(I happen to think the "fire people" gaffe did reveal something essential about Romney's character: Not that he's a heartless capitalist robber baron, but that the man is incapable of speaking off-the-cuff without saying something bizarre and tone-deaf. "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me" is just a really weird phrase, and an odd way of expressing a perfectly reasonable sentiment.)

Of course, his rivals for the Republican nomination wisely ignored the greater context and promptly turned "I like being able to fire people" into a ringtone. Which they are supposed to do, because they're running for president against this guy.

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“Looking in her eyes, I couldn’t come up with an answer to defend the exemptions for rape and incest,” he said at a "tele-town hall" sponsored by far-right Iowa radio host Steve Deace. "And over the course of the last few weeks, the Christmas holidays and reflecting on that … all I can say is that God was working on my heart."

It's just one more step toward society's political margins for the GOP contenders. Perry has already announced his support for the "personhood" movement, which declares that life begins the moment an egg is fertilized, a measure that was rejected by the deep-red state of Mississippi as too extreme. But Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum also back the personhood crusade. That's your modern Republican Party: It makes Mississippi look liberal. They'd like women to have more rights before they're born than after.

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The post lays out Perry's oft-told history of being a true conservative tax-cuttin' god-fearin' job-creator, says every other candidate is vulnerable and insists that Perry can win. But what about the fact that the guy appears to be the dumbest person in the room every time he's in front of a camera? Oh, that's a minor problem, really.

The one knock on Perry is that his poor debate performances and periodic campaign trail gaffes will open him to the same vulnerabilities in office as President Bush: an inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies.

Perry's poor communication skills are easily overcome:

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You've seen the "Strong" video by now. Your friends have posted it all over Facebook, usually with a string of LOLs underneath. In a campaign ad that, unfortunately for Perry, strongly evokes both Heath Ledger's tormented performance and his sartorial leanings in "Brokeback Mountain," the man who uproariously still believes he has a shot at the White House says, "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." He goes on to promise, "As president, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage." (Perry staffers are already distancing themselves from responsibility, with his top pollster calling the ad "nuts.")

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Gingrich is still surging in the polls – the latest to find him in first place is CNN – and while I think his history of selling himself to corporate America will ultimately turn off Tea Partyers, what do I know about Tea Partyers, anyway? I try to give them credit for ideological consistency – they supposedly hate crony capitalism, and Newt is its poster boy – but I may be politically naive in that.

That's where Rick Perry comes in. The guy's got enough money to be the Not Mitt. He's never lost an election. Surely he's got to have more substance than it's seemed so far – he can't really be a stoner frat boy let loose in a presidential race. Can he? I think he can redeem a series of horrible debate performances with a good pummeling of Gingrich Tuesday night.

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This is defining adult down. Mitt Romney is tall and has nice hair. He looks like a dad in a Cialis commercial. He's on a stage with smug adulterer Newt Gingrich, serial sexual harassment clown Herman Cain, crazy-eyed witch-burner Michele Bachmann, and out-of-date George W. Bush impression Rick Perry. So, sure, Romney, why not?

What went wrong for Perry, though? I mean besides the fact that he is pretty obviously both dimwitted and lazy. According to Shrum, who quotes the book at length, what went wrong for Perry is that he did not prepare for the debate by reading Chris Matthews' "lyrical new book 'Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,'" which Shrum quotes at length.

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In all seriousness, it cannot be easy to be governor of Texas and run for president at the same time.

That is the entirety of the post. (Commenter "motherofthetroops": "K-Lo, I say this in Christian love: what Perry is to debaters, you are to Corner commentators." People who preface things with "I say this in Christian love" are people who are about to say something awful to you, usually.)

This morning, she published a longer reaction to last night's debate, informed by a night of careful consideration. "These candidates aren’t half bad," she declares. "I do wish Santorum would have his moment," she sighs, wistfully, imagining herself chastely holding hands with the former senator on a lovely spring day as they block the entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

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It’s even more useful to gain some distance from political events back on the mainland. Much of the week before this was spent chairing an international meeting of writers from a dozen or so countries. Combined, seeing ourselves as others see us, both experiences are revelatory.

One theme that prevails is a general mystification over many Americans’ propensity for the outright rejection of anything that’s not instantly comprehended. Just yesterday, talking with a couple from Calgary, the Canadians expressed their incredulity that relatives in the States were so vehemently opposed to President Obama’s healthcare and jobs programs “when they haven’t even bothered to read anything about them.”

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The survey says Romney is tied with Perry for public endorsements from "influential Republicans," and he's barely beating Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich (!) in the "potential support" race, but as Bernstein says, the point is that Romney has a much better shot of winning elite support in the future than any other candidate.

But the key for Romney isn’t having support now; it’s whether or not he’s ultimately acceptable to most party groups and leaders. And here, the news is very, very good for the former Massachusetts governor. Of the entire group, while 23% have already endorsed another candidate, only another 10% say they have “no chance” of supporting him for the nomination.

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"This is such a cool state," Perry says, referring to New Hampshire, not "intoxication."

