IS RICK PERRY, the governor of Texas, a credible presidential candidate? His opponents plainly think so. As well as grumbling about his loose talk and his Bush-like swagger, they are attacking his economic record. As he has been governor since the end of 2000, there is plenty to consider.

Mr Perry will fight on jobs. His campaign flaunts a startling statistic: that 40% of the net new jobs created in America since June 2009 are in Texas. In an August report, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas actually put it a bit higher. Texas, said the bank, created 261,700 jobs between June 2009 and June 2011; America's net jobs gain was 524,000. Those figures give Texas 49.9% of the nation's net job creation.

Critics say that lots of those were simply poached from other states. Others were the result of factors that have nothing to do with Mr Perry, such as high oil prices. Many are service-sector, minimum-wage positions. The focus on job creation may, meanwhile, have led the state to underinvest in education, health care and infrastructure, areas where it badly lags the nation as a whole. Texas has America's highest rate of people without health-care insurance, for example, and one of the highest poverty rates. And lastly, the critics say, there are not enough jobs anyway: the state's unemployment rate was 8.2% in June, only a point below the national rate.

All this is partly true. The much-vaunted “Texas miracle” cannot be easily replicated. Oil and gas are important to the Texas economy, though by no means dominant. The Dallas Fed reckons that a 10% rise in the price of oil adds about half a percentage point to the state's GDP. Since June 2010, according to the Texas Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry has added about 28,600 jobs.

The poaching efforts are helped by the Texas Enterprise Fund, a “deal-closing” fund established in 2003. In administering it, Mr Perry has used incentives and subsidies in what is arguably tacit industrial policy. This has led to charges of cronyism. But poaching is not sufficient to explain where all the jobs came from. Many of the jobs, incidentally, are good; Texas's median wage is close to the national one. And as for the others, voters might well think that a mediocre job is better than grinding unemployment, as seen elsewhere. And though it is true that unemployment in Texas is only a bit below average, this is in large part a function of the state's extraordinary population growth over the past decade (see chart), caused by an influx of people from less dynamic regions. Mr Perry recites a four-point recipe for economic stewardship: low taxes, “fair and predictable” regulation, tort reform, and “don't spend all the money.” He inherited a minimalist regulatory regime, and has fought attempts to change it. In 2009, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse-gas emissions could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Texas filed suit against the EPA. Similarly, Mr Perry has not needed to cut that many taxes; the Texas tax base was already low. It has, for example, no state income tax. Mr Perry's biggest manoeuvre came in 2006, when he engineered a “swap”—a cut in the property tax, meant to be offset by an increase in the cigarette tax and a new franchise tax. These revenues have not made up for the lower property-tax receipts. Republicans call this a net tax decrease; Democrats a structural deficit. Mr Perry can take full credit, however, for the state's tort reform. He signed it into law in 2003, capping non-economic damages in medical lawsuits, and signed a follow-up this year, which makes people who lose meritless lawsuits liable for their opponent's legal bills.

Many contend that Mr Perry has not been as fiscally prudent as he claims. Though a vocal critic of the 2009 stimulus, he quietly accepted $6.4 billion in federal money, which was mostly used to address a $6.6 billion shortfall looming in the 2010-11 budget. His explanation is that he wanted Texas taxpayers to get their fair share of the money back. (According to calculations by The Economist, between 1990 and 2009 Texas paid more in federal taxes than it received in federal spending.) Taking the money meant that Texas could leave its $9 billion “rainy day” fund untouched. That proved to be important in this year's legislative session, when Texas faced a $27 billion shortfall for the 2012-13 biennium. The difference was largely made up with spending cuts, but several billion dollars from the fund helped.

Complaints have been heard about other aspects of Mr Perry's record, from the right as well as the left. But his approach to economic stewardship will attract the most attention in the primary, and certainly in the general election, should it come to that. The virtues of Mr Perry's approach are debatable, but he clearly deserves a good dollop of credit for job creation. That might be rather important in an election which is likely to be all about jobs.