Rick Perry’s Sarah Palin Problem

Dave Weigel explains why Rick Perry failed so miserably in this weekend’s Florida straw poll:

Walking through the walls of the Orange County Convention Center, you hear these words and phrases over and over again.

Perry. Immigration. Illegals. Tuition. Illegals. He didn’t do as well as he could have. Why?

Almost every conversation I walked into was on the question of why Rick Perry approved a law that let young non-citizens get in-state tuition rates at Texas schools, and why he had characterized the program’s critics as heartless.

Obviously this is a huge deal with the Republican base. But I think Perry’s real problem is that Thursday’s debate badly shook up a GOP establishment that was pretty uneasy with him already. It’s not so much that Perry spoke in platitudes — all candidates do that — or that he muffed a few lines — any candidate can do that too — or even that his policy positions were unacceptable. Hell, he’ll figure out how to fight back on the tuition for illegal immigrants thing eventually, and he’ll get his foreign policy act together too.

But there was a bigger problem: Perry looked like he didn’t think he needed to even care about any of that stuff. He muffed his attack lines because he hadn’t bothered to study them. He wasn’t prepared for the tuition fight because he figured that he could just repeat the same old explanations and flash his thousand-watt smile at the audience. He didn’t know what to say about Pakistan because he figured any sort of good ol’ boy BS would do. It always has before, after all. So he’s apparently spent the past month doing….nothing. - Kevin Drum

Republicans are not serious on almost every issue, from the economy to jobs, climate change to fair progressive taxation. Look how much they enjoyed the lifetime C- student, George Bush. Almost basking in his ignorance, misspeak and malaprops.