C'mon Charles. You're a good historian and you are mixing this all up. Gov. Perry WAS leading (and Newt was low single digits) in August. Perry did NOT drop from that lead because he wasn't "sufficiently conservative". He dropped because George W. Bush was pretending to be an ignorant cowboy -- unfortunately, Rick Perry isn't pretending.
Newt has gotten all AND WAY MORE trashing from the Romulan minions this campaign.
In 2012 we need a fighter and a communicator to beat 0bama. IMHO, that's Newt hands down.
DO you forget Perry was accused of strapping young girls to tables and forcing them to have sex, I mean to get painful potentially lethal INJECTIONS!!!!
Do you not recall "La Raza Rick", who was for wide-open borders, for allowing illegal immigrant children to spend all our tax dollars on useless college educations, who would give amnesty to everybody and put good americans out of work?
So much so that he was faulted for creating jobs in Texas, because illegal immigrants were attracted to the state and took some of those jobs?
Were you unaware of the "Crony Capitalist Perry", who sold out for a $5000 campaign contribution, who ran his own "Solyanda", who was an idiot tool working for the monied interests?
Did you miss PerryCare, how Perry loved Hillarycare so much he sent a letter praising it and begging them to pass it. And he loved TARP so much he sent a letter praising it and begging them to pass it? And how he personally RAN the campaign of Al Gore in 2008, causing irreparable harm to the GOP and costing us an election -- well not the election, but it sure cost us SOMETHING, we were told.
And you couldn't have been ignorant of how Perry made a "fortune" in real estate, which was OBVIOUSLY a sure sign he was a RINO opportunists using his 40 years of working for a living to inappropriately end up with just over $1 million dollars in the bank.
Everybody claims THEIR candidate has been attacked MORE than ANY OTHER CANDIDATE EVER in the history of the world.
Yes, Perry fell apart in the debates. It made him look stupid, when he clearly isn't stupid. He wrote a book. He wrote TWO books. He graduated from College, he worked in business, he flew planes. No less an "intelligent" person than Newt Gingrich commented on Perry's good ideas and intelligence in the forward to Perry's book.
Perry hadn't been attacked for not being "conservative enough" before, and he clearly didn't know how to handle it. Maybe his pain medication from his back surgery was a factor as well. But he did end up being attacked by all conservatives because he called MITT ROMNEY "heartless" -- for some reason all of conservadom decided to associate themselves with Mitt at that point, and take that message personally.
The attacks on Perry of course all started BEFORE he screwed up his debate "performance". It's nice to say now that his debate flubs caused his trouble, but they were a result of, not a cause of, the attacks on him.
I'm not even saying Perry was our best hope. I never actually decided to support him as "my candidate", I just saw him as more electable than most, and sufficiently conservative for the cause of stopping Romney. And he had money.
I keep hearing Newt is a "communicator", and yet in the past three weeks almost every time there's a negative story about something Newt said, the Newt supporters are here telling us that he didn't really SAY that, or he didn't really "MEAN" it, or that he had clarified it, or some other such thing showing that whatever Newt was doing, he wasn't "communicating effectively". Except we were also told we were all just too ignorant to understand how smart Gingrich was.