In my mind the debates have hurt Perry. He appeared amateurish, weak and while well versed in his GOP opposition research not well prepared for national-issue questions.
I disagree. I think Perry received about 4 times the amount of attention of any other candidate, and perhaps twice the amount of attention of all the others combined.
In that huge amount of time devoted to him, he made no mistakes. Whether a popular position or not, he stood by it, and he appeared calm to me.
The rules are different when you are the front runner. As long as you don’t make any catastrophic mistakes, you walk in the front runner and walk out the front runner.
People get their information and make their decisions on who to support based on many sources of information, the debates just being one of them. There is a reason candidates spend 100’s of millions on commercials and other forms of advertising.
Face it, if debate performance alone determined who became president Alan Keyes would of been president.