Mitt Romney’s campaign is going hard after Rick Perry. As it happens, Perry’s campaign is in free fall. (See this latest poll in Florida, a crucial primary state, where he’s now running fourth .) But Romney’s latest attack on Perry seems to risk backfiring on him.
The hit is a spoof of Perry’s “economic plan,” which Perry hasn’t released yet, and which mostly consists of empty pages. That’s safe enough. But the cover features Perry firing a gun, which is supposed to make him look like a doofus. To me, it does make him look life a doofus. But I’m an East Coast liberal elitist who also thought Dubya was a doofus. I’m not sure conservatives will see Perry’s gun-firing like I do.
What’s more, Romney seizes on Perry’s verbal slips:
There is also even more cutting criticism of the Texan under a header of: “Major Domestic Policy Speech” that includes Perry quotes aimed to make him look like a simpleton.
This is exactly the kind of thing liberals did to Bush, which conservatives endlessly cited as coastal elite bias against regular Americans. If I’m Perry, I play that card.