I don’t often disagree with political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, but when I do it is usually over one subject: the role of “elites” versus voters in the presidential nominating process. Jonathan often makes good points on this subject, and helps bring some clarity to it by treating “elites” as including powerful issue advocacy groups and committed activists, not just some shadowy band of Beltway pundits and money bundlers.
But in a recent New Republic piece, Jonathan goes too far in dismissing the “visible primary” of caucuses and primary elections in favor of the “invisible primary” of “party actors” which precedes it. He does so in order to minimize the important of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry’s “liberal heresies,” choosing Romney’s Massachusetts health plan and Perry’s 1988 endorsement of Al Gore for president as the leading candidates’ most serious problem with the party “base.” I actually don’t agree the Gore endorsement is at all Perry’s biggest “heresy” (it took place six presidential election cycles ago, when Perry was still a Democrat and Gore was generally perceived as the most moderate-to-conservative in the Democratic field); I’d say his position on immigration, and to some extent his denunciations of Social Security, are bigger problems for him with “the base.”
But Jonathan’s broader argument is that by the time Republican elites have narrowed the field or even chosen a nominee, they will have found ways to take their favored candidates’ heresies off the table or rationalize them.
Now obviously, if all the elites have done is to narrow down the field to, say, Perry and Romney, then if anything these two candidates’ heresies will get even more attention than ever from their rivals’ advocates as a competitive environment intensifies. So the only way they get taken off the table is for an actual nominee to be all-but-selected before Iowans caucus next February or January. And indeed, Jonathan seems to think this will probably be the case:

It certainly is possible that voters could reject the choice of candidates they’re being offered; some Republican operatives probably worry that voters will reject Romney on the basis of his religion regardless of what opinion leaders say, or Perry because they fear losing their Social Security benefits (a far less symbolic issue). And in the unlikely event that party actors split and we get a long, drawn-out contest, then voters really will choose between two viable candidates with little or conflicting guidance from visible party actors. If that happens, these issues (or anything else) might make the difference. But the most likely outcome is that party actors winnow the field down to one real candidate by Iowa, and that neither of these issues is particularly important in making that choice.

Now I’m not sure he means this pre-selection will probably occur before or as a result of the Iowa Caucuses, but it’s not a very good bet either way. Indeed, since the emergence of the Iowa Caucuses in the 1970s, the GOP nomination (in contests not involving an incumbent) has never been decided before or by Iowa. If you had to pick a “decider” state, it would probably be South Carolina, the third (or since 2008, the fourth) state, which played a crucial role in 1988, 1996, 2000 and 2008. Sure, you can claim that one candidate had a big advantage earlier on, but losses in Iowa by Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and John McCain (who barely competed in the state) in 2008 threw off some of those initial calculations, as did New Hampshire losses by Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000. And a meaningful role for actual voters does not strictly depend on a deep split among elite “party actors” (though they often do split). Virtually every significant power center in the Republican Party backed George W. Bush in 2000, and it required a white-knuckle/bare-knuckle comeback by Bush in South Carolina to head off an uprising by John McCain.
As for 2012, it does look like “party actors” are going to be divided between Romney and Perry well into the “visible primary,” unless something big changes between now and the end of the year, in no small part because of nervousness over the kind of “heresies” Jonathan tends to dismiss. Some Republicans think RomneyCare will make it difficult for Mitt to effectively exploit the unpopularity of ObamaCare in a general election campaign; some also think Perry’s Social Security rhetoric would make him exceptionally vulnerable against Obama. And there are “party actors” who don’t much trust either pol because of the inconsistency shown by their “heresies.”
So yeah, backers of these two candidates really do need to worry about their vulnerabilities during the nominating process, particularly when actual voters get involved and the real deal goes down.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The fireworks-laden CNN/Tea Party Express Republican debate on Monday night didn’t much change the chattering class’s assessment of the candidates, with most pundits interpreting the pounding that Perry received as a confirmation of his dominance of the field. Because he was attacked from the “left” on Social Security and the “right” on immigration and his controversial HPV vaccination program, he’s being hailed as “the Man in the Middle,” which is where you want to be.
This sanguine interpretation depends heavily on the assumption that the attacks on Perry somehow cancel each other out. But there’s no indication that Perry’s rabid denouncements of Social Security are winning him accolades from voters on his right flank–and, indeed, they may even be hurting him among these folks as well. Perry, in other words, isn’t just vulnerable to the roundabout argument that denouncing Social Security will make him less electable in November of 2012; it makes him less “nominatable” as well.
The idea that Tea Party supporters and other hard-core conservative voters just love Perry’s harsh rhetoric about Social Security–an assumption that television commentators repeated often after the Florida debate–is actually not all that well-supported. While sporadic polling on the subject indicates that conservative Republicans, including Tea Party folk, care more about reducing the budget deficit than about protecting entitlement programs, and are marginally more open to changes in Social Security and Medicare than the average voter, there is certainly no evidence they share Perry’s claim that it was unconstitutional from the beginning and should ultimately be junked in favor of some state-run alternative (the latter idea is so completely eccentric that it has never been polled, though that will likely change). And a poll released on Monday by CNN tested Perry’s “monstrous lie” and “failure” characterizations of the program and found Tea Party supporters rejecting it by a 59-40 margin; Republicans, in general, reject it 69-31 and conservatives reject it 67-32.
Looking a little deeper, there is anecdotal evidence that to the extent very conservative voters are critical of Social Security and Medicare, it’s as a subset of general hostility to federal spending. Compared to other kinds of federal spending, however, they are golden–not just because Republicans and Tea Party supporters disproportionately benefit from retirement programs thanks to their high relative age, but because they view them as earned benefits that are morally superior to “redistributive” or “welfare” programs. Here’s what The American Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie heard on a recent visit to a Tea Party event in South Carolina:

