New footage of Perry’s Houston speech

Much was made over the weekend of the brief YouTube clip in which Gov. Rick Perry, speaking last week to a business group in Houston, jokingly asked whether there was a recession.

The Perry campaign has been saying the comments were taken out of context. Now you can decide. The Hutchison campaign, which filmed Perry in Houston, has posted his full remarks.

The crux of his speech was that Texas is doing better than the rest of the country economically. It’s the crux of most Perry speeches these days.

Two critical passages:

First, Perry says, “We’ve got our own challenges. When you’re the No. 1 exporting state in the country, which we have been for the last seven years, and you have that kind of international and national contraction of the economy, sure, you’re going to be impacted by it and we have our challenges. But we’re still substantially better than any other state. We’re 1.8 percent less than the national average on unemployment. It’s not lost on me that those Texans that have lost a job, that’s a family. But what we can do and what we do work on, Dan, every day, the real answer to that is not creating another big-government program to keep people unemployed. The answer is to create a climate where the jobs get created in this state and that man and woman can have a good job to take care of their family in the future.”

Click here to watch video.