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The Republican Party has apparently found itself a new messiah in Rick Perry.

The conservative Christian governor of Texas has come out of nowhere and has already lapped the Republican field for President.

In the two short weeks since he's entered the race, Perry has shot to the top of the polls and leads his nearest competitor by double digits.
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Perry's supporters tend to be older, white and rich, and his strongest backing comes from tea party supporters. He holds a whopping 23-point lead over Michele Bachmann among tea party members in one CNN poll.

It's an astonishing impact in so short a time, especially when Perry has managed to jump to the top of the pack without laying out a single plan or idea for solving America's problems.

Instead, Perry has spent the past two weeks making several dumb comments – while, in the proud tradition of President George W. Bush, pretending he's a cowboy.

Meanwhile, these poll numbers must have Romney's people tearing their hair out. Romney supporters are urging him to kick up his campaign a notch before it's too late. Which is likely why Romney has changed his schedule this weekend so he can attend two separate tea party events in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

And, as Politico reports, "Perry panic" has also fired up the left... something even President Obama has been unable to do recently.

Liberals are terrified at the thought of a President Perry when it comes to his stance on issues like women's rights, gun control, the death penalty and the separation of church and state.

Here’s my question to you: Why is Rick Perry suddenly the darling of the Republican field? http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/31/why-is-rick-perry-suddenl
y-the-darling-of-the-republican-field/

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Weeks before the debt-limit showdown came to a head, White House chief of staff Bill Daley held an unannounced retreat for his senior staff at Fort McNair, an Army base near the southern tip of the District of Columbia. The agenda for the June confab was wide-ranging, including a lecture of sorts from the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. The question Daley asked him to address was the one on everyone’s mind these days in the West Wing: How does a U.S. President win re-election with an unemployment rate far higher than voters can bear?

The answer Beschloss provided gave some lift to Obama’s team. No law in politics is ever 100% accurate, he said. Two Presidents in the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, won re-election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same basic strategy. They argued that the country, though in pain, was improving, and that the ideas of their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse.
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So what does that mean for the coming weeks? It means Obama has twin goals for his big economic policy speech next week. He wants to put in place policies that get the country growing at a noticeable rate by next year, and he wants to continue to nurture the theme, especially for independents, that the Republican policies will push the country in the wrong direction.

This framework, which has been set up under the direction of Daley and David Plouffe, Obama’s message strategist, is designed to be win-win. If Republicans go along with the next round of stimulus measures, Obama will have a stronger economic case to make in the spring. If they block the measures, Obama may have an easier time arguing that a Republican in the White House will not move the country forward.

In 1936 Roosevelt ran for re-election against Alf Landon, a moderate Republican from Kansas. But Roosevelt made the election about the Hoover years, running a starkly populist campaign that accused Republicans of representing “with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” “For twelve years this nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government,” Roosevelt announced in an address at Madison Square Garden shortly before the election. “The nation looked to Government but the Government looked away.”

Similarly, Reagan ... made his 1984 race against Walter Mondale into a sort of referendum on the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s most famous television spot of the cycle, Morning in America, ended with this question: “Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

Just because the strategy has worked before, of course, should not bring too much comfort to the Obama team. One could list at length the many differences between 2012 and the years that Roosevelt and Reagan found victory. One could also observe the similarities between 1980 and 2012. Just as President Carter’s team dismissed the conservative California governor as unpalatable in a general election, Democrats are now saying much the same about the emerging Republican field.

But at least Obama’s aides have a clear theory of the case. And given the trying circumstance in which they find themselves, that’s a comforting thing. http://swampland.time.com/2011/08/31/team-obama-finds-hope-for-2012-in
-a-history-lesson/

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