During a campaign event in Myrtle Beach on Labor Day, the Texas governor said that “anyone who wants to keep the status quo on entitlements isn’t being honest,” and at Wednesday’s GOP debate in California, Perry called the retirement program a “monstrous lie” and a “Ponzi scheme.”
To the older, white Tea Party voters Perry needs to win the Republican nomination, this simply isn’t true. “We paid into Social Security,” said Steven Anderson, a member of the Low Country 9/12 project and a retiree. His wife, Judie, chimed in, “It’s not an entitlement, it’s ours.” The same went for Art LeBruce, a retired Army medic and longtime member of the group: “That’s my money that I put into Social Security–I deserve it.”

This sentiment echoes the strong, defensive attitude towards Medicare expressed by conservative seniors when it was argued that “ObamaCare” might divert money from their hard-earned benefits to health insurance for younger and poorer Americans.
Seen from this perspective, the attacks on Perry Monday night on Social Security and on immigration may not be coming from different directions. They could actually become mutually reinforcing, depicting the Texan as someone who has contempt for generations of retirees who relied on the “unconstitutional” New Deal program–but has compassion for illegal immigrants and their children. Michele Bachmann might be just the rival to put these themes together (she was reportedly planning to go after Perry on Social Security at the Florida debate, but Romney preempted any opportunity to do so). After all, back in 2009 she actually preceded Sarah Palin in linking ObamaCare to Medicare cuts and ultimately to “death panels” aimed at seniors.
It would also not be the first time in Republican presidential politics that a policy position interpreted as “very conservative” got a candidate into trouble with conservatives for unanticipated reasons. In 1976, Ronald Reagan narrowly lost the New Hampshire primary–and arguably, the nomination–because conservative voters were convinced by clever Gerald Ford operatives that the Gipper’s proposal to devolve welfare programs to the states might force adoption of statewide taxes in the Granite State, a major no-no.
So it is not clear at this point whether Perry is, in fact, the “Man in the Middle,” whose critics from the left and the right make him seem more reasonable than his manner would indicate and poise him to win the nomination. Unless he gets his act together and ignores flattering polls and press clippings, he could wind up being a “Man in the Crossfire,” suffering from an eroding Tea Party base and increasing skepticism from electability-focused GOP elites.

