re: #86 austin_blue

The thing is, Obama is no Jimmy Carter or GHWB, and no one on the R side is Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Pointy Boots has the shit to take the R nom, but in the general, he will scare the fuck out of the I’s.

The thing is, the rest of the Rs are going to try to portray him as Too Conservative, which is hilarious because, except for Huntsman (to a small degree), they have all been galloping to the far right.

He’s got ‘em by the short rabbits (an actual subtitle I saw in a Hong Kong hop’n’chop movie).

Seems to me that the nod is now Perry’s to lose. The conservative base is excited by him in a way they never could be for Romney or even the lady with bug eyes. So, unless he screws up big time, he’ll be their candidate.

Normally such a candidacy would be a joke. But these aren’t normal times even by the standards of the last decade. The economy blows so badly I fully expect a lot of voters will just mindlessly vote “not Obama.” And Perry will probably put someone like Rubio on his ticket to help win a swing state and at least mitigate the GOP’s hemorraghing among Hispanic voters.

Much of it will depend on whether Perry has the rhetorical skill to distance himself somewhat from the extreme views of his book. No doubt Perry’s an extremist, much farther to the right than Obama is left. (Among other Perry gems: no direct election of senators, elimination of SS/Medicare due to unconstitutionality, raising taxes on the bottom 50% to preserve tax cuts on the top 2%—a total absurdity since the bottom 50% controls a whopping 2% of the nation’s wealth, how the hell are they supposed to pay?) If Obama can paint Perry as the extremist he is, then he can win. But this economy just leads to a malaise among independents a little more each day, so I’m getting a bit pessimistic.