Mcaffey, the Iowan, does note that some people outside of Texas are put off by Lone Star swagger, and others have suggested that the nation is still nursing a Texas hangover from the George W. Bush years (Perry can launch into a dead-on W. impersonation, with not much exertion). As one top operative from a declared GOP candidate notes, “Perry is a perfect fit for Texas—that’s why he’d have trouble nationally.”

Some in Texas, of course, question whether Perry is a perfect fit even here. A poll released last week by the University of Texas/Texas Tribune showed that a plurality of Texans thought the state was on the wrong track, and only four percent listed Perry as their choice for president. Perry stiffens when asked about those numbers. “You can make anything you want outta polls,” he says. “How’d I feel today when I got up? I don’t govern by polls. They’re interesting to look at, they’re little snapshots in time. Here’s my instinct about people’s how we doin? It’s really driven by the national economy more than it is by the state’s economy, and what we’ve done here in the state. As hard as we work, and as positive a climate as we’ve made in Texas relative to the other states, peoples’ concerns are really larger than the state. It’s four dollar gasoline. It’s this monstrous debt we’ve created at the federal level that we’re going to have to pay off, that our kids are going t have to pay off. It’s the seeming disconnect in our foreign policy—I mean, we don’t have a rudder in the water, we’re floating around aimlessly. And I think that washes over into any poll numbers that you ask about any issue.”

If Perry did join the race, he’d be the second Republican candidate, along with fellow Texan Ron Paul, to assume an anti-war posture. He wants the Obama administration to put more boots on the ground on the U.S.-Mexican border, and to re-think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were initiated by George W. Bush. “This war has gone on way too long,” he told Newsweek, as he sat beneath a portrait of Staff Sergeant Christopher Zimmerman, who was killed in Afghanistan, and whose mother used to work in the governor’s office. “We’ve really gotta figure a way to extricate ourselves out of it. The War on Terror is not going to go away for a long time. But how we fight it, and how we defend America—I’m not sure we’re on the right track.”