What the Heck Is Rick Perry Talking About?

Have fun attempting to decipher these excerpts from Rick Perry's speech to a conservative group in New Hampshire last Friday: 

It's a gotcha-reel, obviously and Huffington Post political reporter Jon Ward notes that although the speech was "unusually expressive," these selected clips are not perfectly representative of the speech as a whole.

They're still a big problem for Perry, and probably the chief reason for his rapid decline in the polls. The issue for the Texas governor's campaign is that clips like this one seem to be the rule rather than the exception. In unscripted debates, he can barely manage to repeat practiced, prepared attacks cogently. And even in scripted speeches, like this one, he often comes across as loopy and incoherent. 

One might protest that the campaign season puts far too much emphasis on a candidate's ability to speak in polished soundbites. After all, the president's job is to be a leader and a manager. That's true to some extent, and I've heard from a number of reliable sources that as governor, Perry's strength is administrative delegation: He brings in competent people and lets them work. That's probably fine as governor, even in a big state like Texas. But to a much greater extent part of the job of president is to be a sort of ever-present face and frontman for the good old U-S-of-A, both internally and externally. It's a communications position as much as a management gig, and Perry isn't exactly inspiring confidence in his ability to do that part of the job. 

Read Reason's Rick Perry candidate profile here.