He remembered Iowa.
Somewhere in America there is a campaign staff member whose primary daily duty is to convince people that ex-Texas Gov. Rick Perry should be taken more seriously than they normally would. This seems like a roundly terrible job, but it has resulted in the much-needed sprinkle of stories in which people do not dismiss his candidacy outright.
Baby steps, I suppose.
"It would be foolish to sleep on Rick Perry's prospects in Iowa at this point," said former Iowa GOP Chairman Matt Strawn, an unaligned political consultant, reflecting many other operatives' opinions. "While other candidates deliberate on how to compete in Iowa, he's been quietly traveling the state and building relationships that weren't there for him four years ago."
This is part and parcel of Rick Perry's new message:
I'm Rick Perry, and I am no longer as much of an idiot as I was last time around. I can remember three things. I have glasses now. I now understand I must visit the states whose votes I'm courting. Make me president now.
The argument goes that Perry's ability to connect one-on-one with voters could quietly pull him to a surprise showing in the Iowa caucuses, which are known to reward retail politicking. It’s a counterintuitive strategy, given that Perry placed fifth there overall in 2012, winning only two of the state’s 99 counties.
But he's doing things differently now.
We'll see. Every candidate who loses a race is always "doing things differently now"; the person Rick Perry lost to, Mitt Romney, even briefly flirted this time around with branding himself the candidate who best understood the little people. Then he realized he was fabulously wealthy and didn't have to put up with this crap anymore.
Rick Perry, however, is in this for the long haul. And things will be different now.
Recently, Perry placed second-to-last in an Iowa poll, with the support of 3 percent of respondents.
Different, I tells ya.