Americans love a good story.

A nice, inspiring narrative makes our presidential politics slightly less vinegary. Herman Cain’s stature has more to do with his humble background and rise to corporate success than it does anything he has said regarding policies. He sounds like he rolled out of bed one morning, got bored over coffee, and decided to run for president. His ignorance of issues ought to be an embarrassment to the GOP.

Rick Perry, too, brings with him a nice yarn. The first seven years of his life were spent in a house without indoor plumbing and now he’s being thought of as presidential. Journalists are finding their way to little Paint Creek and beseeching Perry’s acquaintances and family to sit for interviews. In the process, they file reports that romanticize the roots of a man who is almost single-handedly destroying the state where he was born.

Perry’s mother and father, hard working and humble people with West Texas horizon eyes, agreed to be interviewed by the Dallas Morning News. Unsurprisingly, they spoke with love for their son who they said doesn’t lie and is exactly what this country needs.

Parents are often wrong about their children.

The romanticizing of the handsome man riding in from the west to save the nation is a dangerous construct for Americans in need of answers and political courage. Rick Perry can provide neither. Even the critics of his decade as governor have hesitated to call his cash and carry government worse than cronyism. But it is much, much worse. The exact adjective for Perry’s administration is corrupt. How is it anything other than corrupt to have two slush funds paid for by taxpayers to write checks to your campaign donors and corporate sponsors? Voters appear not to notice that the Emerging Technology Fund (ETF) invested $16 million dollars in enterprises that were owned or founded by Perry campaign donors. A Dallas Morning News investigation found that big campaign donation checks were written shortly after the announcement of investments by the state.

How, exactly, is corruption defined?

The ETF was established with regional panels to review startup applications and then recommend them to a review committee in Austin before being sent to the governor, lieutenant governor, and house speaker for approval. In the case of Convergen, however, the company appears to have skipped straight to the governor’s desk and bypassed review. Convergen founder David Nance, according to the Dallas paper, filed at least two lawsuits against the state attorney general in an attempt to stop the release of information on his company. Convergen was awarded $4.5 million, and Nance, not coincidentally, had given $80,000 to Perry’s campaigns since 2000.  Convergen went bankrupt in 2008. Perry’s office blocked the release of information on Convergen until after he was reelected in 2010.

But maybe that’s just cronyism, which is nicer than corruption. Why has there been no real transparency of the ETF? Further, why are politicians making business decisions for taxpayers when the opportunity for favoritism is clearly too hard for people like Perry to resist?

Examples like Convergen are abundant in Rick Perry’s Texas. The fact that the governor parcels out millions in taxpayer dollars for corporate frivolity or “projected” jobs at a time when he is cutting health care and welfare for the indigent ought to chastise those who would write his small town hero narrative. One in four Texans lacks health care and the state is first in the percentage of uninsured children. We have the highest percentage of residents 25 or older without a high school diploma. Perry’s booming economy is apocryphal enough that the state over which he presides is 49^th in credit scores for individuals. But we do lead the nation in hazardous waste generated and carcinogens released into the water and air.

Meanwhile, as Rick Perry was forcing the Texas legislature to cut $4 billion from the state’s budget that would eliminate most home care for the mentally and physically disabled, increase class sizes in schools and require firing tens of thousands of educators, he was also busily administering the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) to assist corporations looking for a handout. Perry talks about rousting the corporate fat cats that run Washington but the TEF is nothing more than a $453 million dollar account that he has used to bestow favors upon companies like ebay, T-Mobile, Bank of America, Samsung, Lockheed, Office Depot, Cabela’s and Caterpillar. The man who wants to “make government as inconsequential as possible” in your life is using tax money to make life less risky for corporate America. 20 of the 55 companies that got tax money to move jobs or offices to Texas gave money to either Perry’s campaign or the Republican Governors’ Association when he was its chairman, according to the Dallas Morning News. When promised jobs don’t materialize, the governor’s office quietly revises downward the projections or imposes minor penalties on companies that have contracted for the corporate welfare.

The funding cycle is infuriating and ought to be indictable. People pay their taxes to the state government, which dumps the money into the general revenue fund, and then is apportioned to the TEF and ETF, before it is distributed to corporations promising jobs, and those corporations then make campaign donations to Rick Perry. A generous definition might call this campaign money laundering. The most confounding thing about the Texas governor is the manner in which he complains with a straight face about government waste and calls for difficult cutbacks while he writes multi-million dollar checks to corporations on a taxpayer account and with virtually no oversight. This is beyond hypocrisy and cronyism. Corruption is the only appropriate descriptive. If this form of delivering favor is not considered corrupt then American democracy is beyond salvage.

In their exclusive interview with the Dallas paper, Ray and Amelia’s evident pride in their son didn’t do much to obfuscate his horrid record as governor. They are proud of the fact that he was raised in the church but seem completely unaware of the fact that he continues to foster policies that ignore Christian teachings and harm the poor, ill, and elderly while he heaps largesse upon friends and companies who can help his political ascension. The Perry’s undoubtedly raised their son well but he has failed them as mightily as he has let down the people who voted him into office. Rick Perry, the rancher’s son from Paint Creek, grew up to become a very corrupt politician who lost whatever moral guidance his parents taught.

And he ought to be prosecuted. Not elected.

