Perry Really Did Lose Again
By Jon Chait has a contrarian take on this week’s GOP debate:
The big question of tonight’s Republican presidential debate was whether Rick Perry, cratering in the polls and facing a party Establishment starting to accept the inevitability of Mitt Romney, would survive. I think he did. He is a bad debater, but given the history of figures like George W. Bush, I see no evidence that Republican voters want a good debater. They just want someone who doesn’t hopelessly stammer through every answer and accuse conservatives of heartlessness. Perry seemed to attain that level of competence.
As someone who also thought that Perry should be considered the frontrunner when he entered the race, I think this is very wrong. First, I don’t actually concede that he reached a minimum level of competence. While he had nowhere to go but up he was still dishing up plenty of gibberish and his general affect was someone who, like Mayor Quimby, took a bunch of extra-drowsy cold medication right before the debate. Bush wasn’t much of a debater but he wasn’t this bad. And while perhaps this performance would have been OK had this been his first debate, it has to be viewed in the context of following up a debate performance so catastrophic it caused his support to crater. If you were worried about Perry’s brainpower or political skills, I can’t imagine seeing anything last night to change your mind.
But whatever we liberal observers think, what matters is how Republican elites evaluate his performance. Chait is right that, since relatively few people actually watch the debates, weaknesses can evaded or even spun into strengths given the support of the media and a party’s elites. But the problem is that conservative pundits pretty much uniformly views Perry’s performance as another disaster. Far from trying to create a narrative in which Perry’s inability to articulate even the simplest soundbite proves that he’s a Real American you’d want to have a beer with, Republican elites– even those who aren’t fans of Romney and have been begging for alternatives to enter the race — are notably unwilling to pretend that Perry’s performances have been anything but abysmal. He’s completely destroying his reputation with the debate audience that matters.
As Jamelle said earlier this week, the fact that virtually none of Perry’s lost support went to Romney shows that there’s still ample opportunity for an anti-Romney to emerge. The fact that a vanity candidate can lead the national polls at this late date — that basically none of Perry’s vanishing support is going to the presumptive frontrunner — shows just how weak Romney’s position should be. He has huge vulnerabilities and an even marginally credible Perry could still be a viable challenger. But this week’s debate shows that even marginal credibility seems beyond his grasp.
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