'Hey, look! I think I finally figured it out! GENIUS!' (Leschnyhan/Dreamstime.com)
Byron York
quotes a source within the Rick Perry campaign on Perry's plan for tonight's GOP debate in Las Vegas (broadcast live at 8PM ET on CNN and of course we'll be liveblogging it here):
"Clearly Romney has a significant problem sealing the deal with Republican voters," the source says. "He's been running for six years and his numbers have stayed in the low- to mid-20s for much of that time. The challenge is who will emerge as the standard-bearing conservative to counter Romney's flip-flop, inconsistent, not-very-conservative record. That continues to be our challenge and our task. There's no magic wand, we need to just continue to grind it out."
Okay, they're just realizing this now? I mean, that's a pretty solid assessment of what Perry needs to do, but it's something that should have been obvious to them all along, and Perry's troubles on the campaign trail have largely been related to his inability to execute on anything resembling that strategy.
Maybe this simply indicates that the Perry campaign has finally gotten itself up to speed and their candidate will be able to deliver from here on out. If so, Romney's toast and Perry will be the nominee. But it could just as easily reflect a chronic inability on the part of Perry and his campaign to grasp the magnitude of a presidential campaign.
On paper, I'd still bet on Perry to take the nomination, and based on his career in politics, it's hard to imagine that Perry is as much a political bumbler as he's seemed over the past few weeks. But the fact remains, as a presidential candidate he's bumbled and stumbled, and with barely more two months before the voting begins in the GOP primary, Perry can't afford to keep on screwing up.
The good news for Perry is that heading into tonight's debate, expectations will be exceptionally low. More importantly, he won't be the target of the debate, a position that clearly makes him uncomfortable. Instead, the focus will be on Romney and Cain, and they'll both be facing tough questions.
In Cain's case, he'll need to defend his 9-9-9 plan from conservative critics as well as convince voters that he's not merely running a vanity campaign. Romney, meanwhile, will continue to face questions about why he cannot manage to build a lead over his rivals despite having been seeking the presidency since the middle of Bush's second term and enjoying the support of nearly the entire DC Republican establishment.
With both Romney and Cain in the spotlight, Perry's biggest challenge will probably be making himself relevant to the debate. He was a wallflower last week in New Hampshire, and if he doesn't adopt a more aggressive stance, he'll face a fate worse than losing the debate: he'll become irrelevant to it.