A friend is fond of saying, “There is no truth in politics, there is only winning.” He’s only partly correct. Politics does have one truth in the modern era and it is simply that candidates will smear each other and do whatever is necessary to win. Of course, they don’t take these actions themselves but they enlist dirt devils and leakers and unprincipled researchers who deliver portfolios of feces to their clients. And then they begin the smear campaign.

Hell, Karl Rove built a career on these practices.

The sexual harassment story about Herman Cain didn’t come out of nowhere. Cain and his campaign manager are blaming Rick Perry’s team, which is not unreasonable. The numbers Cain has been carrying to the top of the polls are a lot of disaffected Perry supporters who left the governor after he didn’t back down from his tuition plan for children of illegal immigrants. If Cain falters, those voters will be forced to reconsider Perry.

But there has to be a decent sized universe of people who knew about the allegations against Cain that were leveled when he was at the National Restaurant Association. Any one of them, a disgruntled board member who wanted Cain removed, an employee who didn’t get an advancement, or a secretary who didn’t care for flirting, might have dropped the rough outlines of the story on the Politico reporter. More likely, it was one of the two women who got settlements from NRA and didn’t want to see Cain as president and they picked up the phone and called the reporter and agreed to talk under certain conditions. That’s the most probable scenario.

But it could have been Rick Perry’s campaign or Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich and maybe even Ron Paul. Third party surrogates do the distasteful work for candidates so that those seeking elected office can stand on principle and deny any involvement. When George W. Bush was running for governor of Texas against Ann Richards, Karl Rove started a whisper campaign in the coffee shops of East Texas that Richards was a lesbian. Just look at all the gays and lesbians she has appointed, he suggested. The buzz finally turned into a vibration and then a bit of an earthquake and went public. W was able to simply stand back and say, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t think the governor’s gay.” That only made the story more real and she was politically wounded in East Texas, which has long been essential to win any statewide office.

Rove facilitated Perry’s transition from Democrat to Republican in Texas politics and was working with an aggressive FBI agent who had launched an investigation into Perry’s opponent for the office of Texas Agriculture Commissioner. During Perry’s first statewide election in 1990, he and Rove always had information about the investigation before it was made public. Rove frequently called reporters to talk about subpoenas before they had even been issued while Perry was standing in front of microphones talking about how he’d clean up the office and there’d be no federal investigations when he became agriculture commissioner. The FBI showed up in the Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower’s office with subpoenas the day he was out of town to announce he reelection campaign. Rove and Perry leaked new material to reporters covering that story almost every day, and it destroyed the reelection of incumbent Hightower and gave Rick Perry his first statewide office in Texas. Perry knows how to leak material to reporters and he knows whom to use to get that job done efficiently and clandestinely with plausible deniability. Rove taught him.

Herman Cain is blaming his ex-senatorial consultant, who joined the Perry campaign two weeks ago, for doing the leak to Politico. Seems a little too obvious for a political professional to time something so poorly, even though Cain says he shared info on the harassment allegations with Anderson during the senate race. But what in the hell does it matter? Cain had to know this information was going to come out from someone during a presidential race. If he didn’t, he’s too naïve to be president. And his handling of this story doesn’t create confidence in how he might manage a national crisis from the White House. Politico approached him 10 days before the story was published and asked for a response and there was nothing until the ham-handed iterations of the narrative that unfolded over the course of one news cycle.

Cain can blame Perry. And he might be right. But it doesn’t really matter who did it. The information was there and he ought to have planned his messaging for when it went public. And he didn’t. Now he is casting blame and parsing his language to escape incrimination.

Maybe that friend was right. “There is no truth in politics, there is only winning.”

The most important unresolved question of CNN’s GOP debate in Las Vegas may be how to tell an apple from an orange. Herman Cain’s use of a hackneyed metaphor actually helped him to avoid offering an explanation of how his nine percent national consumption tax doesn’t double the sales tax of many states. That apple is rotten, though, and Cain, who was banged around early for his tax plan, and then largely ignored, has discovered what it’s like when the luster fades from a bright, shiny political object.

Because he remains the lead dog of a snarling pack, Mitt Romney had to suffer flanking attacks on health care and immigration. When Rick Perry came after the GOP frontrunner for hiring a lawn care company that used undocumented workers. Romney’s answer to Perry sounded petulant almost like a troubled rich man who has a hard time finding qualified domestic servants. His description of the conversation he had with the yard guy compounded Mitt’s fumble. “I said, look, I’m running for office, I can’t have illegals…..” Does this suggest it would be okay if he weren’t a candidate for governor when this happened? The moment was akin to Perry letting everyone know he can’t be bought for $5000.

Romney scored serious body blows on Perry regarding immigration and jobs. The Texas governor keeps yammering about his experience dealing with the border but he has no real results to report. He has spent about $400 million on cameras and cops and patrols but just last week his hometown newspaper in Austin began running a series of reports about how a drug cartel was using the Texas capitol city as a location to trans ship narcotics to the north. The inflow of undocumented workers and contraband seems unabated. Cameras on poles are pretty easy to spot and walk around in the hundred mile gaps.

