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So Much for the “Teastablishment” Candidate

Perry has dropped out, and he is expected to endorse Gingrich. This was something he should have done weeks ago, but for whatever reason he felt compelled to stay in the race long enough to make a few more painfully ignorant statements. When I first said that Perry was overrated from the very beginning, I […]

Perry has dropped out, and he is expected to endorse Gingrich. This was something he should have done weeks ago, but for whatever reason he felt compelled to stay in the race long enough to make a few more painfully ignorant statements. When I first said that Perry was overrated from the very beginning, I had no idea just how overrated he was. I had assumed that the Gardasil/cronyism charges would hurt him, and they did, but they didn’t destroy him. His positions on immigration were always likely to cause him trouble with a majority of Republicans, but Perry managed to make any political vulnerability he had on the issue much worse with his clumsy handling of it. I suspect that that was the moment in the campaign when a lot of conservatives realized that they were in danger of rallying behind another George W. Bush, and Perry’s slow collapse began.

Perry’s candidacy was supposed to represent a fusion of Tea Party populist enthusiasm and party establishment support, and in the end it was neither. The so-called “Teastablishment” candidate wasn’t really a populist, but there weren’t all that many in the national party eager to back him. Perry disliked Bush personally, and he objected to a number of Bush-era domestic policy moves, but there was never any sign that he was offering much of an alternative. For the most part, he avoided making policy proposals, and that may have been wise. The most famous example was his proposal to simplify the tax code, which would have greatly complicated it instead, and it would have increased the deficit at the same time.

What hardly anyone anticipated was that Perry’s candidacy would make George W. Bush look good by comparison. No one would have confused the original candidate Bush with a foreign affairs expert, but even Bush at his most ridiculous in the 2000 campaign never blundered so badly on foreign policy questions. Bush didn’t venture strong opinions about very many foreign governments, while Perry has had the rare privilege of being denounced by at least one. Bush couldn’t remember Musharraf’s name, which wasn’t good, but Perry couldn’t remember his own talking points. Bush seemed to require a lot of coaching in his debates, but at least he bothered to prepare. The same could not be said of Perry. His candidacy seemed to be inspired by the question, “Why not me?” After five months, we have the answer.

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