You know who's a safe choice for risky times? Mitt Romney

In Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, we have undiluted representatives of each type. Perry is purposely provocative in style and content. He questions the legitimacy of 70 years of federal entitlement commitments. He proposes a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the federal government and the states. He is highly critical of the Federal Reserve and its chairman. Perry’s specific economic policies remain defiantly unspecific, but his rhetoric and intentions are ideologically ambitious.

Romney is running at Perry from the reassuring center. Both are harshly critical of Obama’s economic policies. But unlike Perry, Romney refuses to hurl the accusation of “socialism.” Romney argues that an overbroad condemnation of Social Security would leave Republicans “obliterated as a party.” His own 59-point economic plan contains a “number of options” for incremental entitlement reform — an approach the Wall Street Journal has criticized as “timid and tactical.” But Romney’s timidness on some issues is his main tactic against Perry. With the economy suffering a series of complex maladies, who wants a surgeon who performs only amputations?…

None of these historical precedents make Romney a shoo-in. But they indicate his prospects are better than his current polling. Perry is a perfect candidate for a time of Tea Party anger — say, around 2010. But Romney has a better case in a time of economic fear — like the one we may be entering — when competence becomes a desperate political demand. In this case, Republicans may choose, once again, not the purist they love but the old hand they trust.