For Rick Perry, The Beginning Of The End?

Politico is out with an excellent analysis of last night's GOP presidential debate and it faults Rick Perry for not being on his toes. It seems that Perry simply entered the campaign too late, and he's never really caught up. This is the Big Time and there's little or no margin for error.
Here's an excerpt from the column by Jonathan Martin and James Hohman:

Perry gave a foreign policy answer that offered no indication he’s thought about how to respond to threats against America, twice bobbled attacks on Mitt Romney'ss well-documented departures from conservative orthodoxy, called immigration hard-liners heartless and, in what was otherwise his best answer of the evening, stretched the truth in the course of delivering a well-rehearsed line about why he mandated pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against HPV.

A more seasoned candidate would be better informed on national security policy, fluent to the point of knowing by heart his chief opponent’s core vulnerabilities, and would never offend his party’s base with such a pointed attack. And a more sure-footed one would have recognized that he couldn’t get away with the claim that he issued an executive order on HPV after being “lobbied” by a cancer victim—because it has been publicly established that he met the victim only after he made the decision.

Click here to read the entire column.