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.

Her conclusion:

The winner of the night was the delightfully talented young Taylor Swift, though, who just won the Country Music Awards “Entertainer of the Year” award. Who scheduled country-music awards the same night as a Republican party debate? CNBC wins for ending the debate in time for the Glen Campbell tribute.

As I said: World’s greatest political blogger.

(The commenters are similarly unimpressed with this item, or at least many of them don’t really understand what Taylor Swift has to do with anything. AndrewTP: “For some reason you seem to have been brainwashed into believing that Taylor represents your side in a culture war, a belief for which there is no evidence.” Uh oh, they’re catching on! Quick, Rich Lowry, write a post about how you heard a liberal New Yorker disrespect NASCAR or something!)

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.”

For another, you realize yet again how bizarre our system of campaigns and elections seems when viewed by those from abroad — even though these days the rest of the world isn’t exactly the picture of mental health either. Something like our media frenzy over the harassment charges swirling around Herman Cain — mired as those accusations appear to be in years of hubris and egotism on his part and our consuming national neurosis when it comes to all things involving sex or race — seems distinctly odd.

Whether or not the Rick Perry campaign is behind any of the leaks surrounding Herman Cain’s alleged improprieties, the distraction certainly made the Texas governor, as the website Talking Points Memo reported, the “luckiest presidential candidate in the universe this week.” Up to now, the governor has been experiencing the most dramatic crash from electoral hero to goat since Tennessee’s Fred Thompson ran his presidential campaign’s pickup truck off the road four years ago.

The Cain scrutiny helped draw attention from Perry’s plummeting poll numbers and his wacky address last Friday night at that dinner held by New Hampshire’s Cornerstone Action, a group of social conservatives with a notoriously anti-gay agenda. The speech came off more like Open Mike Night at Chuckles Comedy Club than High Noon on Inauguration Day 2013. (You can see the highlights here.)

In the words of Jon Stewart, “Best-case scenario, that dude’s hammered. Worst-case scenario, that is Perry sober, and every time we’ve seen him previously, he’s been hammered.” I prefer to think that Perry decided, “What the hell, this campaign’s going nowhere, might as well let it all hang out.” Or maybe he suffers from a case of way too premature, election burn-out, like Robert Redford’s character in 1972 movie “The Candidate,” suffering from one too many iterations of his stump speech, blathering: “Can’t any longer play off black against old, young against poor. This country cannot house its houseless, feed its foodless,” and so on.

Of course, these are idle distractions from what we really should be paying attention to: candidates’ positions on the issues and their prior track records as business leaders or officeholders. And blahblahblah, I can hear you tuning out now. Luckily, though, when it comes to Rick Perry, at least, in the tradition of such greats of journalism as Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins, we continue to have fine investigative reporting coming out of the state of Texas. Reporters there care — even when you don’t. They’ve been covering Perry and his stewardship as governor with an intensity as white hot as Tiger Beat’s recording of the day-to-day tribulations of Justin Bieber. Certainly, ounce for ounce, Perry has greater entertainment value.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan Texas Tribune, for example, features on its Web page an exhaustive “Perrypedia,” which offers the latest on all things Rick. The publication recently noted that “Perry’s presidential campaign hinges on one overarching message: that states perform best when left to their own devices and federal regulators should butt out. Yet during his decade-long tenure in the governor’s office, Perry and his staff repeatedly downplayed the severity of abuse and neglect allegations at Texas’ state-run institutions for the disabled — until conditions became so dire that the U.S. attorney general was forced to intervene.”

Two years after that Justice Department investigation found violations of civil rights and avoidable deaths, “a Texas Tribune review of facility monitoring reports and employee disciplinary records shows mistreatment is still relatively commonplace. And though there’s been some evidence of improvement, the state’s federally designated disability watchdog group Disability Rights says that halfway into the five-year settlement agreement, not even a quarter of its requirements have been met.”

