In the traditionally sluggish Dog Days of late August (interrupted, of course, on the East Coast by the occasional earthquake or hurricane), wingnuts, like other Americans, have been a bit distracted from politics. But those answering the phone calls of ever-vigilant pollsters are building a wave of buzz for new presidential candidate Rick Perry for which there is little recent precedent. Perhaps it is just a reflection of long-simmering unhappiness with the candidate field, but in survey after survey, national and local, Perry is quickly moving ahead of not only the Star of Ames Michele Bachmann, but also long-time front-runner Mitt Romney. Five national polls taken since August 15 show Perry up over Romney by margins ranging from six to thirteen points. Two polls of Iowa Republicans taken during the same period show Perry edging out Bachmann, even though the Texan skipped the Iowa GOP Straw Poll and has appeared in the state exactly once. Two new polls in South Carolina show Perry trouncing the field; one has Perry up 23 points over Romney and 29 points over Bachmann. Even in Mitt Romney’s stronghold of New Hampshire, Perry is rapidly moving into serious contention. Where available, poll internals typically show Perry racing past Bachmann among Tea Party conservatives, and holding his own against Romney with more conventional conservatives and moderates alike.

It’s unclear at this point whether the various controversies already surrounding Perry—from his published views on the New Deal and the Great Society to questions about his intelligence—are being brushed off by Republican voters or simply haven’t sunk in. But the reining question in the conservative chattering classes is whether his rivals—and particularly Mitt Romney—should be panicking or beginning to go negative on him, or at least reconsidering their strategies.

The thinking in RomneyLand, it is being reported, is that Perry’s surge in the polls is likely to abate somewhat on its own, and that MSM scrutiny of the Texan will also take a toll. Perry is also gaffe-prone, and doesn’t have a reputation as a particularly good debater (there will be three televised candidate debates in September alone). The main trouble for Team Romney, however, is strategic timing. One nightmare scenario is that Perry will trounce the field in Iowa, giving him enough of a bounce to run a strong second in New Hampshire and then build up an invincible head of steam going into South Carolina and then other southern states. Uncertainty over the primary calendar is a big issue as well. If a Romney-friendly state like Michigan manages to move up to the early stages of the contest as it did in 2008, he can perhaps stick to his original game-plan. But if, say, Georgia and Florida wind up holding primaries the week after South Carolina, then the risk of a Perry sweep would go up considerably. In theory, the Perry-Bachmann competition over the hard-core conservative vote in Iowa could create an opening for Romney in that state; a Romney victory upset there followed by a win in New Hampshire could leave him in a very good position. But this “quick kill” approach is obviously the strategy that blew up on Romney—and for that matter, Hillary Clinton—in 2008.

Romney has a number of more immediate trials to overcome during the Labor Day weekend. He’s the featured speaker at a Tea Party Express event in New Hampshire, a development that has spurred a formal protest by the rival tea party group FreedomWorks, which has long harbored an animus towards Romney.

The same weekend all the major candidates will face an early and potentially difficult test: a command-performance inquisition in South Carolina by a conservative group that has joined forces with ideological commissar Jim DeMint to quiz the hopefuls on various matters of conservative orthodoxy. Most of the media attention on the event has focused on Romney’s initial refusal to participate on specious-sounding scheduling grounds, followed by his sudden decision yesterday that he would, after all, come to Columbia to pay homage to DeMint. But there is another subplot to the story that could become important: one of DeMint’s co-inquisitors will be Iowa Rep. Steve King, who has yet to make a presidential endorsement despite his close relationship with Michele Bachmann. King rivals Tom Tancredo as a right-wing firebrand on the immigration issue, where Rick Perry’s record is significantly out of line with prevailing conservative views. It wouldn’t be that surprising to see King hold the Texan’s feet to the fire on this issue and then sadly decide he has to back someone else back home in Iowa.

Speaking of Labor Day weekend, and of Iowa, there’s all sorts of confusion surrounding the long-anticipated appearance of Sarah Palin at a big Tea Party gathering just outside of Des Moines on Saturday. This event was where a lot of Palin-watchers originally thought she might either launch or definitively foreswear a presidential campaign. Team Palin has thrown cold water on that assumption (saying the deadline for an announcement of her plans is the end of September, not Labor Day), and now, her appearance is “on hold” due to conflicts with local Tea Party planners. One report is that Palin and her staff are fed up with the vacillation of event organizers over a speaking role—offered, withdrawn, and then reoffered—for former Delaware Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, who is fresh from one of the more disastrous book launch tours in recent memory. In any event, Palin will do at least one public event in Iowa this weekend, followed quickly by another in New Hampshire. But the ranks of those expecting her to run for president in 2012 are thinning rapidly.

