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Perry carries on

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We began the day thinking Gov. Rick Perry was headed back to Texas to reassess his presidential run after his distant fifth-place finish in last night’s Iowa caucuses — meaning we began the day thinking Perry was about to call it quits. When a politician says he’s reassessing his place in a campaign, his campaign usually is done.

Then around 10:30 this morning Perry tweeted “Here we come South Carolina!!!” As I write this, it’s uncertain what some members of his staff knew about this decision, but, apparently, Perry’s still in the race. And emphatically so. Three exclamation points prove it.

So the campaign obituaries and analyses about how Perry’s debate performances sank his White House hopes are on hold or in some cases will have to be rewritten once South Carolina completes what currently appears inevitable.

Before he reversed course about his campaign, I was trying to think of the one thing I learned about Perry from his foray into national politics that I found most surprising. And this is what I kept coming back to:

He plays the piano. Who knew? As he told Parade magazine: “I played piano for seven years. But I broke my arm really bad unloading horses when I was 16, so I had to stop. Had it not been for the accident, I’d probably be playing piano in a little bar here in New York.”

(And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar / And say, “Man, what are you doin’ here?”)

He’s a big fan of Beethoven, whose music is a prominent part of his iPod. And Perry’s favorite movie is “Immortal Beloved,” a 1994 Beethoven biopic starring Gary Oldman.

Other than the surprise of his piano-man dreams, Perry’s campaign has reinforced what was clear in his 2010 book “Fed Up!”: For all his true-believer talk about the Constitution, Perry would like nothing more than to change it … repeatedly.

He has said he supports amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, ban abortion, allow prayer in school, require balanced budgets, end lifetime tenure for federal judges, allow Congress to override Supreme Court decisions, and repeal the 16th (income tax) and 17th (direct election of senators) amendments.

It’s a unique way of expressing his fidelity to the Constitution, but fitting of today’s conservatives. And now Perry has decided to keep going in a presidential race colored by candidates whose expressions of conservatism strain the word’s definition.


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