A couple of months ago, the Houston Chronicle ran a terrific, four-part series, “Perry’s Texas,” examining the deteriorating condition of the state’s infrastructure during the governor’s tenure. And the Oct. 22 edition of the Austin American-Statesman took a closer look at Perry’s time as state agriculture commissioner during the 1990s. The paper’s Laylan Copelin reported, “Over his eight years as Texas’ farmer-in-chief, Perry oversaw a loan guarantee program with so many defaults that the state had to stop guaranteeing bank loans to start-ups in agribusiness and eventually bailed out the program with taxpayer money.

“The state auditor panned Perry’s claims of creating jobs and criticized Perry and his fellow board members at the Texas Agricultural Finance Authority for not following their own lending guidelines …

“Even as the first alarms were sounded, Perry defended the program, saying no taxpayer money was at risk, blaming others and claiming he had fixed it.

“It only got worse.”

Guaranteeing risky business loans with public money is a familiar tune – all together, let me hear you say Solyndra. But instead of solar energy schemes, during Perry’s watch, “Entrepreneurs lined up for money to spin cotton into yarn, process meats, develop cotton insulation, market canna bulbs to wholesale nurseries and sell pinto beans as a ready-to-eat frozen meal, to name a few.”

Forewarned is forearmed. These and other reports from Texas journalists present Rick Perry as the poster boy for conservative humorist and essayist P.J. O’Rourke’s famous description of Republicans as “the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

Unsensational as it may be to all but the wonkiest, more attention to all candidates’ public records serves us far better than the latest private gossip and innuendo. Sorry, the salt air must be going to my head. Land ho.

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.

The elites — like the regular Republicans — are steeling themselves to settle on Romney. This has long been Romney’s entire plan, because he knows no one in America actually likes him, but he’s sort of broadly acceptable and he has good hair.

The important fact is that these elites have nowhere else to go with their support. Their imaginary savior is not coming, and their existing options have glaring deficiencies. Rick Perry is a shifty weirdo who is unable to speak in public without embarrassing himself. Jon Huntsman ran specifically to win elite support, but in doing so he made himself toxic or invisible to Republican primary voters. Newt “Tiffany” Gingrich is David Axelrod’s wet dream. Herman Cain, well … if Cain’s lucky he’ll be this year’s Huckabee, winning enough conservative grass-roots support to overcome the fact that the elites recognize him as an unserious flake. But he’s not looking very lucky this week.

It’s not a cakewalk for Mitt Romney. George Will, who represents a pretty important segment of establishment conservative opinion, unequivocally rejected Romney just last weekend. But Will didn’t endorse anyone else, because there’s no one else to endorse. This is why Karl Rove is basically already running the Romney general election campaign. They’re out of options.

Unless Rick Perry’s giggling ineptitude wins over Iowa and South Carolina, Romney’s going to lock up elite support by the start of February.

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 … .”

“Back medicine” is more popularly known as “painkillers.” Rick Perry had back surgery last July, and he could be recovering still. Painkillers plus a drink or two could equal inappropriate giggling.

There’s one more possibility: He’s intentionally sounding like a moron because being totally out of your depth is a huge selling point for GOP voters these days.

Here’s Perry’s new ad, running in Iowa:

“If you’re looking for a slick politician or a guy with great teleprompter skills,” Perry says, “we already have that — and he’s destroying our economy. I’m a doer, not a talker.”

He’s a doer! He does things! Things that don’t involve communicating effectively! Things like taking pain medication, possibly! And he won’t read off a teleprompter, because he may not be able to read!

Maybe Perry didn’t intentionally sound wasted in a public speech in order to generate headlines highlighting his Herman Cain-like unsuitability for high office, but when you’re dealing with a “doer” like him, you can never know for sure.

(Meanwhile his tax plan is basically a massive giveaway to rich people and it’s somehow even more irresponsible than 9-9-9, which at least operates from the theory that government needs to get some revenue, from somewhere.)

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