Five Questions About Rick Perry

When the implosion of the Gingrich campaign freed up key former aides to Rick Perry, chatter in the pundit class immediately focused on the possibility of the Texas governor’s running. It initially seemed like inside-baseball talk run amok, but soon enough came word that Perry was seriously thinking about it, reports of his meeting with outside policy experts, and then this weekend — the announcement.

There are two schools of thought on Perry. One says his strength on the cusp of his announcement mostly had to do with his being a relative unknown and not yet in the race. Others see a truly formidable candidacy in the making — one that can steal establishment support from Mitt Romney and compete with Michele Bachmann for tea-party and evangelical voters, all while touting a record of accomplishment more impressive than any of the other candidates’.

It surely is some of both. Perry hasn’t yet had a campaign flub, nor had to endure the constant scrutiny of the campaign trail. It’s easy for people to project whatever they want onto him. But he starts off from a position of strength. He gets an automatic entrée into the top tier and an excellent chance to become Romney’s chief competitor, if not himself the frontrunner. Besides Bachmann, he’s the only current officeholder among the top candidates. There’s no arguing with his experience as governor the last ten years of one of the country’s most populous and economically dynamic states. He has a natural narrative as the outsider who has succeeded in addressing the nation’s foremost problem — jobs — by rejecting the nostrums popular in Washington today. He’s a down-the-line conservative with a no-holds-barred combativeness when both substantive purity and a hard-line affect are highly prized by the party’s grassroots.
He must be taken seriously. Whether he gets the nomination will depend in part on these five questions:

1. Can he win Iowa?

Perry obviously would have enormous strengths in the South and especially in the crucial South Carolina primary. But he has to get there first, which probably means winning in Iowa. New Hampshire isn’t typically happy hunting grounds for southern evangelicals — witness the humbling of George W. Bush in the 2000 primary and Mike Huckabee’s distant third-place finish in 2008. In theory, perhaps Perry could finish second in Iowa and second in New Hampshire and still retain significant support going into South Carolina, but Mitt Romney proved in 2008 that boasting of “silver medals” doesn’t count for much. Especially given the large expectations for Perry, anything but first in Iowa would be a blow.

Read More at National Review  Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry, National Review