Some Presidential campaigns make some kind of intuitive sense; others do not. Rick Perry’s run for the Republican nomination this year fell into that former category, Jon Huntsman’s into the latter. Now each has lost their pomp and is one with Ninevah and Tyre. It turns out that, whatever the basis for your campaign, running for the presidency is hard. Perry and Huntsman met identical fates (abject failure) but their respective journeys to the bottom of the polls remain instructive.
Nothing hurt Perry’s prospects more than his decision to enter the race. Until that point evertything was going rather well. Perry appeared the candidate not named Mitt Romney most likely to stop Mitt Romney. Oops. As Ben Smith says:
Perry had evidently never thought much about running for president, and he wasn’t nimble enough to fake it. He was widely labeled a dummy, but this isn’t quite right: Politics isn’t rocket science, but it does require doing your homework.
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