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By now you’ve likely come across the line Republican strategist Mike Murphy dropped on the Twittersphere a while back, in which he likened listening to Rick Perry talk to “watching a chimp play with a locked suitcase.”
Well, last night Perry got another chance to play with the suitcase, as Fox News and Google teamed up for another GOP debate. When all the booing of gayness died down, Perry, as he sometimes does, had moments of clarity and confidence, especially at the start of his Gardasil defense and his Texas DREAM act rebuttal, in which he pretty much called the rest of the panel a bunch of heartless dicks. Good times.
But, man, can Perry mangle a sentence. And you have to wonder whether, as the field narrows and he finds himself in front of more and more people, that mangling will start to catch up with him. I know: They all trip up, and a combative relationship with syntax didn’t stop the last Texas governor who wanted to be president. But Bush was first elected light years ago when it comes to the level of exposure candidates and presidents face. These guys exist in carefully cut YouTube clips and endless TV debates, and whatever you think of their respective policies and politics, Perry’s unarguably less articulate on the fly than Obama and Romney (and Huntsman and Santorum and Cain and that guy who sneaked into the debate to tell his best dog jokes).
And sometimes? Sometimes it honestly seems like Perry’s been sipping on purple drank. Do we know where Tea Partiers stand on purple drank?
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