The signature moment of last night’s CNN/Tea Party Express Republican presidential candidates’ debate was the response to Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical question about health coverage for a 30-year-old man needing life-saving surgery: would you just let him die? Before any candidate could answer, quite a few voices in the audience shouted “Yes!” None of the candidates bothered to rebuke them. The John Galt faction of the Tea Party Movement was in the house.
The most remarkable thing about the content of the debate was the complete absence of a single suggestion of anything positive government could do to improve the lives of Americans. Tax cuts and deregulation, general or specific, were the answer to every conceivable problem. At one point, Herman Cain seemed to be saying that energy company executives should control a commission to oversee EPA. Rick Perry avidly agreed, and that was the “centrist” position, since the crowd was far more pleased with Ron Paul’s call for abolition of the agency (along with several Cabinet departments) altogether.
As you know if you watched the debate or read about it, the main dynamic of candidate interaction last night was the pounding Rick Perry took on Social Security, immigration, and his abortive effort to mandate a HPV vaccination for Texas school girls. He did not, in my judgment, handle any of it particularly well, and was especially hesitant and unconvincingly repetitive in his defense of the Texas version of the DREAM Act, to the great annoyance of the Tea Party audience. If the idea was to speak past the live audience to Latinos or to the general electorate, he failed to pull it off, instead looking like a chastened little boy stubbornly sticking to a lie. As Paul Begala noted on CNN, Michele Bachmann crossed an important line in suggesting corporate cronyism in Perry’s HPV initiative (his former chief of staff was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company manufacturing the vaccine); it’s one thing to accuse a fellow-Republican of heresy, and another altogether to call him corrupt.
There was brief coverage by CNN of Perry after the debate addressing supporters from the audience, and he was back in the groove, swaggering around and shouting denunciations of Obama and bureaucrats. Given the utter predictability of the attacks he sustained, and the likelihood he was rehearsed on all of them, you have to say he’s not off to a good start as a presidential debater. If there was any surprise from Perry, it was probably his categorical statement that it was time to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan (a position hard to imagine given the obsession with support for the “Iraq surge” among Republicans during the last presidential cycle). Romney was not asked about Afghanistan, but this could emerge as a point of contrast down the road.
All in all, the debate provided a stark contrast of the primary and general electorates. Every time these candidates spend time on national television competing to appeal to the former, their freedom to maneuver once it’s time to focus on the latter is gradually constricted. Democrats should hope for as many of these events as the calendar will allow.

Today’s underwhelming news on the presidential campaign trail is that Tim Pawlenty has endorsed Mitt Romney for president. With that and five or six bucks, Romney can get a very good king-sized latte at Starbucks.
What makes the announcement interesting, however, is that T-Paw immediately jumped on the message-du-jour of the Romney campaign: bashing Rick Perry on Social Security:

“Gov. Romney wants to fix Social Security. He doesn’t want to abolish it or end it,” Pawlenty said. “Gov. Perry has said in the past that he thought it was ‘failed.'”

Now this messaging may be temporary, attributable to the venue of tonight’s CNN/Tea Party Express candidate debate in Florida.
But maybe it’s not, and Team Romney perceives Perry’s negative remarks on Social Security (and Medicare, and basically every progressive policy initiative of the twentieth century) in Fed Up as a potential silver bullet, partially on grounds that the issue affects Perry’s electability, and partially because elderly Republican primary voters are sensitive about their own benefits, even though the Texan claims they’ll get every nickel they expect.
If so, does this represent a rare example of a Republican presidential candidate deliberately running “to the left” of a rival in the primaries?
Not necessarily. It’s important to understand that many seniors simply do not look at Social Security and Medicare as “government redistribution programs” no different than Medicaid or Obamacare, but as earned benefits–as an “entitlement” in a very literal sense. Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect traveled to a Tea Party event in South Carolina recently and picked up on this sentiment:

During a campaign event in Myrtle Beach on Labor Day, the Texas governor said that “Anyone who wants to keep the status quo on entitlements isn’t being honest,” and at Wednesday’s GOP debate in California, Perry called the retirement program a “monstrous lie” and a “Ponzi scheme.”
To the older, white Tea Party voters Perry needs to win the Republican nomination, this simply isn’t true. “We paid into Social Security,” said Steven Anderson, a member of the Low Country 9/12 project and a retiree. His wife, Judie, chimed in, “It’s not an entitlement, it’s ours.” The same went for Art LeBruce, a retired Army medic and long-time member of the group, “That’s my money that I put into Social Security–I deserve it.”

