Despite Perry's poor debate performances and his current whipping boy status among Republican pundits as well as Fox News, I am not one who thinks this guy is out of the running for winning the Republican Primary. 

Perry's handlers made the choice to start Perry the Pitcher in a Playoff series his first week out of the minors and he has lost his first three games. It's of course 20/20 hindsight but his handlers should not have made him the immediate target of the other "contenders" but should have had him play nice with the others for a while and stick to attacking Obama until he got used to the national stage. Maybe they suspected such attacks on Perry's vulnerabilities and concluded that the Alpha Male ploy was the best shot. He certainly throws his chest out and bends his knees appropriately. 

Perry's handlers certainly understood his retail appeal to the Tea Party base. But apparently they not only underestimated Willard Romney's line delivery but even the damage a lightweight like Bachmann could inflict upon Perry re vulnerable issues like "government injections of young girls". After Perry's fumble on the "ya'll ain't got no heart" statement, Romney had a great comeback the next day: "It's not that we don't have a heart, but that you have to have both a heart and a brain." Pretty devastating, but shows a flavor of what Perry's position on college tuition might have been in the first place. If Romney had come up that quip all by himself on the stage he might have won the entire Primary with a grand slam right then and there. 

Viscerally, I think the Tea Party still wants Perry, and I could be wrong but I discount the straw poll vote for Cain. If Perry can find a pivot point I think he can make a comeback. Chris Hayes had what I thought was a good analysis of where Romney and Perry stand. He said that Romney now has Perry bracketed on both the left and the right: in the further debates Romney will run to the left of Perry on Social Security, thus appealing to Independents, and will run to the right of him on immigration, mitigating a lot of Perry's support from the right wing. Obviously Perry needs not only to change the subject but to find some Romney vulnerability other than Romneycare.

One of the things I don't understand about Perry is where his financial backing is coming from, particularly because Romney seems to have the Eastern Establishment Capitalist crowd locked up. Despite his clumsiness my guess is that Perry still owns a slug of the Tea Party base--but I'm not sure the contributions there are enough to sustain him in a long Primary, particularly when Romney begins to attack him with advertising. And what about the Koch Brothers, who I assume love Perry. How distinct are they from Romney's Wall Street investment banking backers and will they keep Perry going? And is there something in the wings with Rove, Bush, et al.?

In any case, I wonder if Perry doesn't have a shot at adopting the populist pitchfork stance against the bank crowd. Not knowing his backers, such an attack might be impossible. But the anti-bank sentiment has yet to be tapped by any candidate, Republican or Democrat. As we are almost back to square one on the bank crisis, the economy is struggling, and unemployment is obviously stuck where it is, why not blame the country's ills on the banks who are obviously being coddled by Obama, and more importantly, by Obama-lite -- Willard Romney.

Of course, much of what Perry does will depend upon whether he can still muster enough Tea Party support to get him through Iowa and South Carolina, and move directly into the South.  I assume there will be polls next week and it will be interesting to see if that 4% advantage over Romney has been wiped out. Perhaps Perry's actual voter support will be Precipitous but it might be stronger than what seems to be the conventional wisdom following his last debate.