July 28th, 2011
The day after Rick Perry clinches the nomination, E.J. Dionne and every other pundit to the left of (and including) David Frum will wail about how terrible it is that today’s GOP is so radical that a sensible moderate like Mitt Romney couldn’t win the nomination.
They will leave unmentioned entirely the fact that in 2008, Romney was the most conservative guy running and that he left no room to his right. That Romney persona will be airbrushed from history so that the defeat of Romney 3.0 can be blamed on the awful, dreadful, no-good, Republican electorate and not on the inherent problems with Mitt Romney, the candidate.
Exit Question: What’s the over-under on when Perry is compared (seriously, not just as a drive-by aside) to Reagan for the first time? I’ll set the line at September 20.
mrmandias July 31, 2011 at 1:12 am
Reagan? Heaven forfend. Perry’s smarm is already furlongs thick, don’t encourage the man.
Perry isn’t a bad candidate (compared to the alternatives, anyway) but lets not look at the Obama years and decide that we want our own Messiah figure.