He had his chance last time, he fell on his face.
Agreed. I think Perry's ENTRANCE into the race last time was "a sad sign of our politics". We had a bunch of second tier establishment conservatives and Perry just made it worse. He's may be a decent person in his personal life, but he's a mediocre politician in his public career and yet his fan club kept hyping him as southern fried Reagan.
Also disagree with the op-ed's comments that Perry conducted his Presidential races with "maturity, largeness of spirit and devotion to conservative policies". His behavior in Presidential races has been pretty tacky, from announcing the last time around when Michelle Bachmann had just won the Iowa straw poll to suck all the air out of the room and trample over her, to dropping out on September 11th of this year to make the day all about him.
It's interesting, however, that the mainstream media loved to ridicule Perry as an tone-deaf conservative & bumbling doofus when he was actually running, and is now portraying him as a wise, thoughtful statesmen that the eeeeeeeeeeeevil purist right-wingers snubbed, now that he's no longer a candidate.