Photo credit: Aaron Webb

With the end of the brief, Weekly Standard-driven boomlet for a Paul Ryan presidential candidacy, it’s increasingly certain that the 2012 GOP presidential field is set. Yes, there are still some observers who believe (with hope or fear) that Sarah Palin is going to announce a 2012 bid in Iowa at a big Tea Party rally over the Labor Day weekend. But Team Palin’s abrasive push back against a Karl Rove prediction that this would happen is a pretty clear indicator that it won’t, unless St. Joan of the Tundra really enjoys misdirection.

So there are by most accounts three viable candidates—Perry, Romney and Bachmann—with Ron Paul formidable enough to wreak some occasional havoc, and perhaps someone else—most likely Rick Santorum, possibly Herman Cain—having enough juice in Iowa to affect other candidates’ performances at the margins. Perry is the “it” candidate of the moment, and fans of Bachmann are praying that her candidacy can survive his current surge in the national and early-state polls.

Meanwhile, Perry himself is negotiating a pretty interesting tightrope that shows both the power and perils of wingnuttery. On the one hand, it’s important that he provide a credible challenge to Bachmann for the support of serious Tea Party and Christian Right activists; perhaps his camp even thinks they can drive her from the race before voting begins by pushing down her poll numbers and drying up her money sources. This would explain the savagely carnivorous nature of his early speeches, and certain other maneuvers like his decision to sign onto the Susan B. Anthony List’s highly prescriptive anti-abortion pledge, which Mitt Romney declined to do. That pledge, it should be noted, would prohibit Perry from appointing his 2008 presidential favorite, Rudy Giuliani, to any cabinet post with an influence on abortion policy.

But at the same time, Perry is having some problems generated by wingnut-pleasing passages in his 2010 book, Fed Up, most notably an expression of interest in repealing the Sixteenth Amendment (which made possible the establishment of a federal income tax), and exceedingly hostile remarks about the constitutionality and morality of Social Security. Indeed, he’s already back-peddling pretty fast on Social Security, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

His communications director, Ray Sullivan, said [last] Thursday that he had “never heard” the governor suggest the program was unconstitutional. Not only that, Mr. Sullivan said, but “Fed Up!” is not meant to reflect the governor’s current views on how to fix the program.

Perry is also drawing unfriendly mainstream media attention for more conventional (among today’s conservatives, at least) sentiments denying man-made global climate change and treating evolution as a mere egghead theory. But one Perry controversy also shows how thoroughly previously unconventional views have become common among GOP elites. His attack on Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernancke made some Republican opinion-leaders nervous on grounds that a potential POTUS should not be assaulting the independence of the Fed. Hardly anyone questioned the underlying policy stance Perry embraced, suggesting a Ron-Paul-style deflationary monetary policy in the midst of a deep recession.

As Perry’s audition as a possible chief executive continues, the broader question is whether the specific views of Republicans matter a whole lot to anyone outside the hothouse atmosphere of conservative activists. A new Gallup survey testing the incumbent against Romney, Perry, Paul and Bachmann among registered voters showed remarkably little variation. Romney, predictably, did best, edging Obama 48-46. But Gallup also showed Perry tied with Obama at 47-47, with Paul only trailing by two points (47-45) and Bachmann only trailing by four (48-44).

Those who wonder why the Obama re-election team is reportedly planning a scorched-earth campaign criticizing the eventual Republican nominee should stare at those numbers a while. A “comparative” campaign is not simply essential in order to prevent the election from becoming a referendum on life in the Obama Era at a time when “wrong-track” sentiments are extraordinarily high. Perry, Paul and Bachmann, at least, offer a treasure trove of oppo research opportunities that any Democratic candidate would be foolish not to exploit.

