Continuing the series is Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast:

Bush—and it leaves me speechless that he’s starting to look reasonable by comparison with the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls—was hardly apologetic about his political views. But he and Karl Rove did have the sense to know when they were throwing gasoline on the domestic fire, and they did it in smallish doses. You might be able to Google up the odd careless quote from Bush about something like global warming, but in general, and especially on the occasions when he knew his words were being very closely watched, he steered well clear of extremism.

This comment from Galley Friend B.D. is worth re-posting:

This is hilarious given Tomasky’s past comments:http://goo.gl/Q8ccC

“Haunted by a ruined economy and unfinished wars, President Bush will need more than a memoir to rescue his reputation.” All that he needed, it turned out, was Rick Perry!

JVL, August 15:  “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!”

Maureen Dowd, August 17: “By the end of the day, it was a barroom brawl, with Karl Rove telling Fox News that it was not “presidential” to call the Fed chief, appointed by the second President Bush, a traitor. (When Team W. calls you a yahoo, you’re in trouble.)”

So I asked for three betting lines the other day–(1) how long until Perry passed Romney, (2) how long until Romney got painted by the sympathetic liberal media as being the sort of wise, moderate Republican who would have won in a walk once upon a time, and (3) when Hugh Hewitt would abandon ship on Romney’s (latest) doomed campaign.

Today we have answers to all three!

Perry 29%, Romney 18%

Then Richard Cohen stepped up to the plate.

And now we have Hugh Hewitt’s assessment of the Perry campaign. Who does it benefit most? You’ll never guess . . .

The arrival this weekend of Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the race further shatters all the crystal balls brought by all the pundits. Perry upset some Iowa elites by declaring his own rules and timetable, but individual voters in the 2012 caucuses won’t care, and Perry has a powerful appeal to the social conservatives who believe he has the courage, charisma and smarts to return their agenda to the center of the conversation.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin seems to understand that if she sits out 2012 she will forfeit the leadership of the party of faith within the Republican Party (a subparty that exists alongside and in cooperation with the party of growth and the party of national security).

If she plunges in, as more and more observers conclude she will, the values voters spread out in as many directions as mercury spilled upon a tabletop.

All of this leaves Mitt Romney a happy opponent of none of them and constant scourge of President Obama. Romney is the champion of the growth agenda, with only Herman Cain elbowing onto the space. Pawlenty had hoped to campaign in this issues terrain, but the map forced him into a battle with Bachmann and Santorum. It was a battle he admitted Sunday he could not win.

Only Perry seems positioned to make it a quick two-man race, and then only if he can consolidate the evangelicals with the Tea Party small-government activists and do it quickly — in Iowa, in fact.

The New Hampshire-Nevada-Michigan-Florida board is set up well for the Romney campaign, and the deep urgency felt across the party to beat the president has provided the former Massachusetts governor a floor that will not crumble.

“A floor that will not crumble.” Put that one in the vault, right next to the 2009 Limbaugh speech that will be “talked about for decades.” [Quick–what’s your favorite passage? I couldn’t pick just one . . . -ed], Mark Levin’s “extraordinary intellect,” and the rejection of Harriet Miers that “strenghtened the Democrats’ hand” in regards to the Supreme Court.

So I think we have our answer: Hugh Hewitt will jump off the Romney ship the day after he writes his New York Times op-ed tsk-tsking what a mistake Republicans made in rejecting the great man. (I don’t blame him–he’s got books to sell!)

Exit Question: Let’s set a new line–how many primary/caucus victories will Romney notch this time around? I’ll start the over/under at 3.

That was fast. Here’s Richard Cohen today:

That leaves Mitt Romney. He is like one of those odd animals left behind by an ice age or shrinking oceans. Nature adapted him to a different political climate. He is his father’s son, a pragmatic Republican. He is moderate on social issues and actually knows how to make money and create jobs. But his very moderation, not to mention his exotic Mormonism, makes him suspect in the tea partyish Republican Party.

Ah yes, Who could ever harbor a reasonable doubt that Mitt Romney is anything but wisely moderate. And oh, how he created jobs at Bain Capital! If only the GOP weren’t in thrall to the likes of Rick Perry . . .

(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.

If you were setting the Vegas line on the date Rick Perry takes over the lead from Mitt Romney in the RealClear Politics poll average, where would you put the over/under?

I’d probably stick it at September 14.

Exit Question: If you were establishing the line on the date Hugh Hewitt jumps ship from Romney to Perry, where would you set that?

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.