(Brotha’.)

Big Rick Perry round-up this morning.

* Best headline: Wall Street Journal’s “Bachmann-Perry Overdrive.” Pure gold.

* John Podhoretz is right, I think, when he claims that in a few months Democrats and the left will convince themselves that Perry is the Most Dangerous Ideologue/Theocrat/Fascist in World History. I’m already looking forward to lines like

“Even [Ronald Reagan/George W. Bush] never subscribed to Rick Perry’s brand of . . .”

“A principled moderate like Mitt Romney never stood a chance in the New Republican party that values . . .”

“A Christianist, xenophobe, and know-nothing of the first-rate, Rick Perry makes Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin look like . . .”

That–and worse–is coming soon to a theater near you. I’m sure you can come up with your own eschatological descriptions of Perry before the left gets around to it. Leave them in the comments.

* Texas Monthly has a bunch of pull quotes from people Perry has beaten over the years. Some of them are quite contradictory in their analysis, but it’s all still worth putting into the hopper. All the added emphasis is mine:

Some telling tidbits from people who ran against Perry. First, from lefty radio host Jim Hightower, whom Perry challenged and beat in 1990 for the position of Texas agriculture commissioner:

There was a debate on Channel 13 in Dallas. Just the usual stuff. He tried to use some of the Rove negative things, including the flag-burning stuff, I think. Off the cuff, he was nondescript. He hadn’t really developed any political chops at the time. Obviously he has since. I think he’s a good campaigner. I think that’s the one thing he actually does well, as opposed to actually governing or having actual ideas or principles.

Next, this is a guy who ran against Perry for ag commissioner in 1994 (and will now support him for president):

He hasn’t changed that much since I first met him. He doesn’t make a lot of loose talk. He doesn’t say things that you would use against him later on. He’s not his own enemy, is what I would say. If you look at our president today, he’ll say one thing one week, next week he says something else. So there’s always room to go back and say, “Well, you said this then. What’s the difference now?” And you never hear that much from the governor.

From the guy Perry beat for lieutenant governor in 1998:

He’s a relentless campaigner. I was up at five every morning just to match his schedule. Our money was about even, until an extra million dollars miraculously came to him at the last minute.

From the guy who challenged Perry for the governorship in 2002:

I knew he had a disciplined team around him, that he shouldn’t be underestimated, that they were coaching him very well and that he would follow instructions very well. And he also had the benefit of watching George W. Bush do just that: run very disciplined campaigns, repeat the same message over and over, and minimize mistakes…. I would tell whoever goes up against him, Don’t underestimate his ability to perform on the stump. He doesn’t make mistakes. He follows instructions. He’s not going to have a “macaca” moment.

From a lady — not Kay Bailey Hutchison, but somebody else — who challenged Perry for the GOP primary for the governorship in 2010:

But I won both of the debates hands down. Perry’s demeanor when he initially came onto the stage the night of the first debate—it wasn’t serious. It was jovial, like “Great to be here!” It was almost comedic, you know? It was kind of a Three Stooge-y feeling. And that’s what was reported—that his answers were not good, he didn’t take the debate seriously, he may be a little arrogant. He was very confident in his place as the governor, and he got shown up. In fact, they both did. And I think that’s really the thing—that we had two people who spent almost their entire adult lives in service to our state who knew less about what was going on in our state than a nurse from Wharton, Texas.

His demeanor in the second debate was much more serious. But I still think I beat him.

After the primary election, I think, we initiated a call to Perry, and he agreed to take it, and we set up a time to talk. And I remember getting off the call and thinking, “I know why he wins campaigns; he’s a really smart guy.”

And finally, from the Democrat Perry defeated in 2010:

Rick Perry has a justifiable reputation as somebody who lives and breathes politics and has a fierce determination to stay in office. … He very rarely campaigned in person. When he did, he chose public appearances, where questions from the press would be limited. If his handlers had exposed him to more questioning, then he might have responded in a way that hurt him. One of the few—perhaps the last—impromptu sessions he had with a journalist occurred about six months before the election: After a meeting with BP executives he said that the oil spill might have been caused by an act of God. After that there weren’t many impromptu sessions with journalists.

