Category: Rick Perry

Palin Helps Romney Win Alaska

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WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania
Mitt Romney has a powerful ally in his effort to win the Republican nomination: Sarah Palin, who told a Fox News reporter last night that she voted for Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich got 1,834 votes in the Alaska caucuses, giving the former House Speaker 14.2% of the vote, good for a fourth-place finish behind third-place finisher Ron Paul (3,105 votes, 24%), runner-up Rick Santorum (3,762 votes, 29%) and winner Romney (4,225, 32.6%).

Gingrich also placed fourth Tuesday in caucuses in North Dakota (962 votes, 8.5%) and Idaho (940 votes, 2.1%), and the primaries in Vermont (4,608 votes, 8.1%) and Massachusetts (16,756 votes, 4.6%). Gingrich placed third in Ohio (14.6%), Tennessee (24%), and Oklahoma (27.5%).

Gingrich’s vote total in Alaska was more than four times as large as Romney’s 463-vote margin over Santorum. In Ohio, Gingrich’s third-place total (175,375) was 16.7 times larger than Romney’s 10,508-vote margin over Santorum.

In related news, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who quit the presidential race Jan. 19 and endorsed Gingrich — was still on the ballot in Ohio, as was former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who dropped out Jan. 16 and endorsed Romney. Between them, Perry and Huntsman got 13,843 votes in Tuesday’s Ohio primary.

UPDATE: This post seems to have stirred some anger from people who think that my summary of Neutral Objective Facts was intended as a personal disparagement of Sarah Palin.

Of course, I would have enthusiastically supported Governor Palin, had she seen fit to run for president — see my coverage of her Labor Day speech in New Hampshire — but she decided against it. Another source of anger about this post was expressed by my young friend Jamie:

How come you hate Newt so much?

I replied in the comments, but given the rage reaction this post seems to have provoked, I’ll quote my reply here:

I don’t “hate” him, Jamie. But as a presidential candidate, Newt is utterly implausible. There is simply no way in hell a twice-divorced Republican, married to his former mistress — with whom he had an extramarital affair in the midst of the Clinton impeachment scandal — is going to be elected president of the United States.
Not going to happen. Period.
Gingrich’s rhetorical skills are admirable, but his biography makes him unelectable. This is just the reality of politics, and people who would like to ignore Newt’s biography are simply deluded.
It’s not a matter of policy or ideology. I don’t accuse Newt or his supporters of being insufficiently conservative. They are, however, insufficiently realistic about what it takes to succeed in presidential politics, and their admiration for Newt the Great Debater is blinding them to the unavoidable obstacle to Gingrich’s candidacy. Newt is wasting time and money (and his supporters are wasting their votes) on a campaign that was doomed from the outset.
These are, I assert, Neutral Objective Facts. You may dispute the facts, but I guarantee you that Newt Gingrich will not win the GOP nomination.
Not this year. Not ever.

This is my summary of what is, rather than my personal opinion of what ought to be, and I understand that many people wish that Gingrich’s debate skills were sufficient to offset the liabilities of his biography, but they’re not.

It seems that the online world has become a place where we are so accustomed to people expressing opinions that we have become prone to regard simple statements of fact —e.g., “Newt Gingrich will never be elected president, nor nominated by the Republican Party for that office” — as if they were merely opinions, which might be argued out of existence.

Having supported a lot of long-shot underdogs over the years, I recognize why people might vote for a completely hopeless candidate like Newt. But when the hopelessness was so obvious before his campaign ever began, it ill behooves Newt’s supporters to disparage the motives of those who are guilty of no sin more grievous than stating Neutral Objective Facts.

Troglopundit Is Not Only an Acromegalic Sideshow Freak, But Is Also Wrong

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My friend Lance Burri was once famous as the second ugliest conservative blogger in Wisconsin. That was before Sean Hackbarth and his ludicrous hipster soul-patch moved to Washington, D.C., however, and the Towering Man-Mountain of Cheeseland has since ascended to the pinnacle. But I digress . . .

Troglopundit has wasted several thousand pixels in defending the folly known as The Rick Perry “Only Conservative Who Can Beat Mitt” Bandwagon and, because his wrongness is so transcendently self-evident, I thought I’d link it, denouncing the Trog as a worthless varmint.

