Remember last fall when Texas Governor Rick Perry packed 1,000 supporters–including former Orange County Republican Party chairman Tom Fuentes, rising from his death bed–into Roger's Gardens in Newport Beach? Perry also scooped up cash for his presidential run at some private affairs with Orange County's wealthy as he was being portrayed as the savior of the GOP, not as robotic as Mitt Romney, more telegenic than Newt Gingrich and about as teabaggy as Michele Bachmann. My, how times change.
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Perry, of course, suspended his campaign two days before the South Carolina primary, saying he didn't see a path to the White House.
Now he's looking for a path back to the governor's mansion.
A new Dallas Morning News
poll shows that half of those surveyed in Texas don't think he should run for
another term as governor. Of
those polled, 37 percent said they have a less favorable view of him
following the campaign and 45 percent said that his run hurt Texas's
image.
“It's clear it's hurt him,” Mark Jones, Rice University's political science department chairman, told the newspaper. “He's been seen as a really savvy politician with
an aura of invincibility, and all that's been diminished.”
And here's the Texas two-step: Forty percent approving of
the job Perry is doing as governor is down 10 points from a year ago–and 3 percentage points less than the approval rating in the Lone Star State for President Barack Obama.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.