Bill Kristol: In The Normal Course Of Things Rick Perry Will Be The Nominee
Now that the GOP race is being framed as Mitt Romney vs. Rick Perry, the media has been comparing both candidates’ records, past accomplishments, and current popularity within the Republican party. To that extent, Bill Kristol predicted today that if the Republican race is a relatively “normal” one, Perry will be the GOP nominee.
Chris Wallace highlighted Romney’s upcoming jobs speech, and asked Kristol what the former Massachusetts governor needs to do to reclaim his frontrunner status from Perry. Kristol offered some advice to the candidate, but then explained why Perry has a better chance of winning the race than he does.
“I think he has to lay out his vision for the country, which he hasn’t done yet. I don’t criticize him for that, it’s been early, but now is the moment.
“I think, in the normal course of things, Rick Perry will be the Republican nominee. He is the three-term governor of Texas, a conservative state. He’s been a successful governor. Texas has job growth, the rest of the country’s lost jobs. He’s a populist, which is very much in the spirit of the Republican party today. Mitt Romney is the one-term governor of Massachusetts, whose health care plan isn’t popular with Republicans. So if you just have a normal race, so to speak, if neither candidate does badly in the debates, if voters just get to know them, and it looks the way I just described, Perry is the more normal victor.”
Kristol compared this race to Ronald Reagan‘s successful 1980 campaign, where he went on the offensive not just against the Carter administration, but the Republican establishment. Wallace pointed out that in 2008, conventional wisdom dictated that Hillary Clinton would have won a normal race against Barack Obama, but the latter candidate painted his opponent as part of the establishment, which Kristol thinks Romney may do to Perry this time around.
However, Mara Liasson pointed out that Romney seems too much like a career politician to successfully convince people that he isn’t one. And as Wallace pointed out, Romney ran for Senate in 1994 in an unsuccessful run, so he may not exactly be a career politician, but a “failed career politician.”
Watch the video below, courtesy of Fox News:
