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Opinion: Rick Perry campaign falls for flat

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A Texas friend tells me that the bumper-sticker saying was blowing around the Lone Star State a long time before people in the rest of the country recently began muttering it:

‘Gov. Rick Perry -- all hair and no cattle.’

Does Perry’s political CPR team, the one trying to get the Perry-for-President heartbeat started again, have much of a strategy for their candidate beyond ‘me too’ and, in the alternative, ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue’?

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Perry has been grappling with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in a ‘You’re nicer to illegal aliens than I am!’ ‘Nuh-uh, am not!’ match.

My L.A. Times colleague Noam Levey reported that Romney’s 2006 healthcare law -- the one President Obama says was the model for his healthcare overhaul -– included undocumented immigrants in coverage for Bay Staters who have no insurance. The language of the law explicitly bars illegal immigrants from getting certain health benefits but it doesn’t keep them from getting treated through the Health Safety Net.

That sent up a big yee-haw from the Perry campaign, because Romney had been chewing up on Perry for offering in-state university rates and publicly funded grants to students in the country illegally.

Now, when it comes to, well, trumping his competitors on the ‘me-too’ front, Perry breathed new hope into the birther crowd, telling Parade magazine coyly that ‘I have no reason to think’ that President Obama wasn’t born in this country, and then, ‘Well, I don’t have a definitive answer.’

This was after Perry broke bread with Donald Trump, a tete-a-tete during which I imagined the two would talk hair products. But evidently not. Here’s Perry’s latest vertigo-creating spin on his newborn birtherism, as told to CNBC:

It’s a good issue to keep alive. You know, Donald [Trump] has got to have some fun. It’s fun to poke him a little bit and say ‘Hey, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.’ I don’t have a clue about where the president -- and what this birth certificate says. But it’s also a great distraction. I’m not distracted by it.

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How many Rick Perrys are speaking here? It’s a good issue to keep alive ... it’s fun to poke at it ... but it’s a distraction. And the Texas governor who thinks President Obama’s policies are a disaster just wasted valuable minutes and inches of national ‘free media’ talking about something that’s a distraction, but it’s not distracting him?

And then there’s Perry’s latest me-too policy, a flat tax that’s flatter than Newt Gingrich’s, flatter than Herman Cain’s, flatter even than Herman Cain’s pizzas!

So don’t touch that dial. Maybe next we’ll hear that Perry’s Earth is even flatter than those other guys’ Earths, too.

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Perry doesn’t know whether Obama’s birth certificate is real

-- Patt Morrison

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