Just because he is my friend.

If Lance were my enemy, I’d praise him, and then he would be added to the Official Tabitha Hale List of Unimportant Bloggers™ on which list my own name is permanently foremost.

Congratulations, Perry Supporters!

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His doomed campaign pissed away $20 million and never finished better than fifth place anywhere.

Let’s see: Perry got 12,557 votes in Iowa and 1,766 votes in New Hampshire, for a total of 14,323 votes, and then quit two days before South Carolina, which was supposed to have been his “firewall” state. By comparison, the pointless campaign of Jon Huntsman got 739 votes in Iowa and 41,945 in New Hampshire, a total of 42,684 votes — nearly three times Perry’s total, and I rather doubt Huntsman spent three times as much money.

Just ask yourselves, Perrybots, what might have been possible if some other candidate — any other candidate, perhaps one who could remember how to count to three — had an extra $20 million to spend here in Florida. But no, you spent months telling the rest of us that Rick Perry was The Only Conservative Who Could Beat Romney, an argument you didn’t hesitate to repeat as late as December, long after it was apparent that he wasn’t ready for prime time. And you still refuse to admit that you were misled, and helped mislead others, into jumping aboard that hopeless Bandwagon to Loserville. And who warned you, huh?

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.”

Wrote that August 9. Perry’s failure was entirely predictable. But you knew everything and wouldn’t listen to me.

“Howdy. Thank you, Erick.”

Perry Campaign Post Mortem:
Doomed From the Start

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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.
Several years ago I picked up a book called The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts Of In-flight Accidents, which is a major reason why, whenever I travel by air, I always pray before takeoff.

Because what you will learn from studying air disasters is that takeoff is the most dangerous part of any flight and, in many cases, the people who died were doomed from the time they boarded the plane. An undetected mechanical malfunction or a bungle by the maintenance crew and, from the time that jet rolls away from the gate, there is no hope for anyone aboard that doomed plane. They bought their ticket, and they are going to die.

Which brings us to Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. First the headlines:

Perry quits race, backs Gingrich
— The State (Columbia, S.C.)

Perry’s Speech, Dropping Out, Endorsing Newt
— Ace of Spades

Perry’s Voters May Not Flock to Gingrich
— New York Times

Rick Perry Announces End to His Presidential Bid
— Time

I was there at the Hyatt Park for today’s press conference, along with Dave Weigel of Slate, Byron York of the Washington Examiner, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times, Willie Geist of MSNBC and dozens of other reporters. When Perry said, “I’ve always believed the mission is more important than the man,” I remembered that Perry was an Air Force pilot, and thought about The Black Box, because Perry’s campaign was doomed from the moment it began.

Rick Perry is a good man, and he deserved a better campaign than he got, but his political advisers — Dave Carney and those other guys — had all the wrong ideas, and thus Perry’s “mission” was destined to failure from the outset. Exactly how these men, so widely hailed as shrewd strategists, got so many things so badly wrong is a story that I’m sure will be the subject of many campaign post mortems, like Jennifer Jacobs’s excellent examination of what went wrong with Michele Bachmann’s campaign. But I have neither time nor inclination to offer a full analysis today.

What is important today is to realize that there was never really any hope that Rick Perry could win the presidency. All the hype generated about Perry’s candidacy last summer was mistaken, based on a flawed assumptions about the candidate, about his campaign staff, about the entire strategic conception of the Perry campaign.

It was all wrong, wrong, wrong, from the very beginning, an utter waste of time, money and effort, and everyone involved would have been better off if Perry had never run at all. Instead of asking, “What went wrong?” we should be asking simply, “Why?”

But that question is one that Perry’s most vocal supporters — who loudly and repeatedly proclaimed  their candidate the only viable alternative to Mitt Romney — do not wish to0 contemplate. And so I will simply link my American Spectator report on the Perry press conference, which ought to be the final word on this tragic folly.

It won’t, of course, because the campaign will continue, until it is at least recognized that Perry’s endorsement of Newt “Share Me” Gingrich, like everything else about the Perry campaign, has proved to be a mistake.

And then no one will give me credit for that prediction, either.

Greetings from Charleston!