Michelle Bachmann’s solution to this problem, though, is halogen-lit ignorance. A 1700-mile wall from San Diego to Boca Chica Beach in Brownsville is a preposterous concept in terms of cost, engineering, and effectiveness. On the border, the recurrent joke is that the only way the U.S. could ever afford to get it built would be if they got the labor from cheap undocumented workers. Can’t be built without Mexicans. Cain’s notion, which was first a joke and then a plan, of building a twenty-foot tall wall that is electrified and will kill transgressors, dismisses him as a serious candidate. It also brings to mind a great line from Texan Jason Stanford who said that, “The only thing a 20 foot wall does on the border is create a market for 21 foot ladders.”

Border issues are complex far beyond the matter of simply shutting down the frontier. Rick Perry is fond of blaming Uncle Sam, who is supposed to protect the borders, but if Perry were as good at dealing with the issue as he claims, he would have shown some traction with reduced immigration and drugs. Nobody in the GOP has seemed even slightly interested in asking the people who live on the border what they think might work.

Perry and Romney might have appeared publicly in the debate to make peace on the question of faith but the issue won’t die off. The Christian evangelicals supporting Perry will keep up their third party efforts to let everyone in their churches know that they ought not be voting for a Mormon. And Perry’s campaign is doing a wink, wink, nudge, nudge approval. His super PAC can also be expected to help fund those communications. Romney, though, missed his chance to make Perry squirm. If he had forced the issue with a simple question, “Governor, do you think Mormons are Christians?” Perry would have been backed into a corner he does not have the political skill to escape. His honest answer would be no.

The CNN debate was also notable for the fact that Newt Gingrich was not the grumpiest person in the room. Rick Santorum, who has nothing to lose, went after all of the lead dogs, whose rear ends he can barely see from where he is running. Santorum’s “Pennsylvania strategy,” though, was more silliness. He got elected twice to the US Senate from his home state but when he got voted out, he was really and truly and forcefully shown the door by an 18 percent margin. Pennsylvania isn’t going to launch Santorum to the White House.

Sort through that and try to find an apple or an orange that isn’t at least badly bruised or almost rotten to the core.

Rick Perry knew.

If the polls suggest that there is a particular vulnerability in your campaign opponent’s resume’, you make a calculated risk by ignoring the weakness. In the south, it is not a secret that evangelical Christians view Mormonism with a wary eye. According to a 2007 survey by the Pew Center, 57% of voters identifying themselves as Christians don’t think of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as being a part of traditional Christendom. Consequently, logic suggests they might not vote for a person of that faith.

And Rick Perry is not going to ignore those numbers or that logic. The reason the Texas governor informally launched his campaign at a gigantic prayer rally with evangelical southern Christians was to let all of them know that he came from their tribe. He might as well have been telling them, “Vote for me. I’m not a Mormon,” which, in a fairly obvious manner, is exactly what he accomplished. Perry did not denounce Mitt Romney’s religious belief system but he knew there were others to do that important political work.

Perry’s surrogates are running a campaign to spread the word that Christians ought not to support a Mormon for the president. Dallas mega church Pastor Robert Jeffress, who was having a conversation in the hallway after the Value Voters convention, went public with the message that Mormonism was a cult to most Christians. Jeffress found himself, perhaps not accidentally, on most of the political cable talk shows and news networks explaining his perception of Mormonism, and, by extension, speaking for millions of evangelicals. Rick Perry had asked Jeffress to introduce him to the Values Voters convention audience. Perry knew what Jeffress thought as was going to say, on stage and off.

Using a well-established political protocol, , though, Rick Perry distanced himself from Jeffress’ comments, but just slightly. The standard approach in presidential campaigns is always to have third party surrogates do the dirty work and allow the candidate to take the high road. In this case, Perry said that he did not believe that Mormonism was a cult. What he did not say, however, was whether he believes the religion is a part of Christendom and whether Mormons are true Christians. And he won’t say that because it’s not something he believes.

Mitt Romney has not pressed Perry on this question because Romney knows that his religion is an issue for southern evangelicals and the less it is discussed the less harm is done to his campaign, which is why Perry’s surrogates will not drop the subject. Romney and Jon Huntsman, who is also a Mormon, have consistently suggested that discussions about their religion are a distracting sideshow from the important issues but Rick Perry and his strategist David Carney are counting on it being a weapon in their political fight for the GOP nomination. The argument that a person’s faith ought not to play a role in the debate in the public square falls apart if a Muslim candidate enters the race; consequently, it is of relevance to the Republicans when they look to their nominee.

A conversation over religion in a presidential campaign can lead to some awkward assertions. Mormons might ask how Joseph Smith’s never seen tablets are somehow less real than the one(s) on which Moses delivered the Ten Commandments. Is the foundational narrative of Mormonism and the appearance of the Angel Moroni any less believable that the story of a man who rose from the dead, moved a giant boulder in front of his tomb, and ascended into heaven to be with god? This is the discussion the Republican Party does not want to have on the airwaves. If neither Smith’s tablets can be produced nor the Ark of the Covenant, how can Christians dismiss Mormons? Is one a story and the other history and where is the empirical proof that exists beyond faith?

Those questions will not be answered in a presidential campaign. There will simply be a continued and orchestrated effort via emails, phone calls, and a whisper campaign that Mitt Romney is part of an alternative belief system and is, therefore, not qualified to be president and Christians ought not to vote for a non-Christian. Perry’s Make America Great Again super PAC, run by the governor’s old roommate and his former chief of staff Mike Toomey, can be expected to provide resources to get out that message along with the New Apostolic Reformation’s Prayer Warrior Network, which has operations in all fifty states.

