For the second time in the past two days a prominent conservative commentator has thrown Texas Governor Rick Perry under the bus possibly sending this latest Tea Party darling into a downward tailspin along the same trajectory as that of the faltering Michele Bachmann. This morning on Fox News Sunday veteran political analyst Brit Hume stated: "Perry is about one-half a step away from almost total collapse as a candidate...He still has some opportunity to recover his balance and put in a strong performance. What was so strikingly troubling about - from a Republican point of view - about this performance was that Perry was thought of as a really true conservative. Now it appears he has got this position on immigration which is anathema to a lot of conservatives. So this really hurts him with the base." Just a few days ago William Kristol in an editorial analyzing the Republican debate in Orlando opined that any number of uncommitted potential candidates would be better than those who took the stage in Orlando.
I believe what we have here is a growing panic among the conservatives in this country as to their movement's inability to produce a strong candidate that should be able to beat a very vulnerable Barack Obama. Not that I believe that the Republicans have any semblance of a strategy that could actually turn the economy around, but with the overall public dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs being what it is it should be relatively easy to unseat the incumbent. The fact that conservatives keep hoping to find someone better than Mitt Romney speaks volumes as to the consternation within their ranks as to the quality of their field of contenders. Add to that the simmering conflict between the emergent Tea Party movement and what some pundits call the "weakening G.O.P. establishment" and what you have are the ingredients for further internal conflict on the right. Whether or not this conflict burns up so much energy as to hobble their candidate during the upcoming presidential election remains to be seen. After all, any Republican candidate that's not been vetted by the Tea Party will have to tack to the right in order to win in the Republican primaries. That may very well leave the winner with a track record of public comments that are unacceptable to the independent voters upon which the outcome of 2012 will ultimately depend. Thus the next election may be decided to a greater degree than anticipated on the internal warfare that will eventually erupt within the G.O.P.
