June 05, 2015 01:27 PM UTC

Welcome To The Clown Car, Rick Perry

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• by: Colorado Pols

CNN:

This time, Rick Perry has nowhere to go but up.

Four years after his first presidential campaign was crushed by the weight of his debate gaffe and stump speech mishaps, the governor who spent 14 years presiding over Texas launched his second bid for the Republican nomination on Thursday.

“I’m running for the presidency of the United States,” Perry said at a sweltering rally in Addison, Texas, where the former governor and his guests on stage could be seen sweating profusely at the midday event…

Perry’s speech at Addison Airport outside Dallas — delivered without pause for more than 20 minutes even as sweat dripped down his face — focused primarily on foreign policy, which has been his calling card of late on the stump. His GOP competitors emerging from the U.S. Senate have looked down on the class of governors for lacking that foreign policy experience.

Rick Perry’s disastrous 2012 campaign may well have left him with “nowhere to go but up,” but it’s very tough to see things going better enough this year to make a difference. Rick Perry’s endorsement was worth approximately squat to Colorado gubernatorial loser Bob Beauprez last year, and Perry has few friends even in Texas after 14 long years of intraparty infighting and scandal as governor. If that wasn’t enough, Perry is still fighting a felony indictment by a grand jury over an alleged attempt to bully the state’s public integrity investigations office.

Our state is expected to factor heavily in everyone’s campaigns next year, so we expect Perry to move quickly to set up shop in Colorado. You might remember that in 2012, Perry’s Colorado chairman was none other than Rep. Mike Coffman–who praised Perry’s labeling of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” and sat quietly while Perry ran ads bemoaning the fact that gays can serve “openly” in the military. Neither of those messages we think would help either Perry or Coffman today.

We’ll be watching to see if New Perry® has learned anything from New Coffman®.