Is Perry All Hat and No Cattle?

Why did Perry's entry matter?

Rick Perry entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in August 2011 with timing that could not have been better calibrated if it had been engineered — arriving precisely as the party's establishment wing was growing alarmed at the prospect of Michele Bachmann as a credible contender and as the inevitable Mitt Romney looked increasingly like a candidate his own party didn't actually want.

Perry offered what Romney couldn't: a Texas drawl, evangelical credentials, a record of job creation that he could articulate in plain language, and the physical ease of someone who had been running statewide campaigns in a major state for a decade. His entrance briefly transformed the race.

Was there substance behind the swagger?

The question that almost immediately followed the entrance was whether there was substance behind the presentation. The phrase "all hat and no cattle" — a Texas expression for people whose swagger exceeds their substance — attached to Perry almost as soon as he became a national figure, applied by critics who found the style familiar and looked past it for evidence that he could sustain a presidential campaign.

What did the early evidence show?

The evidence during his first weeks was not uniformly reassuring. Perry was a skilled retail politician and a disciplined campaigner in the settings Texas had prepared him for. He was less comfortable in the format of nationally televised debates, where the premium on quick, precise recall of policy detail exposed gaps that a well-managed campaign could overlook in statewide races but could not survive at the presidential level.

The "oops" moment that would eventually become the signature of his campaign — his failure in a November debate to remember the third federal agency he planned to eliminate — was still months away. But the early signs that something might give were already visible to careful observers.