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CHARLESTON, S.C.
Thirteen-year-old Jefferson and I were rolling leisurely south from Myrtle Beach on U.S. 17 — past pines and palmettos and live oaks draped in Spanish moss — when a black SUV passed us and I did a double take. I’d gotten just a quick glimpse at the driver as he passed, but my peripheral vision is excellent, and so I sped up until I was even with the SUV and confirmed that it was . . .

Tony Katz of All-Patriot Media, who actually Tweeted this coincidental sighting along the campaign trail. And as we approached the Charleston suburb of Mt. Pleasant, I signaled to Tony to roll down his window and shouted — as we were running parallel at about 60 mph — that this was where the Santorum campaign had its South Carolina state campaign headquarters, which was my initial destination for the day. Tony nodded and rolled on.

A few miles down the road, just before we reached the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge into Charleston, we found Santorum HQ in a shopping center. As we pulled into the parking lot, we were greeted by two familiar faces: Rick Santorum’s two oldest sons, John and Daniel, carrying boxes out of the office. They explained that they were going to the post office to send out a mailing. So you see that the senator is not kidding when he talks about how his family helps with the campaign.

Jefferson and I walked inside the campaign office and saw press secretary Matt Benyon working in a corner, while other staffer were toiling away at their laptops — so much of campaign work nowadays is done by computer — and volunteers worked the phones. Jefferson helped himself to a Pepsi (the kid is drinking way too much soda on this trip), and I got a cup of coffee, and then I shot this brief video tour of the office:

We left the Santorum HQ and drove into Charleston, reached the Visitor Center, and I asked for directions to the nearest McDonald’s. We got back in the car and I missed the turn Spring Street, finally turning left at Huger Street, which took us over to Hagood Street — the rear entrance to the Citadel — and then we turned left and came down here for me to do a little blogging.

There will be another Republican presidential debate here Thursday (8 p.m., CNN) and meanwhile we’re going to be hanging out with Ali Akbar, who’s in town to help out with the Gingrich campaign. Of course, the Gingrichites are feeling pretty cocky these days, but I’d advise them to beware of outbursts like this:

Gingrich: ‘I Would Be Delighted’
With a Santorum Endorsement

This tendency toward hubris has struck Gingrich whenever he gets feeling confident. A couple of months ago, Jonah Goldberg dubbed this the “World Historical Newt” problem. Newt is 0-for-2 against Santorum so far and, while the latest Rasmussen poll shows Gingrich leading Santorum by five points in South Carolina, that’s not the kind of margin that entitles Newt to act as if he were already the pre-emptive victor. Some more headlines, via Memeorandum:

Mitt Romney to release tax returns,
estimates rate at about 15 percent
— Washington Post

TRANSCRIPT: Fox News Channel & Wall Street
Journal Debate in South Carolina
— Fox News

Rick Perry Camp Explains Suggestion
That Turkey Is Led By ‘Islamic Terrorists’
— ABC News

Perry: Santorum a ‘good Catholic’
— Politico

So now we’re in Charleston. More news later. Please hit the tip jar.

PREVIOUSLY:

Can Mitt Be Stopped? ‘A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Romney Inevitability’

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“The final tally in the New Hampshire primary showed Rick Santorum clinched fourth place and Newt Gingrich took fifth, according to the New Hampshire secretary of state.
“Throughout late Tuesday night and early [Wednesday] morning when the votes were tallied, Gingrich had been fourth, but Santorum overtook him, beating him by just 138 votes, with 23,174 votes for Gingrich and 23,312 for Santorum.”
— Boston Globe

On the phone with a friend this afternoon, we were talking about the Perry problem, which is beginning to depress me. Da Tech Guy is trying to be philosophical about it, but I’m getting discouraged, because it’s turning out as badly as I’d feared, and perhaps even worse. Frightening vibes of vindictive sadism are emanating from the Perry camp, and this is never a good sign.

Three days after Christmas, a CNN poll finally validated what I and others had been saying for weeks: Rick Santorum’s tireless campaigning in Iowa was producing a last-minute surge. And suddenly Santorum, who had spent months grousing about his relative lack of media coverage, was swarmed by reporters everywhere he went.