This is the same sentiment, which many progressives interpret as blatant hypocrisy or selfishness, that led so many conservative seniors to adamantly oppose ObamaCare while demanding no cuts in Medicare–or even because they believed extending health coverage to the uninsured would directly lead to Medicare cuts.
The fact that Social Security, and to an even greater extent Medicare, in fact do represent a redistribution of money from taxpayers to most if not all beneficiaries has not shaken the iron conviction of many seniors that the programs are fundamentally different from “welfare” in any form.
So ideologues like Perry who have identified Social Security and Medicare as just part of the vast march to socialism during the twentieth century are in danger of an attack that may conventionally look like it’s coming from “the left” but may actually threaten them most among staunch conservatives who think federal austerity measures should strictly come out of the hide of “those people” who haven’t “earned” their benefits–you know, younger people, poorer people, darker people. Perry’s “grandfathering” ploy of going after Social Security and Medicare while promising today’s seniors they won’t be affected may help some, but doesn’t deal with the underlying reality that many conservative voters less concerned with ideological rigor just don’t buy the idea that “their” programs are part of the problem in the first place. A really clever if dishonest attack line on Perry might even combine criticism of the Texan’s positions on retirement programs and immigration and suggest he’s protecting “those people” at the expense of “us.”
If that happens (and Michele Bachmann strikes me as just the kind of rival who will go in that direction), the immediate perception that the debate over Social Security and Medicare is pushing the 2012 Republican field to the “left” or “center” in order to better position the GOP for the general election could be off 180 degrees. It could in fact promote a dynamic in which candidates become more and more direct in appeals to their older white conservative base that budget decisions and social policies are really just a matter of “us” versus “them.”

It’s safe to say that most Democrats liked the tone of last night’s presidential “jobs” speech even if they considered it far too late and/or are skeptical that Obama will sustain it over time.
Aside from its unusually passionate delivery, its focus on jobs rather than deficit reduction, and its implicit (if not terribly explicit) partisanship, the speech also framed the economic emergency and GOP obtructionism in their proper historical context. The president reminded viewers that undermining government’s capacity to act in this type of situation cuts deeply against the country’s traditions, and amounts to an effort to roll back policies to the early twentieth century:

[W]hat we can’t do — what I will not do — is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. (Applause.) I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. (Applause.) We shouldn’t be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe we can win that race.
In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own — that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.

Even more pointedly, given the debate that has now broken out in the Republican presidential contest over whether to kill or simply gut the New Deal and Great Society safety net programs, Obama exposed the radicalism of the “constitutional conservatism” that has gripped the GOP:

Ask yourselves — where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the G.I. Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance? (Applause.)
How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? (Applause.) How many Americans would have suffered as a result?

This is as close as Obama has come in a long time to abandoning the pretense that today’s Republicans are anything like their go-along-to-get-along predecessors who were willing on occasion to bend ideology to get things done. If you accept the idea that his bipartisan rhetoric has been in part a “set-up” to expose GOP obstructionism and radicalism, this speech represents the first of what ought to become a series of communications that “pivot” to a message that increases rather than obscures partisan differentiation.
But another big presidential shoe will drop next week when, as Obama announced during the speech, the White House releases a formal proposal for long-term deficit reduction measures for consideration by the congressional “super-committee”–and to “pay for” the jobs initiative he proposed last night. He has already put Democrats on notice that he will endorse “reforms” in Medicare they won’t like. If the deficit-reduction proposal moves even more aggressively than anticipated towards “entitlement reform” in order to avoid deal-killing tax increases or excessive short-term cuts in discretionary spending, the partisan differentiation he sought last night might be “re-blurred” at the very moment Republicans are seeking cover for their radicalism on entitlements.
So this is a moment of great opportunity for Democrats, but it won’t last long.
UPDATE: Mark Schmitt’s take on the speech is similar to mine but framed differently and very interestingly: he calls Obama’s approach in the jobs speech “fighting bipartisanship.” As someone who labeled Obama’s original strategy for dealing with the GOP “grassroots bipartisanship,” aimed at either forcing GOP cooperation or exposing its obstructionism, I obviously agree with Schmitt’s parallel interpretation of what the president is trying to do now.