How to explain this? Perry isn't a great public speaker, but he's usually not a slurring, incoherent one. At a National Journal panel, Democratic consultant Steve McMahon thought perhaps Perry was drunk. He sounds a bit drunk. But who gets drunk before giving a speech in New Hampshire? This isn't the Golden Globes, this is a presidential campaign.

Republican Charlie Black suggests a different substance:

"It's odd," Black said of the speech. "I haven't asked anybody in Governor Perry's campaign about it. Look, he's got a back problem, maybe it was back medicine ... ."

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A confluence of flubs this severe led Stewart to one compelling conclusion: "Mitt Romney is the luckiest mother-fudger on earth."

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According to the AP, Perry said he doesn't support a campaign (mentioned by Joan Walsh earlier this week) by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to introduce specialty license plates featuring an unambiguously hateful symbol of white supremacy.

The Republican presidential hopeful was in Florida for a fundraiser and told Bay News 9’s “Political Connections” and the St. Petersburg Times that, “we don’t need to be opening old wounds.”

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There are still these federal laws limiting how much individuals can donate to political campaigns (which is why God and the Supreme Court invented 501(c)(4)s), and while minors aren't forbidden from sending their hard-earned allowances to candidates who promise to fill school libraries with R-rated movies, the minors themselves are supposed to be the ones donating:

Under current law, three conditions that must be met for a minor to donate to a political campaign: that the donation was made knowingly and voluntarily; that the funds donated must belong to the minor in question; and that the parents may not reimburse the child for the donation. A Perry spokesman declined to say whether there is an age that the campaign considers too young to knowingly and voluntarily donate.

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But so far, the Texas governor seems to come out of the Haley Barbour school of leadership. Earlier this year, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans wanted Mississippi to issue a license plate commemorating Confederate hero and KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, the governor refused to come out against the proposal, even after the NAACP asked him to. "I don’t go around denouncing people," Barbour told reporters, although he was asked to denounce the proposal, not people. "That’s not going to happen. I don’t even denounce the news media." At the time, the Mississippi governor was openly mulling his own presidential run, on an apparent campaign platform of Jim Crow racism being not "that bad," in his memory, at least. Barbour announced he wasn't running in April, after that trial balloon turned out to be made of lead.

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Steve Kornacki wrote about Perry's ludicrous descent into birtherism here; I don't want it to be distractive, or a distractication, as Jonathan Capehart put it.  I'm just starting to wonder how low Perry can go, and not only in terms of political bottom-feeding. How low is he willing to go in terms of poll numbers? Is there any point at which declining poll numbers, debate disasters and not ready for prime-time moments like the Parade interview will convince Perry he's hurting himself on the national stage, and it's time to head back to the ranch?

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And yet, Rick Perry managed to make a real mess of a lengthy Q&A that ran in the magazine this weekend, telling interviewer Lynn Sherr (a former ABC journalist) that he doesn't have a "definitive answer" about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States and suggesting that the long-form birth certificate the president released in the spring might not be authentic. Here's the relevant portion:

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The reason: Party activists would rather get a chance to go to next year's national convention than deal with the current barrage of flak they're getting.

"Most of the [committee members] I've talked to feel it makes sense to go back to February," probably Feb. 4, said Robert List, the state's national committeeman and a former governor. "A lot of them want to be delegates to the national convention, and that's more likely if we don't get delegates taken away" as a penalty for breaking RNC rules. "And we all want to have the candidates coming back and campaigning."

There are also rumors of "financial and other enticements" offered by the national GOP to the local poobahs, though the RNC denies it.

If Nevada moves, here's how next year looks, according to The Hill:

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Being a candidate's spouse is really a horrible gig. Most candidates' spouses are non-politicians forced suddenly to act like politicians. Dumb things will be said. But the grandiose victimology on display in Anita Perry's talk before a South Carolina college yesterday is still pretty egregious. You may have seen it:

TPM:

“We’ve been brutalized and eaten up and chewed up in the press,” she said.

“It is a comfort to know that I am in this place where I can feel the presence of God. We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party,” she said. “So much of that is, I think they look at him because of his faith.”

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"I really don't care about that word. They painted over it. End of story."

Cain knows full well that accusing a fellow Republican of "insensitivity" will inflame a conservative base convinced that it is constantly, unfairly accused of harboring racial animosity against black people, Hispanic people, Arab people, and most other groups of non-white people. And that conservative base has, thus far, been surprisingly supportive of Mr. Cain. (Surprisingly not because he's black, but because the guy supported TARP.)

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In the last few years, however, the term has broken loose from its moorings, and "corporatism" now seems to have become an elastic, pejorative phrase for any dealings between government and business of any kind, other than arm's-length regulation. A number of conflicting and not necessarily related things are lumped under the ever-more-inclusive term "corporatism"-- everything from public venture capital for emerging technologies to the outsourcing of government functions to for-profit contractors to political contributions by companies and lobbies. A word that once had a narrow and fixed meaning is in danger of becoming an empty, all-purpose insult, like the epithets of "fascism" and "socialism" hurled by conservatives at anyone who disagrees with them.

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