Encouraging Perry’s candidacy is too dangerous a game for Democrats. Since World War II, no president with an approval rating as low as Obama’s (now hovering around 40 percent) has been reelected. And polls showing Perry to be weaker than Romney against Obama should be small comfort. In January 1980, a Harris poll found that President Jimmy Carter was polling four percentage points better against Ronald Reagan than he was against George H.W. Bush. Carter was more than 30 points ahead of both at the time, but, because of the electorate’s sour mood, wound up losing to Reagan by 10…
One party operative close to these decisions told me there have been a “lot of conversations” about the dilemma, with some labor and environmental groups arguing for easing up on the anti-Romney message machine out of a belief that he would be the “lesser of two evils.”
Good thinking. If Obama is doomed, who would Democrats rather have in possession of the nuclear suitcase: the technocratic Romney, or the coyote-shooting Perry?
