He’s also a reminder of the immigration issue’s continuing power to tear the GOP apart—a fissure Republicans were determined to solve after 2012 but have instead seen only deepen, aided by Trump. Like many Texas Republicans, Perry has been close enough to the border issue to see it in subtler terms. For a time, the Texas GOP even had an immigration-reform plank in its platform. But as Perryism has been replaced in Texas by Cruzism, that nuance, too, has fallen by the wayside. In the speech Friday in which he announced he was suspending his campaign, Perry made this his parting warning: “We cannot indulge nativist appeals that divide the nation further,” he said, calling for an immigration debate “without inflammatory rhetoric, without base appeals that divide us based on race, culture and creed.”

The smart-guy role he adopted for the 2016 campaign never quite fit Perry. He seemed tentative and trying-too-hard in the first Republican debate, which saw him—Texas’s longest-serving governor!—relegated to the pre-prime-time junior-varsity stakes. In public appearances, his folksy delivery could be at odds with his new, multisyllabic scripts. But Perry was no idiot. In Texas, he took a structurally weak governorship and gave it heft, using appointments to strengthen and consolidate executive power. He didn’t win all those elections by accident. And in the end, his political smarts forced him to see the writing on the wall. He won’t be president, but in his final campaign, Rick Perry may have found some measure of redemption. Adios, mofo.