“The Teavangelicals Are Coming!”

James C. Moore at CNN is getting very anxious, indeed:

The big brains gathered east of the Hudson and Potomac Rivers believe that Mitt Romney is the candidate to beat. But they are unable to hear what Rick Perry is saying. The Christian prayer rally in Houston was a very loud proclamation to fundamentalists and Teavangelicals, which said, “I am not a Mormon.” The far right and Christian fundamentalists have an inordinate amount of influence in the GOP primary process and, regardless of messages of inclusion, very few of them will vote for a Mormon.

“We think a them Mormons as bein’ in kind of a cult,” one of the Houston rally attendees told me. “I couldn’t vote for one a them when we got a real Christian like Governor Perry runnin’.”

Perry, of course, can’t come right out and print bumper stickers that say, “Rick Perry — 2012 — Not a Mormon.” But he doesn’t have to. He’s wearing his faith like a power tie while Romney stays quiet as a tabernacle mouse on the topic of religion. Romney has business experience and intellect that are not on Perry’s resume’ but he is from “Massatoositts,” (Webster’s Texas Edition, see also “Massachusetts”), and Texans love to kick their political boots into New Englanders’ squishy parts. Perry is about to remind the tea partiers and fundamentalists that Romney created a state health care plan, (the horror, affordable health care for everyone), believes global warming is real, and has a troubling history for conservatives on the matters of abortion and gay marriage.

So much for Mitt.

Michele Bachmann, who is from Iowa, and is Perry in Prada, has the same appeal among Teavangelicals. Her husband’s reparative gay therapy sessions, the Newsweek cover and a few speeches that were not reality based will, eventually, make even the GOP primary voters realize she is bound for the desert and not the Promised Land.

Bachman will run close to Perry in Iowa but will disappear into the snows of New Hampshire where religious fervor isn’t exactly considered a positive attribute. In South Carolina, Perry’s money, image and support will become overwhelming.

Romney and Bachmann are the only serious impediments to the Perry nomination. Ron Paul, who makes more sense than any crazy person to ever run for public office, has never been able to expand his cult to the mainstream.

Herman Cain is too brutally honest and lacking political experience, and Tim Pawlenty, what’s-his-face-from-Minnesota, suffers from the heartbreak of ineffectuality.

Fueled only by speculation that he might announce, Perry became the putative front-runner (heard that word at a fancy Washington restaurant and thought it was cool). Because presidential politics tend to be more visceral than intellectual, Perry’s coyote-killer good looks, $2,000 hand-tooled cowboy boots, supernova smile and Armani suits, combined with podium skills to embellish the mythology of Texas, all will create a product Americans will want to believe and buy.

He then goes on to spin a fantasy about Perry getting Governor Palin onto his ticket as the Veep.

And then they win, the country is destroyed, and Moore wakes up screaming, “no, no, no!”

The fear is palpable, and it’s amusing as heck. So, go. The schadenfreude is simply too delicious to miss out on.

One thing that supports at least some of what he’s saying: the unemployment rate is bumping against the ceiling, and has been doing so for a long, long time. As I’ve said before, if a Republican were in the White House we’d be reading article after article that demonstrated the human cost of this long-term unemployment—the families who have moved back in with their grandparents, the men in their mid-50s who are newly laid off and may never work again, the kids just out of college with no prospects, the minority families who were finally starting to catch a break and land in the middle class—until the layoffs.

We aren’t reading those profiles in the Los Angeles Times or The New York Times.

But we all know these people. Everyone in America does.

And we’re angry about what has happened to them.

UPDATE: Stanley Kurtz discusses the need for Perry to get specific about entitlements, and perhaps endorse the Ryan plan. And Memeorandum has more on the growing, inevitable Perry-Romney rivalry.

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