Washington-hater Rick Perry pays a call on D.C. insiders

Rick Perry, the candidate who loves to dump on the nation’s capital as the source of most of the evil in governing, comes to Washington on Friday to do a meet-and-greet with lobbyists, trade association representatives and other Beltway insiders.

The afternoon event will be held at the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors, reports National Journal. The group’s president, Dirk Van Dongen, is a Perry supporter. Perry, who wears his skepticism of federal power as a badge of honor, is not a well-known quantity in Washington, but he has enjoyed a comfortable relationship with the business community in Texas.

Perry has another reason to start building ties in Washington. Mitt Romney has steadily rolled out endorsements from veteran Republican members of Congress, while Perry, so far at least, has little support to show from the GOP establishment.

Friday’s session comes ahead of a policy address Perry is expected to deliver next week—the one on taxes he pledged to deliver at the GOP debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday. The Texas governor is expected to unveil some form of a flat tax, a proposal long advocated by conservatives and one that would replace the current tax code with a uniform rate.

“I want to make the tax code so simple that even Timothy Geithner can file his taxes on time,” Perry said in Las Vegas, a reference to the revelation during the Treasury secretary’s Senate confirmation hearing in 2009 that he didn’t pay Medicare or Social Security taxes for several years.

The concept of a flat tax has long been attacked by liberals, who argue that the tax burden would fall more heavily on lower- and middle-income Americans. But much of that argument depends on the number and nature of the deductions retained in the scheme.

Perry may be looking to siphon some support from Herman Cain, whose simple-to-explain ‘9-9-9’ tax plan captured the imagination of many conservatives, but whose campaign has begun to show signs of wear and tear under a brighter media spotlight. Perry aggressively attacked Cain’s plan in Las Vegas, contending that it would saddle many Americans with heavy and unpopular sales taxes.

His trip to D.C. comes as rivals for the nomination, particularly former Sen. Rick Santorum, are trying to make an issue of his past ties to the nation’s capital. In September 2008, as Congress was struggling with passing the Wall Street bailout plan, Perry signed a letter as president of the National Governors Assn. urging lawmakers to pass an economic package. The only package in play at the time was the Troubled Asset Recovery Plan—TARP.

Santorum suggested at Tuesday’s debate that Perry supported TARP, but Perry was critical at the time of the bailout and said that the letter he sent to Congress was not an endorsement of the plan.

“The fact is, Rick just has that wrong,” Perry said Tuesday. “We wrote a letter to Congress asking them to act. What we meant by acting was, cut the regulations, cut the taxation burden, not passing TARP.”