August 25, 2011 09:13 PM UTC

Perry Rockets To Ken Buck-Style Prominence

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• by: Colorado Pols

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via McClatchy–as of today, it’s Rick Perry’s race to lose.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry emerged as the Republican front-runner for president in a major national poll Wednesday as he prepared to embark on a multi-city fundraising tour in his home state next week.

Perry was favored by 29 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the latest Gallup poll, compared with 17 percent for former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Lake Jackson was third with 13 percent, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota came in fourth with 10 percent.

Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, entered the race for the Republican nomination on Aug. 13 and immediately went on a weeklong campaign trip through Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina before returning to Texas to shift into fundraising mode.

But as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake writes today, it’s a long and rocky road for the come-lately GOP frontunner Perry. Recent history, anyway, isn’t on the late entrant’s side:

Ever since Perry got into the race nearly two weeks ago (it’s only been two weeks?), this idea has been bandied about by political observers and strategists who question whether there’s much substance behind the Rick Perry boomlet.

That plot thickened Thursday after Gallup showed, as with Clark and Thompson, Perry has sprinted out of the gate and gobbled up a double-digit lead nationally over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, leading him 29 percent to 17 percent.

Gallup polling around the same time in 2007 showed Thompson jumping up to 22 percent, and in 2003 the pollster had Clark leading the Democratic primary with that same number…

Here’s a longer-term omen, noted yesterday evening by Lynn Bartels at the Denver paper’s blog. 2010 GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck crashed and burned after a successful Republican primary based on a number of related factors we’ve explored in this space in detail. One of them was his response on Meet the Press to a question about homosexuality, regrettably comparing it to “alcoholism.” Apropos, Bartels points us to this story from Time’s Mark Benjamin:

The origin of homosexuality has become something of a political litmus test for presidential candidates, almost akin to their stance on abortion. Candidates are now expected to explain whether or not they believe homosexuality is a hard-wired predisposition. It’s an important distinction, and how candidates broach the issue can really matter. Just ask Ken Buck, who drew criticism when he compared same-sex attraction to alcoholism on NBC’s Meet the Press in October 2010 during his unsuccessful Senate run in Colorado.

Since leaping into the GOP presidential race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry hasn’t been asked if he thinks gays are born or made. But in a little-noticed passage in his first book, “On My Honor,” a encomium on the Boy Scouts published in 2008, Perry also drew a parallel between homosexuality and alcoholism. “Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink,” he wrote. “And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.”

Don’t worry, folks. That won’t trouble Republican primary voters in the least–it would have probably helped Fred Thompson with the GOP base in back in 2007 to have said something like this. The problem, as it was for Ken Buck, comes after.