Romney says he's different from Perry, whom he wholesale feather hair extensions calls a lifetime politician. Romney spent his formative years, of course, leveraging failing companies. Romney might have been a lifetime politician himself, though, if he hadn't kept losing elections.
Then there is Bachmann, who won the Ames straw poll and who excites Tea Party voters and who is, in her words, the tip of the spear against Barack Obama. But she's even less experienced than Obama and was ready to take the nation to default (while saying it wasn't actually default) and likes to brag about her fight for the "Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act." No, really.
Perry, meanwhile, has been elected three times as governor of the nation's second-biggest state, and, when it comes to appealing to Iowa social conservatives, he can match Bachmann prayer for public prayer.
Perry qualifies as a real anti- Obama, the Texan from Paint Creek who owns the Texas miracle economy (which may or may not quite be a miracle), who feathers in hair extensions thinks the 10th Amendment means most New Deal and Great Society programs are more or less unconstitutional.
If you ask Obama's advisers, who are worried enough about Obama's 39 percent Gallup poll showing, they'll say they worry more about Romney, who can run on his business background in a bad economy.
It's no wonder they'd prefer Perry, who reminds me of the Ken Buck caricature that Michael Bennet beat in Colorado. But Perry is the real thing. He really doesn't believe in the 17th Amendment. He really does think semi-official, evangelical-Christian prayer meetings are fine. He'd never call Tea Partyers dumb---es.
And Perry is the Texas governor who could make Republicans almost forget about George W. Bush. Perry isn't responsible for two wars. He wasn't in charge when the economy collapsed. If he sounds like Bush, he's still a Texas A&M Aggie who didn't go to Yale. He even jogs with a gun (no, I don't know how either).
In fact, he's so Texan he actually has suggested Texas might have cheap feather hair extensions to secede again some day— which is why I like to call him Rick "America Second" Perry.
But more to the point, in his campaign kickoff, Perry promised to make Washington "as inconsequential" in people's lives as he could. It's not just a campaign slogan. It's at the heart of the national debate.
It could be a very consequential argument that elections have consequences. Of course, it's early in the contest. We still have to see if Perry makes it to the showdown.
“He just denied it. He said the vice president didn't make any of those assertions,” Rhodes said. “If he doesn’t want to even admit what was on TV nationally -- all over the place -- then how can you have a conversation?”
Rhodes added that Obama brushed him aside. “Then he said, ‘We can't have a conversation because you're saying I called you a terrorist,’” recalled Rhodes. “The fact is it demonstrates the deep divide that he is unwilling to negotiate without going after the other side. The whole day was about going after Republicans and talking about how unreasonable they are.”
The private conversation between Rhodes and Obama was partially picked up by a TV camera, but the audio was tough to make out. Obama in general seemed to be saying the incident with Biden was misconstrued and that if Rhodes wanted to insist that the word “terrorist” was used then they were never going to feather extensions for hair see eye to eye.
