Perry Campaign Now On Wife Support

Anita Perry, your public complaint that your husband Rick’s campaign is being “brutalized by our own party” has guaranteed that further mayhem will ensue. I know, I know – your husband was this summer’s golden boy candidate-to-be of the GOP…all the way until he actually got in the ring.

So how does your husband go to debates, Mrs. Perry, which are nothing more than dog-and-pony shows, without taking his dog or his pony? What kind of campaign staff does your husband have, Mrs. Perry, that lets their candidate sit on a stage in front of TV cameras without explaining to them where the cameras are that are likely to be trained on the candidate when he is not speaking?

“We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party. So much of that is, I think they look at him, because of his faith. He is the only true conservative – well, there are some true conservatives…”

Anita Perry at North Greenville University in South Carolina

If this were the mid-nineteenth century, when presidential candidates stayed home while their surrogates crisscrossed the countryside, building support for the candidates in advance of the nominating convention, Rick Perry might have a chance. But this is 2011, and while the talking heads on the evening news and the cable channels are being polite, the internet is teeming with negative commentary and caustic comments at conservative-friendly sites by the GOP rank and file who are totally disgusted by the way Perry has performed over the last few GOP debates.  

Conservative politicians and their supporters confuse me a lot with their need to play the role of the aggressor and the victim. Anita Perry’s comments in South Carolina this week seem to suggest that her husband is the Anointed One. But isn’t this the very same thing the conservative right has tried to use to demonize President Obama, belittling him as the Chosen One every chance they get?  

If your husband wants to be the president of Texas, or South Carolina, Mrs. Perry, that’s fine with me. But if you are a Republican primary voter, trying to figure out who can beat President Obama, why would you believe your husband can bring his “A” game seven days a week for the next 13 months when he has had trouble delivering “C” level performances for the last eight or nine weeks?

Mrs. Perry, do you know what the good thing about all of this is? You probably won’t have to suffer too much longer out here in the real world of rough-and –tumble politics before you and your husband get to take your final campaign flight back to the Republic of Texas.