The Perry proposition to the Republicans

Doyle McManus:

...

So Perry has taken all the preparatory steps a potential candidate should take. He's hired political consultants to prepare a blueprint. He's met with conservative grandees, including Kansas' Koch brothers and others who once bankrolled another Texas governor, George W. Bush. He's visited California twice in the past month to feel out potential donors and supporters. He's even spent time boning up on foreign policy.

And that's been enough to touch off a boomlet of Perrymania, at least in some parts of the Republican Party. Perry says he may not decide whether to run until Labor Day, but the mere possibility was enough to vault him into second place in two polls released last week, close behind the dogged but unloved frontrunner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. (Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who unlike Perry is actually running, came in third.)

...

Perry's favorite claim is that in recent years Texas has created almost as many jobs as the other 49 states combined, and that his low-tax, low-regulation policies are the reason. Economists debate how much credit Perry deserves; the fact that Texas produces oil and we're in an oil boom helped too. But Texas has done better at job creation than most states, and it's hard to think of a more potent talking point in a campaign that will be fought largely over economic issues.

Perry's conservatism goes beyond low taxes, though.

His pre-campaign book, "Fed Up," is mostly an essay about the evils of federal power and an appeal to move decision-making back to the states as laboratories of democracy.

"We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own [and] what kind of prayers we are allowed to say," he writes in his list of complaints against the federal government (which doesn't actually tell people any of those things, unless you count Agriculture Department brochures about salt).

...

What's holding him back from running?

"We don't know whether it's doable," Perry's political strategist, David M. Carney, told me. "Most people running for president do it for years. We'd be trying to do it in 200 days."

The biggest practical problem Perry faces, Carney said, is fundraising. It could take $50 million to run a credible primary campaign. "It takes time to raise money — the candidate's time," he noted. Major donors want to meet a candidate in person before they write a check or recruit their friends to help.

But even if Perry decides that the fundraising challenge can be conquered, he has a more basic decision to make.

"He needs to do a gut check," Carney said. "You can't run for president as a hobby."

And there's a third question Perry needs to consider, in the view of some potential supporters: Can he present his ruggedly conservative views in a way that will appeal to voters far from Texas?

The conventional wisdom is that he's too conservative, too controversial and maybe not as book smart as the men he'd be running against. But that's what they said in 1980, when the candidate was Ronald Reagan.

...

Perry is smarter than the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, he just is not a liberal so some in the media may question his intelligence. Perry recognizes the failure of liberalism and the success of conservative ideas as applied in Texas. It is those conservative ideas and government restraint that have propelled the Texas economy to out perform Russia.