There have been plenty of assessments, some quite lengthy, of last night’s Republican presidential candidates’ debate in Simi Valley. Some focus on conventional debaters’ points, and typically adjudge Mitt Romney the “winner.” Others focus on personality, and tend to award the prize to “alpha male” Rick Perry. Still others looked at who did and didn’t dominate the event, and noted how the fiery Michele Bachmann is beginning to fade from first-tier status.
But in the long run, the enduring significance of this debate is that Mitt Romney went after Rick Perry’s denunciations of Social Security, and Perry did not back down.
Romney’s decision showed how alarmed he and his team must be about Perry’s rapid ascent in the polls and his superior positioning in the GOP field as the guy Tea Partiers and Christian Right activists love and the Establishmetn can tolerate. Many of the most certain participants in early nominating contests–the kind of people who tell pollsters they are “very conservative”–pretty much agree with Perry’s uninhibited remarks in Fed Up that Social Security is not just a “Ponzi scheme” and a “lie” but was from the very beginning a huge step down the road to serfdom that should be retracted to the maximum extent possible. This is why Paul Ryan has become such a conservative icon–he seems to be challenging the very fundamentals of the “socialist welfare state,” the New Deal/Great Society legacy, not just ObamaCare or the 2009 stimulus package. Perry’s attack on that legacy in Fed Up was a lot more direct and visceral.
But with polls showing resistance to cuts in (much less abolition of) Social Security and Medicare being very unpopular even among rank-and-file Republicans (a broader subset of voters than likely caucus and primary participants), Perry’s stance is also perilous. You’d figure, however, that rivals like Romney would let Democrats and the news media focus attention on Perry’s radical views. That he did so himself at so early an opportunity tells us a lot about Team Romney’s sense of urgency.
Perry’s tack on the subject is now also pretty clear. He won’t take back what he said in Fed Up. But he will promise to take the edge off his attacks on Social Security and Medicare by focusing on the “Ponzi scheme” aspect of the former program–i.e., its current solvency–instead of his criticism of its original design and basic moral character. And he’ll also promise not to change the two programs for current and near-term beneficiaries on grounds that they have already planned on them.
“Grandfathering” entitlements for people over 55 or so while suggesting they are socialist abominations is a very old and transparently cynical conservative tactic. It was a feature of George W. Bush’s failed 2005 Social Security partial privatization effort, and of Ryan’s proposals for both of the big programs. Up until now, it hasn’t worked to tamp down fearful opposition among seniors–even very conservative seniors who don’t quite understand why we can’t just eliminate “welfare” for shiftless poor people and stay away from retirement programs that are a reward for a virtuous lifetime of working and saving.
We are about to find out if the generational warfare characteristics of contemporary U.S. politics have advanced to the point where at least conservative seniors will take Rick Perry up on his offer to gut entitlements for younger Americans while holding old folks harmless, and ignore his rather obvious feeling that anyone receiving such benefits is a parasite. If that happens, then Perry will become a maximum hero to those conservative activists and opinion-leaders of all ages who are determined to make the right-wing uprising of the last few years an attack on three-quarters-of-a-century of “socialist” policymaking.
If conservative seniors (and younger Republicans who are only interested in retaking power and repealing Obama’s initiatives) instead respond positively to Romney’s efforts to label Perry as too extreme on entitlements, then we’ll know that there are indeed limits to the rightward movement of the GOP at this juncture of history. I would not put big money on this proposition, however, particularly if it depends on a messenger like Mitt Romney.
