In a popular 1960s movie, an aged President recalls the good old days when “we poured God over everything like ketchup.” That line elicited a laugh after John F. Kennedy moved a new generation into the White House and promised to send a man to the moon.

Today, ketchup will be back on the American political menu as Texas Governor Rick Perry declares his presidential candidacy in South Carolina and heads for Iowa and New Hampshire two weeks after holding a Christian prayer rally in a stadium back home.

Perry’s blurring of the line between church and state comes into the 2012 campaign with bundles of money from so many Super PACs that it has inspired an Iowa commercial by Stephen Colbert’s parody of the process.

But other GOP candidates won’t be laughing as the man who succeeded George W. Bush as governor of Texas enters the contest with convictions that make his predecessor look like a centrist. Perry was an early idol of the Tea Party when he delighted them with talk of Texas seceding from the Union if Washington didn’t mend its ways.

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