Visual source: Newseum
Dan Balz and Jon Cohen detail Rick Perry's Trump-esque collapse in the polls:
After a quick rise in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has experienced an almost equally dramatic decline, losing about half of his support over the past month, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Perry’s slide, which comes after several uneven performances in candidate debates, has allowed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to resurface atop the GOP field. But the most direct beneficiary of the disenchantment with Perry is businessman Herman Cain, who is now tied for second place.
Perry also faces opposition to one of his signature immigration policies in Texas, the survey shows.
Stephen Shepard digs deeper into the numbers:
Perry has clearly been damaged over the last month by revelations about his record and uneven debate performances: 44 percent of all Republicans (including non-voters) say that the more they hear about Perry, the less they like him. Just 30 percent say the more they hear, the more they like the Texan.
More Republicans now trust Romney than Perry on issues like Social Security and immigration -- two areas on which Republican candidates have focused their criticism of Perry. And by a 20-point margin, more Republicans think Romney has the better chance to defeat President Obama in November 2012.[...]
The Cain Train has picked up significant momentum over the past month. Cain's support has more than doubled from last month, and 47 percent of Republicans say the more they hear about the former Godfather's Pizza CEO, the more they like him, higher than any of the five candidates or potential candidates tested. Only 18 percent say they like him less.
Gary Stein:
The Republicans would have you believe that President Obama is there for the picking in 2012 and they may be right. Problem is, they have nobody to do the picking.
The GOP needs a face of the party, somebody that can get the support of the base, along with independents and maybe even some Democrats. Right now, that face seems to change every week, which doesn't bode well for the party's chances of winning the White House in 2012.
Beth Reinhard explains why frontrunner status is the GOP is so fleeting:
While the mounting interest in Christie reflects an unusually unsettled Republican field, it also reveals something about voters' predilections in the 2012 race. More than anything else this election cycle, perhaps more than ideological purity or outsider status, Republicans seem to be looking for someone who can throw a punch.
In other words, someone who can really knock President Obama out of the White House. [...]
Enter the brash governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who once shot a coyote dead while out for a jog. He catapulted to the top of the presidential primary polls, at least in part, on the promise of his swagger. But his feeble performances in three back-to-back nationally televised debates raised questions about his potential mettle in a general-election campaign against a sitting president.
Michael Hiltzik takes on Rick Perry's false attacks on the New Deal:
Perry’s book draws heavily from several libertarian denunciations of the Roosevelt administration — chief among them Burton Folsom’s book “New Deal or Raw Deal?” and Jim Powell’s “FDR’s Folly” — to paint the New Deal as the foundation stone of an “abuse of federal power” by Democratic administrations and Congresses, abetted by the Supreme Court, that has persisted for generations.
All this from a Depression-era program that “failed.” Although Perry repeatedly pins that label on the New Deal, he never quite specifies what he means. That’s unsurprising, given that the U.S. economy grew at a blistering 8 percent a year through most of the New Deal period and that its most important component, Social Security, today provides benefits to 54 million Americans, at rock-bottom administrative cost and without a whiff of scandal.[...]
The GOP primary is putting immigration back in the spotlight, and today The New York Times takes on Alabama's draconian immigration law:
School superintendents and principals across the state confirm that attendance of Hispanic children has dropped noticeably since the word went out that school officials are now required to check the immigration status of newly enrolled students and their parents.
That rule is part of the law’s sweeping attempt to curtail the rights and complicate the lives of people without papers, making them unable to enter contracts, find jobs, rent homes or access government services. In other words, to be isolated, unemployable, poor, defenseless and uneducated. The education crackdown is particularly senseless and unconstitutional
Meanwhile, Joe Nocera adds logic and facts to the discussion about the administration's Solyndra loan gaurantees:
In this country, it is relatively easy to get venture capital for a good idea — and alternative energy has attracted billions in the past few years. What is hard to come by is money to fund the far more expensive process of commercializing the innovation. [...]
The Republicans know all this, surely. In 2005, when the Energy Policy Act was first proposed by the Bush administration, they made some of these same arguments in support of the loan guarantee program, which was part of the bill. The bill passed the House with overwhelming Republican support. Most Democrats voted no.
Today, the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating Solyndra, forcing its executives to take the Fifth Amendment, and releasing embarrassing White House e-mails. I looked it up: every single Republican on that committee who was in office in 2005 voted for the loan guarantee program that they are now so gleefully condemning.
I wonder why.
Ezra Klein on the influence on the European debt crisis on the 2012 race:
We’re only about 13 months from November 2012, so predictably, depressingly, Washington has turned its attention toward the election. This week, all eyes are on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is deciding whether to join the race. That’s the wrong place to look. If you’re worried about the 2012 election — or, more quaintly, just worried about the economy — the politician to watch is Germany’s Angela Merkel.
Merkel isn’t entering the Republican primary, or mounting a challenge to President Obama. But what she and a handful of European leaders do over the next few weeks could well decide whether the American economy tips back into recession this year, and thus, quite inadvertently, decide who wins the U.S. presidency in 2012.