The Perry family, seeking to distract from the full-frontal assault on Romney’s religion, has been working to position the governor and his wife and children as victims. The governor’s wife Anita made fatuous and emotional claims that the Perry’s were being attacked for their Christian Faith. She offered no proof beyond her glistening eyes because there was none. But there is probably a bitter conversation coming for Republicans on the question of religion. When a presidential candidate like Perry offers up his faith as an attribute that makes him an attractive nominee, he can expect to be scrutinized.

But let them argue over whose god is right. And the voters can focus on how the Republicans are all wrong.

The people who manage Rick Perry’s communications are really, really bad. Because of their aggregate incompetence, Perry is digging out of a policy hole that makes him look like that hiker in the Utah badlands who had to saw off his arm to survive. Perry has the same challenge.

His communications team is headed up by Ray Sullivan, who has become a millionaire by being Perry’s chief of staff. And then a lobbyist. And then Perry’s chief of staff. And then a lobbyist. Sullivan has rotated back and forth between working for Perry and lobbying for corporations that want Perry’s favor. His wife has also been made wealthy from her association with the governor. Unfortunately for Perry’s attempt at the White House, Sullivan and his entire staff have spent the past ten years practicing media avoidance. Perry was consistently unavailable when reporters wanted to ask him about anything controversial and Sullivan has passed twenty years in the capitol offering little more than a grunt or two word responses even in conversations with friends. He is cryptic enough to pass for a former CIA agent, which is a counter-intuitive skill when your boss is trying to effectively tell his story.

It’s also how Sullivan helped Perry screw up the immigration tuition issue.

There was a politically safe answer to why Rick Perry offered tuition “subsidies” to the children of illegal immigrants: They aren’t subsidies. Why this obvious response did not occur to Perry’s team is unknown but it would have avoided the hit he has taken in the polls. The children of illegal immigrants are required to live in Texas for three years, be in pursuit of US citizenship, and graduate from a Texas high school, before they qualify for in-state tuition rates. This is a daunting standard for young people who are in a locale as a consequence of their parents’ decisions. This is not a subsidy. In fact, if you move to Texas from another state and don’t want to pay out of state tuition rates, you only need to spend one year establishing domicile by getting a Texas driver’s license, paying taxes, and getting a Texas address. Perry has made it tougher on the offspring of undocumented immigrants. Too bad for him his communications team and Ray Sullivan don’t know how to offer that clarification to reporters.

Perry’s immediate challenge, though, as the New Hampshire debate looms is to find some way to mitigate that political anger over his tuition “subsidy.” He will do this in the debate at Dartmouth College by talking about how he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on border security. Much of it was wasted, sure, and there were a few corrupt law enforcement officials involved, but Perry has slopped a lot of Texas taxpayer money in the direction of the border security hogs. He has called for strategic fencing and installed a series of cameras and wants to run up the numbers of national guard, border patrol, customs, and every other type of agent who can draw a paycheck to protect the frontier with Mexico.

And he wants you to know.

Politics is not complicated. By arguing that he has been tough on the border and has sent resources there Perry can mitigate damage done by his tuition subsidy problems. If you provide resources to clamp down in illegal immigration, you have no issues with needing to provide reasonable and humane treatment of the people who crossed the border illegally and then had a child. They aren’t here because they couldn’t cross the border. Shut down the border and you shut down discussions about tuition. Perry is going to be talking a great deal in coming weeks about everything he has done to prevent illegal immigration and drug smuggling along the border. Unfortunately, his hometown paper, the Austin American-Statesman is running a special report right now on how even the Texas capitol city has become a staging point for the trans-shipment of cocaine and methamphetamines from Mexico to US cities. A major drug cartel has moved into Austin from the mountains of Mexico. The border still has security issues.

No matter what the question might be that Rick Perry gets asked on Tuesday night on the campus of Dartmouth College, his answer will be about either how he has stomped down on the Texas-Mexico border and how he has been governor of a state with a growing economy. He has to fix his communications problem regarding tuition subsidies and begin to turn his discussion in the direction of all things economic. He could be asked about the relationship between gravity and hemorrhoids Tuesday and he would end up with a long rant about how nobody has dealt with the border more than him and how Texas has been adding jobs while the rest of the nation has been losing paid positions.

He’s also not going to denounce the Dallas pastor who called Mormonism a cult. If asked, Perry will talk about his own faith and how it has informed his life and its direction. Perry’s religion was never a topic when he arrived in Austin in 1985 nor did it have anything to do with his legislation or the partying he did with lobbyists and fellow legislators. But like George W. Bush, Rick Perry has had his fun and now he wants everyone to not have theirs and turn to his god. There are likely to be more Perry surrogates and evangelicals that work to keep alive the matter of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith as a news topic but Perry will judiciously avoid it, even though he does not believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a part of Christendom. He’ll just keep rambling about his own faith and let his Christian cronies denounce Romney’s spiritual beliefs. The idea of the angel Moroni delivering golden tablets to Joseph Smith is apparently considerably less believable than the notion that a dead man rose, moved a giant rock, and slipped heavenward to be with god.

