UPDATE:
Rick Perry has just made it official — and, finally, commonsensical. At an emotional news conference in North Charleston, S.C. Rick Perry announced that he is dropping out of the race (“suspending the campaign”) and is endorsing a “redeemable” Newt Gingrich.
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A few days ago, I “postscripted” the announcement that Jon Huntsman intended to drop out of the Republican presidential race with a personal note expressing sadness at that development since “Jon Hunstman is perhaps the only GOP presidential candidate who might have gotten my vote.”
As, this morning, the number of GOP presidential candidates still slugging it out will shrink to four, I will use a short preface to say that this latest departure by an all-hat-and-no-cattle cowboy who should have never entered the fray in the first place deserves nothing more and nothing less than a relieved “good riddance.”
And now for the details:
Rick Perry’s hometown newspaper, the Austin American Statesman, has just announced that “Rick Perry will end his presidential campaign today”:
[Perry] will endorse former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Perry has called a press conference for 11 a.m. Eastern time to announce his decision.
After poor finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, polls have shown Perry heading for another poor finish in the South Carolina primary on Saturday. Dropping out now allows him to avoid that embarrassment and skip tonight’s GOP debate.
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Perry has been facing calls to drop out so that conservatives who are unhappy with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney could rally behind one candidate.
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Perry will end his campaign in the same state where it began in August. He launched with considerable fanfare, expected to be the chief rival to Romney, and his raised $17 million in his first seven weeks as a candidate — a stout amount.
But he derailed his campaign with one mistake after another. Suffering from a lack of sleep caused by the lingering effects of his July back surgery, Perry botched an attack on Romney in a late-September debate in Orlando. That night, he also said it would be heartless to oppose his law allowing some children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition.
The problems continued throughout the fall. In a bizarre New Hampshire speech that went viral, Perry was overly giddy, leading many to wonder whether he was drunk. (He wasn’t.) In a series of interviews over several days, he said it was fun to ask President Barack Obama about his birth certificate. And — perhaps most significantly — in a November debate, he forgot the name of one of the federal departments he proposed to close. That moment, which Perry concluded by sheepishly saying “oops,” will be remembered as one of the worst candidate moments of the 2012 campaign.
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