The Gingrich campaign apparently self-destructed this week.

Sarah Palin is wandering from one national historical site to another on a bus, gushing and continuing to produce bumbling misstatements in the same unpracticed, overly demotic, and naively self-congratulatory style which has never served her well, you betcha!

To be a credible presidential candidate, Palin has needed to raise the level of her game above that of host of a day-time talk show program on some low-amperage local AM radio station. It seems increasingly evident that the elocution lessons with Professor Higgins that the Alaskan cockney flower girl has been needing to make her talk like a lady are just not happening. If Palin won’t make the effort to acquire significantly more polish and gravitas, she is inevitably going to be a walk over in a national election against Obama. Aging beauty queen charm and down home sweetness are never going to take Mrs. Malaprop all the way to the White House.

Mitt Romney passed state health insurance in Massachusetts and this week associated himself with Warmism. Romney is a good businessman and a highly competent manager, but he is gravely lacking in conservative cred. This election is going to be all about the fundamental direction of the country, about what happens once and for all about the entitlement state, about repealing Obamacare. The man who gave Taxachusetts its own version of Obamacare is not the standard-bearer the GOP needs in 2012.

The gossip is that Texas Governor Rick Perry is about to enter the race. What do we non-Texicans know about Perry? Not much. I seem to recall that he alluded once to the possibility of Texas seceding once again, but I think he was joking.

Thinking that its time to start forming some kind of opinions about Perry, I looked around and found a useful article by Kevin D. Williamson from National Review. On the whole, it makes Perry sound pretty good.

nice photo, too

The guy that NPR executives and the New York Times and your average Subaru-driving Whole Foods shopper were afraid George W. Bush was? Rick Perry is that guy. George W. Bush was Midland by way of Kennebunkport. Rick Perry’s people are cotton farmers from Paint Creek, a West Texas town so tiny and remote that my Texan traveling-salesman father looked at me skeptically and suggested I had the name wrong when I asked him whether he knew where it was. (Governor Perry confesses that one of the politiciany things he’s done in office is insisting that the Texas highway atlas include Paint Creek, making him the hometown boy who literally put the town on the map.) Bush is a Yalie, Perry is an Aggie. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, and Perry was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, flying C-130s in the Middle East. Bush has a gentleman’s ranch, Perry has the red meat. …

[H]e is a very different sort of man. Those who know both Bush and Perry say that Perry has even sharper political instincts — and none of the Bushes’ patrician compunction about deploying them.

Read the whole thing.