The hypocrisies of Perry’s campaign have yet to do him great harm. Before he had planned to participate in the Houston prayer rally last summer, reporter Gary Scharrer of the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News had acquired the governor’s tax returns. They indicated that Rick Perry was not exactly generous with giving to his church even though he had, in one annual filing, earned a million dollars. One year Perry gave nothing even as his income soared with sweetheart land deals. When Scharrer contacted Perry’s office for a comment, he was told by Sullivan’s staffer Mark Miner that, “Governor Perry never talks publicly about his faith.” Yeah, well, except when he wants to fill a stadium full of people to hear just how Christian he is and how humble he is as a man.

Perry isn’t really worried and neither is his strategist Dave Carney. They know that the evangelicals who cannot handle Mormonism, and are upset with Perry over immigration, have nowhere else to turn other than the Texas governor. Right now they are dating other people. They will not go to Herman Cain and have already left Michelle Bachman, have not looked at Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or Gary Johnson, and don’t have sense enough to see that either Jon Huntsman or Romney represent the most rational mainstream approach to governance before the GOP. But those voters aren’t worried about the economy as much as they are the threat of two people of the same sex loving each other and pregnant women getting abortions because they aren’t ready for children. Rick Perry frets about those things, too, and they will remember him for that and forgive and forget his tuition problem. And he will rise again.

Rick Perry is about to become the Comeback Kid.

Rick Perry is looking wobbly. But he has been politically staggered before and recovered to win the fight. If he falters in his current effort, it will be the first time in his 26-year career of public service.

Analysts are busy writing obituaries for Perry’s presidential aspirations and there are many of us who would like to attend that funeral. But his current predicament is only a transitory moment in the GOP primary. Herman Cain’s Florida success has Republican Primary voters and big campaign donors wondering if Perry is good for the long, hard haul that is a run for the White House.

But what are their other choices?

Perry’s bumpy performance in the debates has prompted these reconsiderations. Media trainers have taught him how to “bridge” away from questions and talk about whatever he wants but when he ignored the query about Pakistan and started rambling about selling planes to India he looked foolish. When he tried to describe the various versions of Mitt Romney he sounded a bit like George W. Bush struggling to recite the aphorism about not getting fooled again. And then Perry told his base supporters they didn’t have a heart. But they aren’t seeking either a legal separation or a divorce. His voters are just upset after a bit of a lover’s quarrel.

They won’t hook up with either Ron Paul or Michelle Bachman because neither of them have electability. And when those two candidates drop out of the race, their supporters will be left choosing between Perry, Romney, Cain, and maybe Huntsman. Cain’s unfettered rhetoric offers a grand appeal and his 999 tax plan is simple enough for a broad group of voters to understand and embrace, and like Romney he has had great success in business. But he is new to politics on this scale and doubts about his electability will persist.

Which, basically, leaves Romney.

And the conservative wing of the GOP cannot forgive Romney’s statewide health care plan in Massachusetts, and his constantly evolving positions on the Tea Party and evangelical issues like abortion, gay marriage, and global warming. Romney brings a disturbing level of rational thought to those topics and the right wing GOP base is not interested in listening. It already knows what it thinks. The primary voters re-thinking their Perry support after the debates and Florida aren’t re-thinking what they already think about Mitt Romney.

A new CNN poll taken after the Cain mutiny in the Florida Straw Poll and subsequent to Perry’s amateurish performance in the FOX News/Google debate shows Perry still with a comfortable 7-point lead over Romney. Everyone else is below 10 percent but the Bachmann and Paul vote together totals around 16 percent. As their campaigns fade and they are forced to confront reality, where, exactly, can their voters be expected to land?

Not in Romney’s camp.

Perry’s support will return. Straw polls and debates don’t decide nominations and are only a small piece of what picks a president. George H. W. Bush was so bad in debates with Michael Dukakis that his lack of linguist skills was turned into a Saturday Night Live skit and everyone remembers how Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas stuck a shiv in Dan Quayle for comparing himself to John F. Kennedy. But nobody remembers a Dukakis-Bentsen administration.

The only place Rick Perry is going is further out in front of the GOP pack.

Mitt Romney is emerging as the grown up in the GOP primary process, which is too bad. He will not win the nomination. He would make the strongest candidate for the Republicans in 2012 but he cannot win the primaries. The primary process does not require sanity and moderation in the GOP race. The candidate must appeal to the Tea Party, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and right wing conservatives who vote on social issues.

And they rarely vote for Mormons.

Romney’s problems with the radical right go a bit beyond his religion. He has refused to sign an abortion pledge because the way it was worded meant that too many federally funded hospitals would be forced to close. He decided that everyone in his state ought to have health care and passed a bill his own party derisively calls Romneycare. He thinks that global warming is a real issue but he is not sure about human contribution to the problem. And he doesn’t seem afire with desire to stop gay people from getting married.

Romney makes too much sense to win this GOP nominating process.

And lucky Ricky Perry is the guy in the perfect position to win by default. The Texas governor is neither as smart or as poised as the former Massachusetts governor but he’s close enough to be the first choice of the primary voters who will take their anger against Obama into the polls this winter and into next spring. Romney’s repeated squishiness on social issues will give them pause and then his religion will help them make their decision to vote for Perry. He is consistently conservative on the social issues that matter to primary voters.

And he is not a Mormon.

Religion is the biggest issue in the GOP primary and it is being completely ignored in the debates and public discourse. The only way a Republican can win back the White House in 2012 is with a southern strategy that turns out huge numbers of conservative Christian voters. And conservative Christian voters do not view the Mormon faith as being a part of Christendom. If Romney is the nominee, they will stay home and President Obama will be easily reelected. Romney’s campaign keeps trying to suggest that a tiny percentage of evangelical voters will ignore him because of his faith, which is unfounded optimism.

James Gimpel, a GOP political scientist and consultant, argued in the Boston Globe that Romney is failing to recognize what could be an “insurmountable” problem with fundamentalist Christians. “The question is whether a church-going Christian is willing to set those differences aside as irrelevant to holding the office of president, or take them quite seriously as heretical and cultish. There are a great many evangelical Christians who would have a hard time justifying a vote for Romney under any circumstances.”

But they are enthusiastic about the wildly conservative Christian Rick Perry.

Republicans must carry the south, including Florida and Texas, to win the presidency because they will split the plains states and the Intermountain West. The president will win New York and California and the Northeast and the election will come down to the Midwest. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are the electoral votes that will pick the president. Romney can do well in that part of the country; his father was a popular governor of Michigan. But it is irrelevant unless he wins the south and that is impossible. A Mormon cannot win Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas, and, consequently, the White House.

A 2007 Pew poll reported that 43% of Christians do not believe Mormonism is a Christian religion and among Christian evangelicals that number jumps to 57%. The unanswered question until Election Day is how many of those evangelicals will cast a ballot for a Mormon, who has also been vague or contrarian on social issues that matter to religious conservatives. A significant number of these people view Mormonism as a cult. They will not vote for Mitt Romney.

Rick Perry will have to make a huge mistake to lose this GOP election. Christian conservatives in Iowa will make him a big winner. If he loses in New Hampshire, where Romney has a home and has been campaigning for four years, Perry will win handily in South Carolina as well as Florida. On Super Tuesday, which includes (under current GOP scheduling rules) states like Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia, Perry will win handily. Romney has the resources to stay at least through that March 6^th multi-state contest but the race will not last any longer and he will be forced to concede.

Romney and Jon Huntsman, both Mormons, are the best candidates for the GOP to have a chance against President Obama. But neither of them will survive the primaries because of their faith. Rick Perry will win.

And the GOP will lose.

(Houston) – The devout can be deceptive. But sometimes they are just blatantly hypocritical. And because the attendees of Rick Perry’s and the American Family Association’s (AFA) The Response event in Houston are human, there was an abundance of contradiction in Reliant Stadium. A lot of good comedy material, too. But too much sadness to ignore.

Waiting for Jesus on the Jumbotron

The AFA might call itself Christian but its intolerance has gotten the organization labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of the nature of written and verbal comments from AFA leaders about gays and Jews. (Both are hell bound, apparently; Jews because, well, you know, and gays because they have “chosen” an alternative lifestyle). Of course, AFA says it loves gays and is praying for them to understand the sinful choices they have made. And Jews, well, you know. If AFA believes you can “pray away the gay,” can you get rid of your Jewishness, too?

Sounded like AFA founder James Dobson was also praying for President Obama. The prayers are needed since Dobson equated Obama’s policies and his administration with the Nazis, but in a kind of loving, forgiving, Christian sort of way. Anyone looking at the crowd in the stadium, though, might have recognized the borderline mass hysteria as something they had seen on The History Channel’s black and white films of the rising Reich, arms raised, chanting, stomping feet, tears.

Perry, who wants to replace the president (regardless of his lack of a campaign proclamation), also prayed for Mr. Obama. He quoted scripture and mentioned suffering but he didn’t mention all of the agony in Texas. As Hair Almighty took the stage with a nuclear smile and a red power tie, he had much to pray about, and most of it was in the state he has been running for more than a decade.

Perry's Prayerapalooza

According to researchers in the Texas Legislative Study Group, 17.3 percent of the state’s population lives in poverty, 4.26 million people. 66 percent of Latino children and 59 percent of black children live in low-income families, compared to 25 percent of white children. 28 percent or 6.1 million of the population of Texas is uninsured, the largest share of uninsured in the nation. And if you are a woman with a child and in financial straits, don’t come knocking on Uncle Tex’s door for a handout. In 2010, the average monthly benefit for Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) recipients in Texas was $26.86, the lowest in the country. Yes, that’s for a month. You want more, you better pray. But so far that hasn’t worked in Texas.

Perry didn’t pray about any of that or the fact that Texas is 50^th in workers’ compensation, 50^th in percent of women receiving prenatal care, 50^th in percent of non-elderly women with health care, 50^th in per capita spending on mental health, 49^th in per capita state spending on Medicaid. Texas was sad before he became governor but Rick Perry has turned the state into a tragedy.

Maybe that’s because we aren’t all doing our share to help our neighbors or perhaps we aren’t praying enough to be heard. Perry, of course, wants to privatize much of government and believes that faith-based groups, individuals, and non-profits can help reduce the burden on government. This is what you’d expect of a conservative man of faith, and that he would do his personal part to help the less fortunate (since the government he is running clearly does not give a damn about “the least of these”). The evidence in Rick Perry’s tax returns, however, indicates he may have missed some Sunday school classes on giving.

