The campaign for Texas today

ABC News:

When Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison signaled she was challenging fellow Republican Rick Perry for governor of Texas shortly after the 2008 election, the conventional wisdom was that the veteran senator, who has won all her elections with at least 60 percent of the vote, might pose a real threat to Perry, who was re-elected four years ago with just 39 percent of the vote.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this Lone Star shoot-out: Perry, who enjoys the support of Sarah Palin, effectively nationalized the race and turned Hutchison's Washington experience against her.

The incumbent governor has fared so well, in fact, that Texas Monthly Magazine recently floated the prospect that he might run for president in 2012.

"We all know the old line that all politics is local," Wayne Slater, a veteran political reporter for the Dallas Morning News, told ABCNews.com's "Top Line" on Monday. "This year, it seems that politics is really national."

As voters go to the polls today in Texas, the big question is not whether Perry will be re-nominated but whether Hutchison and a third candidate, Debra Medina, will force Perry into extra innings. An April 13 runoff between the top two vote-getters will be required if no candidate garners a majority in today's vote.

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"Rick Perry saw very early on that this Washington Tea Party movement, this anti-Washington uprising, was very effective and he framed the campaign that way," Slater said. "'Kay Bailey Hutchison is Washington and all things bad about Washington. I am Texas. State sovereignty. The 10th Amendment. States' rights.' That has been very successful."

Hutchison, who has won endorsements from former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President George H.W. Bush, has focused her campaign against Perry on three issues: a revolving door of aides-turned-lobbyists, the governor's unsuccessful push for toll roads and a short-lived plan to mandate vaccinations for girls against the cancer-causing HPV virus.

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She has not really gotten any traction with those issues. The toll road issue might have had some potency when the Trans Texas Corridor was still viable, but it has been dead as a hammer for at least a couple of years now. As for other toll roads, I think Texans in urban areas like them because they relieve congestion in both Houston and Dallas.

I may have been one of the few conservatives who thought the vacine idea was a good one, but that is also an old issue that has gone away. The real passion in this year's election is about government spending in Washington and the out of control deficits that have resulted. That is why Perry's campaign has been so effective.

While Sen. Hutchison has been getting all the high profile endorsements as well as the media endorsements, Perry has been courting the alternative media and getting his anti Washington message out.

BTW, I do not see him running for President in 2012. Right now, being Governor of Texas is a better job anyway.