Almost as quickly, the Perrybots attacked. They had spent three weeks expecting that once Mitt Romney’s attack ads destroyed Gingrich in Iowa, the beneficiary would be The Only Candidate Who Could Beat Romney™ (as they had been marketing their guy since mid-summer). The fact that Iowa Republicans shifted instead to Santorum drove the Perrybots into unprecedented paroxysms of frothing rage.

What especially infuriated them was that the Perry campaign, which had been saturating Iowa with some $3 million of ads — including an ad that attacked both Gingrich and Romney — hadn’t anticipated Santorum’s December surge. So by the time it became apparent that Santorum was surging, it was too late for Perry to do anything more than hit Santorum with a last-minute radio ad, plus some cheap underhanded smear tactics like disseminating anonymous anti-Santorum flyers. (Which the Perry people then deviously tried to blame on Ron Paul’s campaign.)

Despite everything that the Perry campaign and its proxies could throw in at the last minute, however, Santorum came within eight votes of beating Romney in Iowa and, as I said to my friend on the phone today, “How much different would it have been if Erick Erickson hadn’t spent five days slamming Santorum at Red State? Couldn’t that have cost Santorum the votes he needed to beat Romney?”

Of course, the anti-Santorum messages didn’t stop after Iowa and this vengeful negativity from Perry’s people — as if Santorum unjustly deprived them of something that was rightly theirs — was not unnoticed, either by the Santorum campaign staff or by various journalists covering the campaign. A rather eminent pundit asked me last weekend in New Hampshire, “What the hell happened to Erickson?”

What is especially annoying about this is that, for all the harm inflicted on Santorum, they haven’t done Perry any good at all. He’s still down at the bottom of the GOP heap and, even if he gains ground in South Carolina now — as at least one anomalous poll suggests — all Perry can do is drain votes away from either Gingrich or Santorum, the two candidates with a plausible chance to beat Romney there.

So I was telling this to my friend, who has already joined the “Roll Over for Romney” camp, and explaining that I intend to fight as long as there is anything left to fight with, but was frustrated by the apparent determination of the Perry people that, if their guy can’t be the “Not Romney” alternative, then they’ll destroy whatever other “Not Romney” has a chance, just for the pure hateful spite of it.

It grieves me terribly to see such petulance from people I’ve long regarded as political allies, just as it embarrasses me to have to cite Bill Kristol (!) as an example of clear-thinking courage:

Thus Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday: If Romney, having beaten Santorum by all of eight votes in Iowa, wins in New Hampshire, where he has a summer home and has been campaigning for six years—well, then we should all just accept the inevitability of Romney. After all, then “Romney is 2-0.” And if he’s 2-0, by whatever margins and in states with 11 electoral votes—“he becomes the prohibitive favorite” for the nomination.
Really? Well, no. But the point [of Rove’s argument] is to convince Santorum supporters, and those of you who might consider becoming Santorum supporters, that he has no chance, so as to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of Romney inevitability. After all, “Mr. Santorum shouldn’t kid himself; he faces huge obstacles. . . . He hasn’t had to endure withering scrutiny but will shortly. His chief opponent has tremendous organizational and financial advantages and has been through the rigors of a presidential primary race.” Rove does note with gracious condescension, “Mr. Santorum has a shot, and that’s all he could have hoped for.”
Actually, Santorum can hope to win. He has been running to win. And after what he pulled off in Iowa, it’s foolish to suggest he doesn’t have a chance to win. His Iowa performance, and his speech Tuesday night, were impressive enough to suggest to primary voters in subsequent states that they should make an effort to judge both his capacity to win and his capacity to govern.

Exactly so. For a long time, Santorum’s critics said he seemed “whiny” or “sanctimonious,” but in the past few weeks, Santorum seems to have gained confidence and found his voice, and people are responding to his positive message. Unlike either Gingrich or Perry, Santorum never resorted to using “Occupy Wall Street” arguments against Mitt Romney. And Santorum’s ad have been optimistic and inspirational:

The Santorum campaign has said they’ll spend $1 million to spread that message in South Carolina, and there is reason to hope that, with a week to go — and two debates — before next Saturday’s vote, he can finally score a breakthrough win.