In 2007, the governor of Texas earned $1,092,810. According to his IRS form, he gave $90 of that total to his church. He was a tad more generous in 2008 when the governor’s adjusted gross income was $277,667 and he donated $2,850 to his church. Perry was feeling less magnanimous in 2009 when he earned $200,370 but shows all zeroes as a line item for church donations. For the years 2000-2009, Governor Perry’s adjusted gross income on his tax returns adds up to $2,694,253 and church donations are $14,293. He did, however, manage to itemize each article of clothing and household items he donated to Goodwill, which amounted to a deduction of $30, 768 during those same nine years.

Perry isn’t exactly troubled by daily expenses, either. He lives in a $10,000 per month mansion, which the state is leasing for him since fire destroyed the historic residence of the governor. No fretting about making mortgage payments, and health care is provided, along with all transportation costs, and he does not pay for utilities, food, or property taxes. Maybe he could have edged up those church donations a bit without much personal suffering.

The information about Perry and the state he is destroying indicates he is both mean and stingy, and at The Response he proved that he hangs out with organizations that promote hatred against certain types of people. They all claim tolerance, of course, and inclusion, but take the folding chairs out of Reliant Stadium and roll out some prayer rugs for a Muslim Day of Prayer for America and see what happens. Perry has used his office, his tax paid time, state letterhead, and the Texas brand to promote a single religion. The man who would protect the Constitution as president begins his campaign with a gross violation of one of its most basic tenets.

Let’s hope he doesn’t have a prayer.

When Rick Perry told the Des Moines Register he felt “called” to run for president, he wasn’t exactly the first Texan to claim a landline to god. George Bush famously related to Mahmood Abbas that god had told him to invade Iraq and that if Abbas didn’t act quickly on a peace plan for the Palestinians god might give Bush other jobs. When it comes to sorting through presidential timber, god’s judgment appears to show some weaknesses. Whether she likes it or not, the Christian god is getting credit for a lot of weird things down here in the Lone Star state.

Good Hair, Good Suit, Bad Politics

As the legislature was trying to figure out how to deal with a $27 billion dollar budget deficit, Governor Rick Perry made it an emergency measure to pass a sonogram law. The legislation, which was successful, requires women to undergo a sonogram if they are seeking an abortion. The doctor is then forced by the law to describe what he sees and to ask the woman if she wants to examine the sonogram or hear the heartbeat. At the signing ceremony, Perry brought in the bill’s senate sponsor, Republican Dan Patrick, who told reporters this wasn’t about politics and it was a “god” issue. A few dozen pro-life types had been invited to the governor’s reception room and one of them asked Patrick if there was anything that could be done for the women who had already “killed babies with abortions.

“The good news, the good news,” Patrick was almost weeping as he repeated the evangelical phrase, “is that there is hope of redemption for those women through the blood of Jesus Christ.”

The church (Christian) and the state are Siamese twins in Texas.

Patrick, who has been an instrumental ally for Perry’s more extreme political accomplishments, walked out of the Texas Senate Chamber when it started its daily session with its first Muslim invocation in state history. The man who led the drive to have government intrude in the lives of women with problem pregnancies, is, like Sarah Palin, is a former sportscaster. Not too many years ago Patrick painted himself and a room blue and put on a big blue foam hat to yell at the TV during Houston professional football games. (Culture czar in a Perry administration?)

Perry, though, had already demonstrated a facility for messing with the lives of young women. In 2007, he signed an executive order requiring all sixth grade girls to get a shot vaccinating them against HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that can lead to cervical cancer. The governor, however, was being neither thoughtful nor progressive; he was being politically expedient. Merck manufactured the vaccine and the pharmaceutical company’s lobbyist at the time was Mike Twoomey, a Perry friend who has made millions getting the Texas legislature to bend to corporate will. Unfortunately, in this case, Christian conservatives wailed against the governor’s order and the legislature tossed it out. One GOP lawmaker even asked, “Does the governor think my daughter is a slut?”

The HPV rule was a perfect vehicle for Perry’s religious and political beliefs. He was able to cloak the intrusive nature of the bill under the guise of caring about young people while also making a lot of money for his lobbyist friend and a major drug company, which was likely to deliver large donors to any presidential campaign. Perry exhibits, as do many of his conservative consorts, a most fundamental of all contradictions: They are able to stand on stages and howl about government intruding in our lives and businesses but are quick to use the power of government to intrude when it serves their politics and profits.

These political expressions of god and faith, and, in Perry’s case, Jesus, conveniently ignore “the least amongst us.” Perry and his politics are determined to protect a child in the womb but they don’t do a hell of a lot for that kid once he or she starts walking in the world. According to the “Texas on the Brink” report, produced by State Senator Elliot Shapleigh and the Legislative Study Group of the Texas House of Representatives, the land south of the Red River has the highest percentage of children without health insurance of any state in the union.  In fact, 6.1 million people, 28 percent of the state’s population, the largest share in the U.S., is uninsured. We are also 4^th in the percentage of children living in poverty and 34^th when it comes to full immunization.