* Galley Friend X sends along this observation from the weekend in re. Perry and Bachmann:

An interesting contrast w/ Bachmann at a side-by-side event in Iowa on Sunday. Bachmann has gotten better at almost every aspect of politicking as the campaign has gone on (witness, for instance, her deft sidestepping of reporters’ traps on the Sunday morning shows). But Perry is a natural. Think about the perfect pitch of what is already the best line of his embryonic campaign: Don’t spend all the money. Short, phrasing that could hit the ear either as folksy or hip, and an instant, obvious contrast w/ the president.

I’d agree about the money line. He’s already boiling the election down to the bullets that are exactly on point: “It is time to get America working again.” “I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

Toss in Perry’s biography (Paint Creek and Eagle Scouts vs. Indonesian Basuki schools) and you have very, very high contrast between the candidates in terms of both background and ideas; maybe the greatest contrast we’ve had since 1984.

* Kevin Drum lists ten factors that should make Perry a hard sell. It’s a good, sensible piece of analysis. But the fact that there are pretty simple political answers to each one of the problems Drum raises serves more to highlight how formidable Perry is, I think.

* Updated: One last thing–it’s going to be awesome when the media decides that the way to spin the uneasiness of the Team Perry and Team W camps is by painting George W. Bush as the thoughtful, sensible guy who just wasn’t comfortable with the brash, extremist Perry. You’ve never seen Strange New Respect like this!

Btw, www.perrypocalypse.com is still free if someone wants to grab it. Someone on the left will pay good money for that URL in a few weeks.

He’s positioned exactly where he should be, his critique of Obama is substantively and tonally perfect. If I were on Team Obama this stump speech would scare the crap out of me.

Perry should be the consensus favorite to win the nomination in a couple weeks.

The left has spent a lot of time spinning its wheels the last two weeks arguing about why Obama’s presidency is such a failure. The dominant arguments seem to be: (1) He’s not liberal enough; (2) He’s liberal enough, but he’s not a dirty enough fighter; (3) His failings are temperamental–he doesn’t emote, connect, use the bully pulpit, etc.

All three of these arguments are the standard-issue failure rationalizations of politics. They’re basically what conservatives and Republicans said in 1992 and 1996, what liberals and Democrats said in 2004, and, most recently, what conservatives and Republicans said in 2008. The key difference is that in the Republican version of this argument, there’s usually a bitter debate between factions arguing that the candidate would have won if only he’d been more conservative or less conservative–depending on the viewpoint of the pundit making the argument. I haven’t seen any Dems arguing that Obama’s problem is that he’s been too liberal. Otherwise, both sides think they only loose because they’re too pure and the other guys are too mean. And for whatever reason, people love arm-chair psychologizing presidents, as if demeanor trumps policy completely. None of these rationalizations for Obama’s failures are particularly illuminating.

But a couple things strike me.

First, it’s odd that Democrats suddenly find the debt ceiling fight to be the sine qua non of liberal principles. Because when you jump up to 30,000 feet, Obama’s liberal accomplishments have been pretty impressive:

* He passed a giant healthcare law, giving the left much–though by no means all–of what it wanted. He did this in the face of bipartisan opposition; spent enormous political capital on it; and has suffered very steep political consequences as a result. It’s hard to square his bruising, year-long campaign for Obamacare with the contention that Obama compromises too much and doesn’t like to fight.

* He presided over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He didn’t push the button himself, but he made sure it happened.

* He has generally expanded the role of government.

As a top-line list of accomplishments, that’s not bad. But it doesn’t include the Big One: Obama has laid the groundwork to end both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences. Once upon a time, these wars were the single most important thing in Democratic politics.

