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After the initial rush of Rick Perry announcing his candidacy, now comes the initial rush of opposition research attempting to torpedo it.

We’ve previously covered the first wave of background information on Rick Perry as well as a tour of his most well-known speeches and policy positions. So if you’ve been reading along, then you’ve probably gotten a fairly good idea of the positive arguments for his candidacy. But what about the negative arguments that his opponents will use against him both in the primaries and in the general election?

Luckily for us, a couple of bloggers have done the hard work of both summing up the arguments presented to date as well as looking into the substance behind them.

The strongest argument for Rick Perry is the relatively strong job creation numbers in Texas during his tenure as governor. Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, immediately attacked:

“There’s a specific reason that Texas has done so well, and that’s because the oil industry has done so well in the last few years, and the military has grown because of the challenges that we’ve had overseas. And so he’s been the beneficiary of things that he had very little to do with. Governor Perry also is a beneficiary of $17 billion of money from the Recovery Act, though he’s been quite critical of it. That’s helped him balance his budgets.”

Obama’s allies have also been deriding the quality of the jobs created in Texas:

“If you want a bad job, go to Texas,” state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, told The Huffington Post, a liberal-leaning news website.

HuffPo’s Jason Cherkis took a shot at Texas’ so-called economic miracle: “The miracle is that anyone would call minimum-wage jobs a miracle.”

In The New York Times, five writers debated the Texas job juggernaut, and one headline captured this theme: “Texas or the Third World?”

So which is it? Are the Texas jobs really just an illusion made up of nothing but oil jobs and minimum wage work? Matthias Shapiro took a long look at the various claims being made about Texas jobs. Here’s a sample of what he found:

As you can see, Texas isn’t just the fastest growing… it’s growing over twice as fast as the second fastest state and three times as fast as the third. Given that Texas is (to borrow a technical term) [expletive] huge, this growth is incredible.

Since the recession started hourly wages in Texas have increased at a 6th fastest pace in the nation.

…take the energy sector completely out of the equation and Texas is still growing faster than any other state. This indicates to us that the energy sector is not a single sector saving Texas from the same economic fate as the rest of the states. It’s not hurting, but Texas would still be growing like a weed without it.

Counting from the beginning of the recession (December 2007) the Texas public sector has grown 3.8%, or a little under 70,000 employees. This is faster than normal employment, but it’s not off the charts. Given that the Texas economy has grown so much and private sector jobs have grown so much, that doesn’t strike me as an unsustainable growth in the public sector.

My advice to anti-Perry advocates is this: Give up talking about Texas jobs. Texas is an incredible outlier among the states when it comes to jobs. Not only are they creating them, they’re creating ones with higher wages.

One can argue that Perry had very little to do with the job situation in Texas, but such a person should be probably prepare themselves for the consequences of that line of reasoning. If Rick Perry had nothing to do with creating jobs in Texas, than why does Obama have something to do with creating jobs anywhere? And why would someone advocate any sort of “job creating” policies if policies don’t seem to matter when it comes to the decade long governor of Texas? In short, it seems to me that this line of reasoning, in addition to sounding desperate and partisan, hogties its adherents into a position where they are simultaneously saying that government doesn’t create jobs while arguing for a set of policies where government will create jobs.