Despite my own pro-Santorum bias, however, I’d be OK if somehow Gingrich pulls ahead to beat Romney. If the point is to stop Romney from clinching in South Carolina, it doesn’t really matter who stops him. But there are only so many anti-Romney votes to go around, and every vote wasted on Perry (currently 20.9 points behind Romney in the RCP average of South Carolina polls) is in effect a vote for Romney.

Think about it: When the votes in South Carolina are counted on the night of Jan. 21, if Romney wins by a margin smaller than the vote total for Rick Perry, the supporters of Perry will have inadvertantly handed the nomination to the RINO they spent six months denouncing as unacceptable to conservatives.

By all normal political logic, Perry’s humiliating fifth-place showing in Iowa should have been the end of his campaign, but his staff and consultants insisted that he had to keep going, if only to give them a chance to spend the rest of the millions in campaign cash he’d collected. Yet they have refined the avoidance of blame to a high art, so I’m sure when all is said and done, Dave Carney and his (well-compensated) friends will lay all the blame for their failures on some convenient scapegoat.

But this is depressing me, and I don’t want to be depressed. What I want is for people to wake the hell up and start thinking for themselves, and realize that trends in human affairs are never really inevitable. The actions of individuals make a difference, and if you have the courage to stand up and speak out, you can make trends happen, rather than always being the victim of somebody else’s trend.

That’s why I like Rick Santorum: He’s the guy who says you don’t have to vote for Romney just because somebody told you Romney’s “electable”

All the noise from all these pundits won’t amount to a hill of beans, if the people of South Carolina decide to take a stand and tell the pundits to go straight to hell. Join the fight — and fear the vest!

Campaign-Induced Tourette’s Syndrome

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‘The Phantom Menace’ in Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 9, 2011

“Perry’s decision to make his announcement in South Carolina was widely viewed at the time as a genius move that would lock down his support in a crucial early primary state, and once he emerged as the most viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, Perry would have no trouble making up whatever he’d lost in Iowa by dissing Ames.
“Such was the conventional wisdom in August . . .”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 17, 2011

“There could be some populist cred for Perry if big donors tied to Wall Street start leaving him, but that’s a big trade-off for the funding Perry desperately needs in South Carolina. If he can’t put ads on the air and compete with Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich, then Perry won’t go anywhere in his last-gasp effort to stay in the race. He’s already at the bottom of the pack in the latest Insider Advantage poll, at 5%. Even Jon Huntsman scores better than Perry in South Carolina, at 7%.”
— Ed Morrissey, Jan. 12, 2012

“Oops he did it again. When asked to name and provide the number of federal departments he’d eliminate as president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry managed to list three, but they weren’t the three agencies he consistently names on the stump or that he attempted to name when he committed his now infamous ‘oops’ moment.”
— ABC News, Jan. 13, 2012

“Mitt Romney still holds first place in the South Carolina Primary field, while his opponents jockey for second with the voting eight days away.”
— Rasmussen Reports, Jan. 13, 2012

While I was in New Hampshire, I occasionally startled my hosts with outbursts of profanity, cussing my way toward deadline. It’s my theory that unless you thoroughly cuss out your computer once in a while, the damned things become arrogant. So I’d be sitting there in Mike Rogers’s kitchen, frustrated by the effort of trying to upload a video, and suddenly erupt in a fit of vulgar shouting at my laptop.

But it’s not just the computer that’s testing my patience these days. It’s also the campaign itself. Because I see a widespread confusion prevailing among conservatives that has been generated by the same bandwagon-jumpers who, in August, kept telling us that the Mighty Rick Perry Juggernaut was going to roll all the way to Tampa and then on to the White House.

The Perry myth — “Howdy, Thank You, Erick“ — has gone through several permutations in the months since Perry’s debate disasters torpedoed his poll numbers. But the myth has enjoyed a zombie afterlife in the form of a phrase that the Perrybots made ubiquitous back in the heyday of the Smilin’ Texan’s frontrunner glory:

“A Vote for [Blank] Is a Vote for Romney”

You could fill in the blank with any name — Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, whoever — and it didn’t matter to the stooges and shills who were riding aboard the Mighty Rick Perry Juggernaut. Their peculiar variation on the Bandwagon Fallacy involved not merely the hyping of Perry as The Only Man Who Could Beat Romney™, but also the orchestrated derogation of any other “Not Romney” candidate.

