Rick Perry’s entry into the Presidential race has focused national attention, anointing him one of the two or three most likely challengers to Barack Obama in 2012. Given his track record as a formidable candidate, it seems completely within bounds to suggest this. And forget the theocratic stuff; as Governor of Texas, a state that has held up OK during the recession, Perry will be running on his economic record, something rare for any politician in America. But this hyping of the Texas economy doesn’t bear a huge relationship to the facts.

First of all, I thought we went through this with George W. Bush: the Texas Governor is not a powerful position, Constitutionally speaking. Arguably, the lieutenant governor plays a bigger role in policymaking because of their role as head of the state Senate. But Perry once was a Lite Gov as well, so let’s set this huge caveat aside for a moment and assume that Perry is responsible in a meaningful way for Texas’ economic performance.

So why has Texas done well during the downturn? First, you have to challenge the notion that it has done well. 8.2% unemployment is below the national average, but not astounding by any measure; New York and Massachusetts are in better shape. Texas also has one in four of its citizens without health insurance. Their poverty rates are pretty bad.

First, you have the simple fact of population growth. If Rick Perry were the governor of New Hampshire, the unforgiving climate would have chilled his economic miracle, in other words.

For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular [...]

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

Now combine that higher population growth with an oil and gas boom driven by global demand, and Texas happens to be the right state at the right time, rather than the beneficiary of a serious effort at job creation.

In fact, overall GDP growth during the Perry years wound up slightly below growth in the US as a whole, on a per capita basis.

There are a couple of other things that worked in Texas’ favor that had little to do with Perry. First, they had no mortgage bubble because of strict regulation of mortgages, particularly on cash-out refinancings and home equity lines of credit. In short, the state discouraged most of the products that blew up the housing bubble. This dates back to the founding of Texas in 1845, so maybe Perry’s great-great-great-great-grandfather had something to do with it, but not him. In fact, he wants to dismantle most federal regulations.

Finally, Texas really benefited from something you won’t hear Perry tout on the campaign trail: the Recovery Act. Over half of the states job growth over the past two years came in health care, education and local government, precisely the areas boosted by the stimulus. In addition, the stimulus filled a gaping budget hole in 2009 with $11 billion in stimulus funds. The 2011-2012 budget was filled in with accounting gimmicks, mostly, all of which hit after the 2012 elections, just out of reach of the Presidential race.

So you have a low-tax, low-services petro-state with warm weather and a solid mortgage regulatory apparatus, which led to low-wage jobs at about the level of higher-tax, higher-service states in the Northeast. What’s more, if you carry this off broadly throughout the country, suddenly Texas has no other states from which to poach jobs, and fewer jobs would result.

That’s what Republicans consider a “miracle.”