent”), then quickly widens the frame to racial disparity (16 percent for African-Americans, 11 percent for Hispanics). It’s an appeal to fairness that also functions as a trap: any opponent who insists the economy is improving risks sounding indifferent to communities still getting hit hardest. He then adds the shadow labor market - part-time work, discouraged workers - to argue that official statistics are undercounting pain. The subtext: elites cherry-pick metrics, ordinary people absorb the consequences.

Contextually, this is recession-aftershock rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing an incumbent’s “green shoots” narrative. Perry isn’t offering a policy blueprint so much as a permission structure for anger. By stacking constituencies - unemployed, underemployed, and those who’ve stopped looking - he builds a coalition of the economically disappointed, insisting their frustration is not a mood but a fact. The line’s real target isn’t the economy; it’s the authority to name what the economy is.