Belinda Kapaun came to the Republican presidential confab in Orlando last Thursday wearing a Rick Perry sticker. She was not wearing it Friday.
“He was my number one,” she said the morning after the FoxNews/Google presidential debate here.
Perry lost Kapaun with a weak performance marked by misstatements of fact, missed opportunities, and general incoherence. “When he was talking to Mitt Romney there was a part of that—if you printed it, I don’t think it even made sense,” she says.
Here’s the botched (and obviously prepared) attack on Romney that Kapaun was referring to:
I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it was before he was before the social programs from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against Roe v. Wade? Ah, he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare, and now he’s against it. I mean we’ll wait until tomorrow to see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.
Not strong. But it was Perry’s defending Texas’s policy of charging in-state college tuition to the children of illegal immigrants, and the insult he directed at the opponents of his position—“I don’t think you have a heart”—that proved decisive for Kapaun.
“He lost me with that one line.”
Myra Adams, a Florida media producer who worked on Republican presidential campaigns in Florida in 2004 and 2008, said that the energy and enthusiasm for Perry in the debate hall disappeared when he flubbed his attacks on Mitt Romney.