Yes, I understand that from the Democratic perspective, Obama hasn’t ended them fast enough. Yes, he continued the presence in Iraq longer than they would have liked. But realistically speaking, of the three people who could have become president in 2008–Obama, Clinton, or McCain–Obama is the only one who would have gotten us to the point we’re at now in those two conflicts. He hasn’t been as liberal as many Democrats would like, but he has been much, much more dovish than Clinton or McCain would have been. It seems like that should count for quite a lot.

(And I understand that liberals could make a list of complaints about action items Obama didn’t deliver on–warrantless wiretaps, the Bush tax cuts, Gitmo, etc. I’m simply making the case that they ought to be, if not ecstatic, then quietly pleased with what they’ve gotten from him.)

So what good rationalizations are there to be made for Obama? (That is, if you discount the conservative critique, which I assume most liberals do.) I think there are two, though I haven’t seen any liberals making them.

(1) Obama is a hostage to events. By any measure, the last 36 months have been brutal for the entire world. Obama’s the president, not King of the Markets, and the U.S. is suffering not just from entitlement bloat, but from a financial crisis and a housing collapse, the latter of which could take decades to work out. On top of that, Europe is a complete disaster and even in the best of times, would be a drag on the world economy. On top of that, China has its own housing problems, not to mention looming demographic catastrophe. No president, pursuing any other set of policies, could have reasonably expected much better results than we’re seeing now.

(2) Obama is not a very good president. For whatever reason–strategic foolishness, political naivete, or maybe he’s just not that bright–Obama simply isn’t very good at the job. He loses control of issues by handing process off to Congress (Obamacare); he miscalculates political advantage (not passing his own debt ceiling increase because he wanted to hang this one on the Republicans); he just doesn’t have the skills/instincts/intelligence/take your pick to perform the job ably.

If I were a Democratic partisan, I’d be making the case for (1) now, and then for (2) after he loses the election. They’re both more helpful to the movement than the standard trio of rationalizations.

One final note: Jonathan Chait makes a case for something like (1) in this piece, where he argues that Obama still has a perfectly clear path to victory in 2012. I agree, to some extent. A sitting president always has a puncher’s chance. And Obama will have to run an insurgent campaign, as Chait suggests. (Though the fact that Team Obama spent part of this week trying to torpedo Mitt Romney tells you something about how smart they aren’t. Forget the current polling: Romney is the most beatable Republican in the field. He’s terrible at retail politics, has a glass jaw, and would not be able to take advantage of the two big issues–Obamacare and jobs–because of his “accomplishments” as governor and job-killer at Bain Capital. Team Obama should be doing anything they can to help Romney get the nomination. The fact that they misunderstand the nature of their Republican challengers ought to be really unsettling to down-ticket Dems.)

What I would caution Chait from doing, however, is putting too much stock in Obama’s base approval numbers. As a statistical matter, they’re skewed by the enormous disparity between black approval and everyone else. Which means that even if black voters turn out like everyone else (not often the case) in swing-states where blacks make up less than the national average (WI, IN, for starters) he’ll be at a much greater disadvantage than his approval numbers show.

(Also, this assumes there’s not Bradley Effect in approval surveys. I’m not sure I’d believe that.)

Jon Huntsman’s recently-released website points to a bunch of problems with both his campaign and the idea of having an interactive website for any political campaign.

First, take a look at this particular post: Huntsman is pimping an endorsement from Jeb Bush!

. . . Jr.

Isn’t it a little early to be rolling out meaningless endorsements? Isn’t it especially too early to be rolling out endorsements that are designed to be semi-misleading? Jon Huntsman–now with real chocolatey taste and genuine Corinthian Leather!

Now let’s move on to the overall look of the site. Check out the Big Red H up top. On the pale blue background that could be waves gently lapping on a beach in a videogame.

Remind you of the aesthetic of any other political campaign you’ve seen before? I can’t quite place it . . . maybe . . . oh, this one?

