The villagers seem to have gotten all a flutter over the entrance of Rick Perry into the race for the Republican nomination. Meet the Press hack host David Gregory gets to play up the showdown between Mittens Romney and Perry, thus trying to engage an audience so far completely underwhelmed by the republican candidates.
New York Times columnist David Brooks gets to continue his thesis of whining about how far right the republican party has come in the past few years, as if we've ever seen any evidence of moderation or rationalism from them in the past decade.
GREGORY: ...But first, let's look at the presidential field and look at the Gallup numbers this week. Rick Perry is at 29 percent, the Texas governor, another Texas governor storming his way forward. That metaphor has been used even by the Romney people who said they were hunkering down as Hurricane Perry was coming over top.
David Brooks, what does his candidacy mean?
BROOKS: It means he's the front-runner now. And it, it means the Republican Party was waiting for this guy.
GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
BROOKS: If you looked at the 2008 electorate, Romney would have been perfectly fine for that electorate right now.
GREGORY: Right.
BROOKS: But the 2012 electorate is a different electorate. The country as a whole has moved to the right; the Republican Party has moved vehemently to the right. And what the, the core message is, "We hate Washington. We hate the Acela corridor, all those folks who just got hit by the, the hurricane. But we also have a fear of national decline. The country's losing its veer, we got to get back to our hard, sort of pioneer virtues." Here comes Rick Perry sort of personifying that. The guy's got tons of baggage, but he meets the Republican Party for the moment. So I think he's quite a serious candidate.
GREGORY: Not just a summer fad, as you wrote in your column.
For the rest of us, without any professional stake in that race, the Republican theme song so far for 2012 could be U2's "I Still Haven't Found What Im Looking For". Or perhaps Sloan's "Underwhelmed". Feel free to suggest your own alternatives in the comments.
