I would agree with you completly; however, I would have to say that much of the larnin' I did about Perry was examining, and then refuting, most of the anti-Perry comments by the Palin-bots (sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander). In particular, I've found that the anti-Perry pieces usually have a small snippet of a remark that is isolated from its actual context, and that once you go back to the original material and read the snippet in context, it either does not mean what the article claimed it meant, or else it becomes tempered and becomes a mistake, but an honest one and not simply a callous sell-out, once again as the anti-Perry articles would have one believe.
Is Perry perfect? No, far from it (then again, only the Good Lord is perfect, the rest of us ain't); however, his actions have been generally consistent with conservative values and he appears to have the same instinct that Reagan did for being able to figure out which conservative principles are core - ones that a conservative cannot do without - and those which are secondary - ones on which a reasonable amount of compromise is acceptable for a reasonable conservative, even if personally distasteful.
And no, I am not saying that Perry is Reagan - Perry is Perry (which is not something one can say about Romney) - and will necessarily have a different take on, and approach to, things; however, there are some analogies 'twixt the two that spark some interest.
A lot of the discussion reminds me of the scene in the movie about mathematician John Nash where Nash and some friends are in a bar trying to figure out who's going to get to go after the one striking hottie at the bar. Nash convinces the other guys that they would all be better off if they instead each went for one of the nice, but not striking, girls at the bar - the thesis being that since there was only one hottie and they all spent the night fighting over who would get her attention, only one of them would actually end up getting the hottie and in the meantime the other girls would have gotten fed up and left the bar, so that all of the other guys would end up going home alone.
The same sort of concept based on the Nash Equilibrium works here: so long as Perry is a "nice girl" candidate, and not a cross-dresser like Romney, we are all better off pulling for a candidate like Perry than we are pining for - and chasing after - the political "striking hottie" because we may all end up being left with no-one to go home with if having that "striking" candidate as our nominee materially reduces the chances of our candidate winning the general election. Perry works, and even though he is not as ideologically perfect as the purists would prefer, he represents something analogous to a Nash equilibrium that gives us all a better chance of having the next President be sympathetic to our principles rather than antithetical to them, as is the current denizen of the White House.