Either way, it’s becoming obvious that the 2012 cycle is not just a referendum on Barack Obama, but on the New Deal and Great Society. And that’s a referendum Democrats ought to be able to win.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Since the last full-scale debate in Iowa, Rick Perry’s entrance into the Republican nomination contest and rapid ascension in the polls has been remarkable. The last two national surveys of Republicans show him opening up a double-digit lead over Mitt Romney, and edging up into the high thirties overall. The latest poll from Iowa gives him a double-digit lead over Straw Poll winner Michele Bachmann. The latest poll from South Carolina shows him beating second-place candidate Romney by better than a two-to-one margin. Most shockingly, a new poll in Nevada has him leading Romney in that Mormon-rich state long considered to be Mitt’s ultimate citadel. So will anyone in this suddenly endangered GOP field go after him in tonight’s debate at the Reagan Library?
Actually, one candidate already is: Ron Paul, whose campaign is buying national television time, possibly even during the debate, to run an ad contrasting his endorsement of Ronald Reagan in 1980 with Perry’s endorsement of Al Gore in 1988. It’s a clever use of the Reagan hook, and it relies on the fact that few of today’s Republican primary voters have any reason to know or remember that Al Gore was generally considered the most conservative Democrat in the 1988 field, making him a natural favorite for Perry, who was still a year or so away from his conversion to the GOP.
Paul’s gambit provides a reminder of the occasional significance of candidates who don’t have a realistic chance to win the nomination: They can go after candidates who do in ways that attract attention and even move votes. And while most lesser candidates lack the kind of financial resources to fill the airwaves with campaign ads, they get serious exposure during the endless series of debates, where they are free to wreck havoc. Aside from Ron Paul, Rick Santorum is always game for an attack on first-tier candidates like Perry and Romney for their alleged lack of interest in the cause of outlawing abortion. And Newt Gingrich, who has even less to lose than Santorum, is ready to pounce whenever a candidate or a questioner says anything he considers stupid.
“Real” candidates, on the other hand, would prefer to let the small fry do the dirty work for them, unless the attack involves a powerful issue where the attacker might directly harvest votes from the attackee. It would therefore not be too surprising to see Michele Bachmann go after Rick Perry on immigration tonight, an issue many consider to be his Achilles’ heel among conservatives, and a potential wedge issue in Iowa where Bachmann is battling to keep up with Perry. Another highly possible line of attack might come from Mitt Romney, who has already done a drive-by on Perry’s lack of private-sector experience, which is a simple way of undermining the Texan’s otherwise potent “job-creation” record among conservatives who don’t believe government can do anything to promote economic growth.
A tougher challenge for Perry’s rivals, however, involves the potentially toxic comments on Social Security and Medicare he (or an impolitic ghostwriter) made in his recent book Fed Up. As Newt Gingrich painfully learned when he criticized Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals on the early campaign trail, there is zero percentage right now for a Republican candidate to go to the left of anyone else on “entitlement reform.” While it may be true that Perry’s remarks could hurt him in a general election, his GOP rivals see little room to exploit the situation. The same is true of potential criticisms of Perry’s economic record in Texas. His opponents would all be pleased if doubts were raised about the “miracle” Perry supposedly wrought on jobs and growth. But since his formula of low taxes, low public spending, deregulation, and hostility to unions and environmentalists is conservative gospel these days, they don’t want to be anywhere near a microphone when blasphemy is uttered about its effectiveness.
All in all, the odds of major clashes between candidates tonight–other than those involving Ron Paul, who is not only dishing it out, but whose “anti-militarist” foreign policy views offer a target-rich environment for more conventional conservatives–may be dampened by the simple fact of where the debate is taking place. Aside from their desire to let someone else wield the cudgels, the candidates know that any attack in Simi Valley will be sure to draw a rebuke based on Reagan’s supposed “Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Any Fellow Republican.”
But the candidates would do well to remember that Reagan himself was known to throw an elbow now and then during his 1976 and 1980 presidential nomination campaigns. For Perry’s part, the new front-runner seems to enjoy a rhetorical barroom fight. His remarkable rise all but ensures that it’s only a matter of time before his rivals give him a chance to rumble.