Sure, let’s start the speculation about 2016. It helps take our minds off of Tuesday.
And we need to plan ahead for the race against Hillary. (It will be Hillary, don’t you know. Bill didn’t do all that for Obama.)
As longtime readers know, we were Perry-curious in the summer of 2011. We waited for the Rick Perry of lore to show up in the campaign.
But his roll-out was disastrous, to put it mildly. He was targeted by smears at The Washington Post over a rock at a family hunting ground, a reflection of how much the liberal media feared his candidacy.
Perry survived the WaPo smear, but his initial debate performances killed his campaign, although he did get much better interacting with the press as time went on. By the end of the process, I lamented what might have been.
Via Instapundit, Perry is leaving the door open:
A couple of days after his onetime rival lost his bid for the White House, Gov. Rick Perry said he is keeping his options open for 2016.Perry said Thursday it was still too early to make any decisions, noting that he had a busy legislative session looming in January. But, just like the day he dropped out of the 2012 race, the brash-talking Texas governor is keeping a toe in the presidential waters.“I think we said the door was going to be left open, but there is a lot of work that has to be done,” Perry said. “2016 is multiple lifetimes away.”
At the end of his campaign, when reality forced him to withdraw after South Carolina, I came to appreciate what people saw in Perry. But it was too late.
My sense is that if there was a year for Perry it was 2012. By 2016 there will be a new generation of Republicans running, a younger generation which was just shy of the experience needed for 2012.
But I’m still Perry-curious.
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