If you’re Jon Huntsman and one of your four biggest electoral problems is that primary voters might identify you too closely with Obama, maybe you could wait to unveil the Obama-inspired graphic design elements until after you’ve won the primaries? Or maybe, not at all? Because if anything, the Huntsman “H” is even worse, suggesting as it does that the candidate walks on water. America just elected a god-president. It hasn’t worked out so hot.

Finally, go check out the comments section of the Huntsman item. A fair number of them are anti-Huntsman comments. I’m all for transparency, I suppose, but probably not on the website being paid for by the campaign. The problem isn’t that the website is paying to give a platform to anti-Huntsman trolls–they’re paying to give a platform to actual critiques of the candidate. (Some of the comments are much less flame-like than you’d assume.)

So what’s a campaign website to do? Well, you can curate your comments and turn into a pravda-ish world where thousands of people comment and none of them are ever, in the least bit, negative. (Like some conservative personalities do.) Or you can pay for a platform for people to criticize you. Or–and this might be way, waaayyyyyy out there–you could not have comments on a website run by a political campaign.

Oh I know. You have to have engagement! Social Media! Web 2.0! This is the New World we live in. I suppose.

But if someone on the Huntsman team could explain to me exactly what the added value of the 43 comments on that post are–how many votes they are going to translate to; how many donations–I’d be all ears.

I suspect that like the great majority of interactive value adds in the business world, the actual upside of this for Huntsman is vanishingly small, while the downside–placing negative reader feedback side-by-side with campaign propaganda–is pretty obvious.

For those of you keeping score, the third most damaging thing to happen to Obama’s reelect prospects this week was the undertones of the NYT Drew Westin story suggesting that Obama isn’t as smart as we thought coupled with the overtones of Bret Stephens’s WSJ piece this morning. Why are these two data points dangerous for Obama? Because the end logic of the narrative they create leads to the Third Rail of his presidency: affirmative action.

I’m not sure how I’d defuse this if I was David Axlerod. My guess is that I’d go pretty much what they’ve done from the beginning: Trust that America is too racially sensitive to allow itself to even contemplate having those thoughts. (At least until December 2012.)

This story about Rick Perry being a C (and D) student at Texas A&M is pretty great.

That is, it’s great because it means that if Perry wins, it will be completely in bounds for his surrogates to ask–over and over and over, if necessary–for President Obama’s college and law school transcripts. In fact, Perry should preemptively release his SATs, since Obama’s SAT and LSAT scores are even more interesting.

Much of the left has devolved into rationalizing (or worse) about Obama, Boehner, and the debt ceiling deal. Which is slightly odd. This is one of those debates which is much more about process than anything else. The only reason to invest it with earth-shaking importance is if you’re either (a) just starved for copy, or (b) it feeds into deeper, pre-existing concerns about Obama and/or Republicans. As a stand-alone issue, the debt ceiling debate will be forgotten in a few weeks.

All of that said, the two best liberal columns I’ve seen are from Glenn Greenwald and William Galston.

Greenwald’s piece is part of his long-running, principled critique of Obama, and it’s pretty good on its own terms. But the two bits that stood out were funny, self-aware links he posted. The first is to this cartoon:

The second is a tweet by liberal Charles Davis: “Remember when Michele Bachmann killed all those innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Libya? Ugh. Hate her.” Such self-examination will almost certainly pass as we get closer to November 2012. If it doesn’t, Obama is in even bigger trouble than he looks, because it would mean that he’s moving from Dukakis into Carter territory.

But Galston’s piece is even more damning. Here he is dropping the hammer:

As many critics have pointed out, this man-made crisis was entirely avoidable. The Democrats could have raised the ceiling last December. They chose not to, handing a sword to their adversaries. Senate majority leader Harry Reid wanted to force the incoming Republicans to accept some responsibility for the increase. We’ve seen how that worked out. And if President Obama genuinely believed that the Republicans would cooperate because it was the right and responsible thing to do, then naïveté was the least of his mistakes. (A moment of introspection about his own 2006 vote against increasing the debt ceiling should have sufficed to disabuse him of that notion.)

