The Benefit of a Failed Perry Candidacy

Rick Perry is giving off a strong impression of being Not Ready For Prime Time. That would please me immensely if he were already the Republican nominee; unfortunately, the whole point of these debates is to give Republican voters a chance not to nominate people like Perry who can be charismatic or whatever but fail miserably on substance, and it kind of looks like that's working. But I still think that the Perry candidacy can be very helpful in one very specific way: making Mitt Romney look less moderate. Apparently in last night's debate, Romney attacked Perry on Texas' policy of letting illegal immigrant children go to state college at in-state discount tuition. Perry, for his part, defended his position in a way that will probably not go over well with Republican voters. But what I'm looking at here is that Romney is trying to find opportunities to position himself to the right of Rick Perry. Great. I have a feeling that Latino voters, who probably agree with Perry that "if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart," will remember that Romney decided to curry favor with Republican voters by taking the hardest of hard lines on immigration. I have a feeling that same dynamic will play out on other issues: every time Romney tries to defend his right flank against attacks from Perry, or tries to loop around and hit Perry's right flank, he makes himself less electable. And I'll take that if I can get it.