But it’s equally interesting to wonder if findings like Gallup’s will convince conservative activists there is no electoral risk attached to their own choice of a candidate. If so—if, in other words, “electability” is not really a factor in so polarized an electorate–you can expect them to indulge themselves ideologically without much in the way of inhibition.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Last week was a pretty good week for hard-core conservative ideologues in terms of their domination of the Republican Party. In the Fox News/Washington Examiner presidential candidates’ debate on Thursday night, every single would-be president on the stage—even Jon Huntsman—rejected a hypothetical deficit reduction deal involving a 10-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. At the same event, an extended exchange in which Tim Pawlenty went after Michele Bachmann for being a windy bomb-thrower who had never actually been able to accomplish anything in public life went pretty well for the windy bomb-thrower. Meanwhile, the discussion of cultural issues featured differences of opinion that ranged from hard-core opposition to same-sex marriage (with the exception of the pariah Huntsman) and abortion to hard-core opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

At the Iowa GOP Straw Poll on Saturday, over half the votes were cast for two candidates generally considered to be minor fringe characters in the House Republican Caucus until quite recently, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul. Tim Pawlenty, who began his national political career calling for a Republican Party that would be amenable to the views and practical needs of Sam’s Club shoppers, ended his audition for Electable Conservative Alternative to Mitt Romney with an ignominious third-place finish. Given his world-class organization in Iowa, T-Paw’s poor showing in this test of organizing strength indicated his failure to make the sale to serious conservatives, and he dropped out of the race the very next morning. Other than Bachmann and Paul, the candidate with the most to boast about on Saturday was Rick Santorum, who managed to get past Herman Cain to finish fourth and keep alive a campaign focused almost entirely on representing the most extreme right-wing cultural views (Santorum’s big moment in the Thursday debate was probably his passionate defense of a ban on abortions where the woman in question had been raped).

Bachmann’s narrow win over Paul in the Straw Poll was significant in Wingnut World for three reasons. First, it confirmed Paul’s continued marginalization in the GOP because of his highly unorthodox views on foreign policy and defense (in the debate, Paul spent an extraordinary amount of time defending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and went all Chomsky in attacking the CIA’s meddling in Iran in the 1950s, not a major concern of conservative Republicans then or now). Second, it lifted Bachmann into the top tier of candidates moving towards the actual delegate-selection contests next year. And third, it confirmed the relevance of wingnut-friendly Iowa in the nominating process; a Paul win would have called that relevance into question.

Meanwhile, down in South Carolina, the long-awaited announcement of Rick Perry’s presidential candidacy further tilted the field to the right. His speech, delivered at the annual gathering of devotees of the fervent take-no-prisoners conservative website RedState.com, was a masterpiece of the rawest ideological red meat. Perhaps the most significant moment was when Perry slipped into a tirade about high taxes a nasty comment about the injustice of low-to-moderate-income Americans owing no federal income taxes while “we” are expected to pay more. The desire to raise taxes on the poor is one of the more ironic preoccupations of Tea Party activists, reflecting the reverse class warfare sentiments made so plain in the foundational “rant” by Rick Santelli that launched their movement back in 2009.

Bachmann and Perry, both major figures in the iconography of both the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right, now represent two-thirds of the viable Republican presidential field for 2012. Realization of that fact has some of the more Establishment-minded Republicans a bit panicked. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat looked at the field on Sunday and didn’t like what he saw:

No one doubts Romney’s intelligence or competence, but he has managed to run for president for almost five years without taking a single courageous or even remotely interesting position. The thinking person’s case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn’t believe a word he says.

But his phoniness would remain a weakness even if he won the presidency. He’s a born compromiser pretending to be a hard-liner, and the hard-liners know it—which means he would enter the Oval Office with conservative knives already sharpened and ready for his back.

Rick Perry has many of the qualities that Romney seems to lack: backbone, core convictions, a killer instinct and a primal understanding of the right-wing electorate. He also has the better story….

What Perry doesn’t have, though, is the kind of moderate facade that Americans look for in their presidents. He’s the conservative id made flesh, with none of the postpartisan/uniter-not-a-divider spirit that successful national politicians usually cultivate.

And Douthat didn’t even address Bachmann’s even more strident stance. He concluded his column with that most thread-bare of Republicans cries for help: a plea to Chris Christie to repudiate months of disavowals of candidacy by jumping into the race. Other elite malcontents are promoting a candidacy by the very epitome of conservative fiscal orthodoxy, Paul Ryan, a more reliable figure than Romney who is also more seemly than Perry.

Aside from these desperate measures to add to the field the big debate in the chattering classes right now about the Republican nominating contest is whether it’s effectively a Romney-Perry contest or if Bachmann can remain viable by winning Iowa. Either way, the pressure will remain on Romney to perpetually prove his conservative bona fides, and the most GOP “moderates” can hope for, as Douthat observes, is that he’s lying through his teeth.

Any doubt that the “movement conservative” conquest of the GOP has now been consummated should pretty much be consigned to the trash bin. The main question now is whether conservatives prefer their presidential candidate to be cool and shifty, or raw and shrill.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey