With Chris Christie ruling out a presidential run yesterday, the other important political news for the Republican Party was this: The latest Washington Post/ABC poll shows a 16-point drop in Rick Perry’s support among GOP primary voters — the same drop shown in a poll of Florida Republicans released Monday.
In South Carolina, a state that Perry by rights should simply have in his pocket, a reliable Democratic polling firm yesterday announced the one-time gadfly Herman Cain is beating the Texas governor by 10 points (27-17).
Political analysts should never say something like “Perry can’t recover from this” — but I’m going to. Perry can’t recover from this. No one in a presidential race has ever jumped to a lead after a couple of days, only to lose more than half his support in just seven weeks.
Yesterday, Christie said he didn’t know what accounted for the urgency among Republicans in his direction over the past month. It’s simple: Perry’s inability to rise to the occasion.
To the Republican Party, Perry’s emerging from the crowd in the summer was like the appearance of your perfect Internet dating profile — the eHarmony match of the GOP’s dreams.
And when he sent the GOP an “I’d like to meet you” e-mail in early August, he seemed charming and direct and fresh — with a good job and brilliant prospects and a list of likes and dislikes that was pretty close to yours.
You told your friends you might have found The One.
The first meeting, on Sept. 7 at the Reagan Library, started out great: He was cute and funny and relaxed. But as time went on, his energy seemed to flag and his mind seemed to wander.
Obviously, he was just tired; he’d had a long day. You texted your mother: “So excited for 2nd date!”
Well, much the same thing happened with that one on Sept. 12. There were some discomfiting gaps in the conversation. And then you asked him about this confusing trouble about something called Gardasil, but you couldn’t understand a word of what he said as he defended himself.
Next came the all-important third date — the party where you brought him to meet all your friends and some of your frenemies, all 6 million of them. They peppered him with questions, and he seemed like a deer caught in the headlights.
Then came that moment, that awful moment, when he tried to make a joke about that Mitt guy who’s also after you, and he got all tongue-tied and everybody stood around waiting for him to finish and then the room fell silent and you just wanted to die of embarrassment.
You told him you’d get home by yourself, and on the way, tears in your eyes, you texted your mom: “:(”
Perry still wants you to think he’s The One, and that Mitt isn’t, and, come on, You Cannot Be Serious about Herman. But the rose-colored glasses are off, and without them, you’re just not that into him.
The bar was set very low for Perry. He had to perform credibly and with energy in the three debates, and to find graceful and plausible ways to explain the reasons for his deviations from Republican orthodoxy.
If he’d managed to accomplish these relatively simple tasks, Perry could not only have survived the kinds of hits he was taking from other Republicans and from the press, but used them to his advantage.
It would appear that is not in him.
And it would appear that you might, after all, have to turn your attention back to Mitt — even though you really, really don’t want to. Especially since the drama of the past couple of weeks, when you heard that really cool guy you had been crushing on months ago was thinking about breaking up with New Jersey and going after you.
But then he went and said yesterday he’s sticking with his current relationship because he made a commitment and he really loves her.
Which kind of makes you crush on Chris Christie all the more. And makes Mitt just seem all the more … meh.
But at some point you’re going to have to pick. As, your mother never fails to remind you, you’re not getting any younger.