Anita Perry sympathizes with unemployed because son quit job for campaign

By NBC's Ali Weinberg and Carrie Dann

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Anita Perry said today that she could sympathize with unemployed people because her son Griffin had to resign his job at a bank in order to campaign for his father, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Mrs. Perry’s words came in response to David Von Schmittou, 45, who said he had lost a high-paying job during the recession and now worked odd jobs as a handyman to make ends meet.

“I’m just sympathizing. Let me tell you. Our son has resigned his job because of the federal regulations Washington has put on us,” she said. “He resigned his job two weeks ago. Because he can’t go out and campaign for his father because of SEC regulations. He’s got a wife; he’s got a job. He’s trying to start up a business. So I empathize with you."

New “pay-to-play” rules, enacted in July of 2010, prohibit financial advisors from “providing advisory services for compensation,” directly or through investments, “for two years, if the adviser or certain of its executives or employees make a political contribution to an elected official who is in a position to influence the selection of the adviser.”

According to the Perry campaign, Griffin’s position as a Deutsche Bank advisor would have banned the bank from “certain business in the state of Texas” had he been simultaneously working for his father’s campaign.

Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan confirmed that Griffin resigned from the bank a few weeks ago “ as a result of new Obama Administration policy.”

“It was impossible for him to be personally active in his father’s presidential campaign and remain employed at the bank,” Sullivan said in an email.

This isn’t the first time Griffin Perry’s employment at a financial firm has come under scrutiny.

In 2007, he was hired by UBS, one of two firms who were at the time consulting Perry’s office over the possible sale of the Texas lottery. At the time, Griffin was hired to work in the bank’s Dallas office, UBS and Morgan Stanley were both providing advice to the governor’s office, but neither had been hired to broker the sale, according to an AP report at the time.

Rick Perry feels your pain, America, and will end regulations against conflict of interest that took his sons job: Soon, EVERYONE (on Perrys campaign staff) will get rich begging daddy for taxpayer money. He will do to the nation what he did for friends, family and donors with TX toll roads and HPV vaccines. He will create jobs for his pals running redundant agencies he also created, just as in TX, where local government employment has increased nearly 20% despite government layoffs and hiring freezes. In other words, if Rick Perry nationally replicates his TX model, he will DOUBLE the federal governments current growth rate despite REDUCING federal workers (i.e. not those managing them.) Meanwhile, his wife will conflate sympathy and empathy in a pathetically transparent attempt to claim the Perrys are just like everyone else, while the fact she thinks that plausible demonstrates just how absurd it is.

American government has begun reminding me why I quit reading ASoIaF after the first book: Because everyone is either evil, insane or insane and evil.