President Perry

"For the very first time in my life, I feel compelled to stand up and to speak out for the man who I believe has a new vision for America. I am here to tell you, Iowa, he is the one. He is the one!" [emphasis added]

--Oprah Winfrey (2007)

O.K. We don’t want to go down that road again. But Rick Perry is already the best presidential candidate Republicans have seen since Ronald Reagan in 1980 (Reagan was a bit old by 1984). Better than George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani, and better than Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and Sarah Palin.

Not even close, really.

Perry looks like a president. He has a terrific bio, including Eagle Scout and service as an Air Force pilot. He is three-term governor of America’s second largest state. That’s experience. His budgets are in surplus even though Texas has no income tax. His pro-growth policies are even more important than his budget balancing. In the last two years (Obama’s years as president), Texas has created 40% of the new jobs in America.

Tea Party economic conservatives love Perry’s budget-balancing, job-creating record. But social conservatives have just as much reason to love Perry, who wears his Christianity on his sleeve, and Saturday presided over a 30,000-person Houston prayer rally he himself organized. It seems highly likely that in these troubled times, Perry’s message of faith and hope will reach well beyond the evangelical Christian community, a core group that is, nevertheless, crucial to winning two of the early Republican contests—the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary (whose winner since the primary's 1980 inception then wins the GOP nomination).

Politics tells you Democrats should never nominate a candidate from their Northeast-Midwest base, and Republicans should stay away from their Southern core. In politics, after all, you always want to expand beyond your base. I favored Northeasterner Chris Christie. But maybe what worked for Obama in 2008—give ‘em the progressive intellectual your party truly is and truly fix the country—will work in 2012 for the other side, now that country is still broke and broken. Hope. Change. Rick Perry. President.