Memo para Romney sobre cómo enfrentar a Perry

Bill Galston, de The New Republic, escribe un memorandum público para Mitt Romney:

Perry is a mortal threat to your candidacy. What should you do?

It will be tempting to keep on doing what you’ve been doing. After all, you’re comfortable with it, and you’ve gotten good at it. Some of your advisors will say that changing tactics now would give off an air of desperation. Others will say that your best course is to allow Perry—volatile, undisciplined, the distilled essence of Texas—to self-destruct. After all, he has already used the language of treason to denounce a third round of quantitative easing. Surely there are many more unguarded moments to come. So let’s let others help him take himself down, while we do as little as possible to antagonize people whose support we hope to get down the road.

Seductive, isn’t it? And dead wrong. Perry’s entrance into the race has highlighted your key weakness: People still don’t know who you are and what you stand for. They’re yearning for clear, strong, unapologetic leadership, but they don’t know where your red lines are. And efforts to placate opponents—such as fudging your long-held views on climate change—will only make matters worse.

But Perry’s emergence also gives you a unique opportunity to define yourself—against him. If you take it, you have a fighting chance of prevailing. If you duck it, you’ll lose, just as Tim Pawlenty did when he booted away his chance to take you on.

How should you do it? Well, to the extent that the Republican nominating contest is a rational process, it’s a search for a candidate with three characteristics. The nominee must be competent to serve as president, reliably conservative, and electable. You’re never going to be able to make your party believe that the longest-serving governor in Texas history isn’t fit to serve as chief executive. And despite some facts to the contrary, it won’t be any easier to challenge Perry’s conservative credentials. That narrows it down to one option: You must persuade the decisive portion of your party that Rick Perry is too extreme to be elected president.

Here’s your theme: Rick Perry wants to repeal the 20th century. I don’t. And neither do the American people.

That terrain of battle offers a target-rich environment. Where to begin? With Perry’s stated desire to repeal the 16th amendment? With his opposition to the 17th amendment, based on the odd view that taking the power to elect senators away from state legislators and giving it to the people of each state somehow amounts to a national power-grab? Maybe. But if I were you, I’d begin with Social Security.