Hardly. It’s neither a shaky defense nor an indication that Perry is a “slow learner.” Perry is younger than Reagan and therefore would not have changed as early as Reagan did. Furthermore, to paraphrase the old adage, if you’re not a liberal when you’re 20 you’re heartless; if you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, your brainless.
Quite frankly, everything else being equal, I would place more trust in someone who started as a democrat and then made a mature, considered choice to switch to the republican party than I would in someone who was a life-long republican because that is how the family has always been (I ain’t sayin’ that’s you, I’m just sayin’).
The fallacy in all these attempts to explain why Perry stuck with the national Dims until 1988 is that the issues that caused Reagan to changed parties around 1960, and whatever caused Perry to change around 1990, were vastly different.
The national Dims had clearly been a leftist, anti-American and anti-military party since the late 1960s. Have you ever heard of George McGovern? I left the Dims in 1968 while in college, before I could even vote. I was actually never with them. Reagan changed parties because of the increasingly socialist, big government drift of the Dims in the late 1950s.
Anyone still supporting any national Dim for president in 1988 was not a conservative. Perry changed parties because he realized he'd stayed too long already and would not be viable for statewide offices much longer in Texas.