There is no argument to be made that Rick Perry does not own this grim real estate. He has been governor for more than a decade. The fact that Texas ranks 50^th among people over 25 with a high school diploma is his problem as much as it is the electorate’s that put him into office. “Texas on the Brink” indicates we are 45^th in SAT scores and the way we got there is because Texas ranks 47^th on the amount of money it spends on each public school student. Things will, however, get worse. To balance the state’s $27 billion dollar budget deficit, (why does that exist if we have made most of America’s new jobs?) Perry and the legislature cut $4 billion dollars from the two- year budget.  An additional $1.4 billion was eliminated by ending grants for pre-kindergarten and at risk students while also reducing state contributions to teacher pensions and health care. A teachers’ group called the educational budget cuts a “planned failure” for children.

If you happen to be an ethnic child in Texas, you are in a tough situation living under Perry’s Lone Star. 66 percent of Latino children and 59 percent of black children live in low-income families, compared to 25 percent of white children. Texas offers almost no help to change these circumstances. Parents making even poverty level incomes do not qualify for Medicaid under state standards, if they have two children and earn more than $4,942.70 in one year, (less than $100 bucks a week for those of us slow with math). This is a big problem when 4.26 million people, almost a fifth of the state’s population, lives in poverty.

This, then, is Rick Perry’s theology: by word you can claim to be a man of faith and care for others but by actions your truth is known. Texans have always been slightly deranged in terms of their politics but we are now almost certifiable with our continued election of Perry. What the rest of the country will learn with his political ascension is clearly described in the movie “Blood Simple.” The Coen Brothers’ 1984 film is about a Texas bar owner who is convinced his wife is cheating on him. The opening monologue describes the Texas social and political ethos.

“Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else– that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas…And down here… you’re on your own.”

When Mark Halperin made his distasteful remark about President Obama on cable TV, he provided a glimpse into the media that the right refuses to acknowledge and progressives seemingly cannot prove. Conservatives wailing about the liberal media are as wrong on that subject as they are about taxes. The media is not liberal.

Analyst or kind of a dick?

Overwhelmingly, the journalists working in national media are conservatives. There are very few of them who do not earn six figure incomes. Tax policies of George W. Bush and potential Republican presidents in 2012 are more favorable to employees of national media than are those of a President Obama trying to eliminate tax cuts to upper income brackets and reduce the deficit.

Halperin’s own dickiness is a kind of icon for the disaffection the rest of us in fly-over America feel for much of the national media. The East Coast condescension of editors and journalists who want the rest of the country to know they are smarter than the rest of us is annoying in the extreme. Halperin’s politics, in particular, have always been thinly veiled. He cannot hide his Republican and conservative leanings and you need to hear only one interview to ascertain his perspective. The same is true of most “analysts.” The on-air broadcasters and political thinkers in New York and Washington spend a great deal of their time sitting around breathing each other’s fumes and wait for absurd notions to become their conventional wisdom.

In Texas, where we have watched our governor disastrously privatize Medicaid and force 147,000 children off of health care rolls, bring minimum wage jobs to the state and proclaim an economic boom, operate a Youth Commission where children were raped and given extended sentences when they complained, we find George Will writing a column that describes Perry’s “exceptionalism,” which is probably accurate if the reader considers that the Texas governor pushed through a law forcing women to have a sonogram before they get an abortion. Will appears to have flown to San Antonio for a lunch with Governor Dick and got enough of a crush that he offered a rhetorical flourish over Perry’s “French cuffs and cowboy boots.” Will was obviously encouraged he has acolytes West of the Potomac.

Of course, it’s no secret that Will is a conservative determined to keep us little people out in the prairie informed of how we should think. What exactly is the reach of progressive media and its thinkers, though? The conservatives who own the national media, whether that is Murdoch or Disney, provide a forum for people like Halperin and other pseudo-analysts to complain about publications like the New York Times. But it was the bitchy “gray lady” that enabled the fatally flawed reporting of Judy Miller, which was central to fomenting a political environment in Washington that led to our ongoing disaster in Iraq. The paper of record was not a liberal enemy when conservatives figured out how to manipulate its editorial content.

FOX News, at least, is a known commodity for viewers. Chris Wallace’s dickiness is as obvious as a lapel pin. There is no attempt to pass off FOX people (let’s not pretend and call them journalists) as analysts, the guise under which Mark Halperin stalks the green rooms of Washington and New York. The Hannity’s and the O’Reilly’s pull fatuous nonsense out of the ether and then push it on the streets like it is fact as they denounce Keith Olbermann as a tool of the liberal elite media. Disagree with Olbermann all you want but his perspective is backed up by intellectual rigor, evidence, and reporting, which, in the eyes of conservatives, makes Olbermann “kind of a dick,” too.  Facts remain “stubborn things.”

Let’s retire this notion of objectivity in the media. It is a kind of mythology taught in journalism schools and checked at the door as soon as a reporter walks into the newsroom of a large media operation. No one is objective, not even reporters, maybe especially not reporters. We are all a product of our experiences. The goal is fairness, making certain that facts are properly assessed, perspectives weighed for credibility, and the report is informative based upon available information. And there aren’t always two sides to a story. Sometimes there is only one. The fool standing on the Golden Gate Bridge who says he can fly before he jumps does not need to be refuted by a scientist explaining why human flight is not possible. Sometimes there is just the truth.

But what do I know? I’ve been told a few times that I’m “kind of a dick,” too..