Ergo, supporters of all other Republicans were dismissed as hopelessly naive: “Don’t you know that a vote for [your candidate] is a vote for Romney?” Continue reading Campaign-Induced Tourette’s Syndrome →

Governor Zombie Stumbles Relentlessly Toward Humiliation in South Carolina UPDATE: Rush Limbaugh Compares Perry ‘Vulture’ Attack to Fidel Castro

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While I was in Iowa, a source told me that suspicions about Rick Perry’s weak debate performances being caused by back pain — which I had first reported Sept. 23 — were essentially correct. At one point, said the source, the governor had been prescribed oxycontin for the pain, but when his advisers realized that this was causing problems, his medication was changed. Of course, as anyone familiar with such things can tell you, changing medications can be a tricky business, sometimes involving bad side-effects, and it is possible that continuing medication-related problems explain some of the bad judgments and mental lapses Perry has exhibited in recent months.

I didn’t make a big deal of what my source told me in Iowa because it was difficult to explain the circumstances that lent credibility to his information without identifying either him or his source. And it wasn’t until I got to New Hampshire that, when I mentioned this to other journalists, several of them said to me, “Yeah, everybody knows that.”

But nobody’s reporting it, of course, because you can’t prove it, and it’s not as if the Perry’s campaign staff is going confirm that, yeah, the governor’s gobbling all kinds of pills every day, just to be able to endure the physical and emotional rigors of showing up at events and saying the stupid things he keeps saying:

“Listen, I love capitalism,” Mr. Perry said at a campaign stop at Duke’s Bar-b-q in Orangeburg, S.C., but “this corrupt and fraudulent activity in Washington, D.C. — between them and Wall Street — has got to stop.”
Mr. Perry stopped short of explicitly criticizing rival Mitt Romney and his business record at Bain Capital. But he highlighted workers at factories in South Carolina where Bain had cut jobs during Mr. Romney’s tenure. . . .
“My whole concern about Wall Street is the Republican Party should be about creating jobs, not creating instant wealth,” Mr. Perry said at a stop at a Lizard’s Thicket restaurant in Blythewood.

After calling Romney a “vulture capitalist” the other day, now Perry is unwilling to criticize Romney by name? Listen to Perry’s interview with Laura Ingraham:

Ingraham: You know I am going to raise the issue of Texans for Public Justice, their analysis of your campaign contributions since 2000 you have received more than $7 million from private equity firms and private investment firms.  Are any of those “vulture” firms?
Perry: Listen, I didn’t paint with a broad brush and say that every private equity firm out there is…
Ingraham: Only Romney’s are vultures? None of your guys, only Romney’s?
Perry: Look, Romney is running for president.
Ingraham: Yeah, you are running for president too and you have benefitted from these firms.
Perry: Correct, and I don’t have a problem with that.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, Joe Scarborough said Perry “sounds like a stoned NYU grad student in Zuccotti Park.”

It’s a zombie campaign at this point: Dead, but undead, the former frontrunner shuffling onward in a bizarre ritual simulacrum of campaigning for president.

UPDATE: Perry is sixth in the latest South Carolina poll by Insider Advantage, and also sixth in the latest Florida poll by Rasmussen. Maybe Erick Erickson can explain what purpose is served by Perry’s continued candidacy, other than spending the rest of the millions the Perry campaign collected in August and early September, before the wheels fell off that bandwagon.

UPDATE II: If Perry’s lost Rush Limbaugh . . .

After Perry described rival Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital as “vulture capitalism” (rather than venture capitalism), Limbaugh lashed out.
“That is indefensible!” he said on his EIB broadcast [Wednesday]. “It’s absurd…this is the language of leftists! This is the way Fidel Castro thinks, or says he thinks.”As you probably know, Limbaugh is no fan of Romney, whom he views as a flip-flopper and a closet moderate. He says he’s irked because Perry and others are going after Romney on “the one thing he’s actually pretty clearly conservative about.” He directed his ire at both Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“The attacks that they’ve mounted on Romney are indefensible,” Limbaugh said.

Stupid attacks like Perry’s are probably actually helping Romney.