From John Heilemann’s great piece  in New York Magazine:

A month later, when he visited New York on a fund-raising swing, I asked who his political heroes were. ­“Reagan was certainly part of that,” Huntsman said, though he paraphrased Dutch’s ringing anti-statism as a commitment to “making sure government never exceeds boundaries and never gets out of control from a cost standpoint.” He also mentioned Nixon: “I mean, here’s a guy who created the EPA.”

Jonah Goldberg has another excellent column. He focuses on Obama’s claim to pragmatism, but mentions in passing something that should be a line in the stump speech for whoever the Republican nominee is.

Goldberg notes the following line from Obama:

Earlier last week, referring to the fact that he is rich, the president said: “I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing. In fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need.”

He then adds, “the man lives in public housing and has a government jet at his disposal.”

But that’s not going far enough. The Republican nominee should quote this line of Obama’s often, and then follow it with some of the extravagant expenses Michelle Obama has racked: the $500,000 trip to Africa, the pleasure trip to Spain with 40 of her friends, the $100,000 “date night” in New York, the extensive and expensive personal staff she requires.

All of these expenses were picked up by taxpayers. The eventual nominee should note all of this and then tell voters that perhaps President Obama would “need” more money if the rest of us didn’t have to pay for his wife’s lifestyle.

Galley Friend X sends in the following observation about Mitt Romney’s ability to make the jobs case against Obama:

Romney is making a big push on jobs.  In his new ad, he takes Obama’s line that economy faces some “bumps in the road,” and he runs with it: a bunch of weary-looking Americans get up off a road and say, “I’m an American, not a bump in the road.”

But this ad has a ready-made response: Where are all the people whose employers were acquired by Romney’s private equity fund, Bain Capital, and who were subsequently laid off by Bain to make the acquired company more profitable?

So Romney’s opponents can go out and show the video from the 2008 speech in which Romney said, “By the way, you know, layoffs happen. … Of course you have layoffs sometimes to try to keep the company alive.”  And they can keep pointing to the Boston Globe’s big 2008 article on how Romney got rich while Bain gutted companies.

I’m not saying that Romney’s wrong to highlight Obama’s dumb “bump in the road” line.  But Romney’s probably the last guy the Republicans want making this argument.  Just like the Obamacare fight: Romney is probably the least-well-positioned Republican in this fight.

As pointless as Twitter is for private use, it’s commercial uses are pretty interesting. For instance, if you’re a coffee shop you can push out alerts that you’re having a sale on baked treats at 2:00 pm. Twitter is basically an advertising pipeline that (1) you don’t have to pay for, and (2) your customers ask to be included in. Win-win!

Since presidential campaigns are essentially really big, abstract sales operations, it makes sense that they use Twitter, too. Again, you can see lots of interesting uses: fundraising, alerts on candidate appearances, rapid response.

But it strikes me that having a candidate use Twitter to attack his opponent is–at least at the presidential level–a really, really bad idea.

There’s a story out this morning about Mitt Romney trying to elevate himself (surprise!) by having pizza sent to Obama’s campaign HQ. Yes, Mitt, we get it–you’re such a front-runner that it’s like you’re already going mano-a-mano in the general election and all the other Republican are just minor side-shows. But buried in the story is a nugget that reflects even worse on Tim Pawlenty:

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty also took a swipe at Obama today with this tweet:  “@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?”

Ugh. Presidents–even today in the internet/Facebook/Twitter age–act presidential. You know what presidents don’t do? They don’t attack their rivals with the kind of drive-by snark you see on gossip sites and blogs. I’m all for Tim Pawlenty (or anyone else–even Mitt Romney!) savaging Obama at every opportunity by pointing out the administration’s incoherent foreign policy, the continuing housing disaster, rising inflation, awful unemployment numbers, and total disconnect from America. Pawlenty could have simply Twit-picked these two pictures from Tuesday and asked if the president would come back to look after the people of Joplin:

But the low-rent Twitter flame should be beneath anyone who aspires to the White House.