Perry's Iowa Math

Gov. Perry: Aiming for Ames? (Photo by Richard Whittaker)

So how do you run in the Iowa GOP's presidential straw poll without running in the Iowa presidential straw poll? If you're Gov Rick Perry, it's simple: Let someone else run a write-in campaign for you.

Perry will not be appearing on the ballot for Aug. 13 straw poll in Ames (the first, and possibly most ridiculous, attempt by the national press to read the entrails on GOP front runners.) However, since Perry has not actually declared yet, he does not get his name printed up. So how to grab some post-Ames headlines?

Enter failed New York GOP senate hopeful David Malpass, whose conservative GrowPAC is running radio ads in the Hawkeye state. "I'm appalled at Washington's out of control debt," Malpass rumbles, before gushing that "Governor Perry has a proven track record of controlling spending and creating jobs."

It's a pretty smart move, getting a write-in boost by proxy. If Perry polls below Mickey Mouse, he can always say, "Well, I was not on the ballot." If he picks up a few percent, than he can add that to the list of people he says are "calling" him to run.

But who is this new chief drum-beater he's picked up? And does anyone know if they met up during Perry's recent extended trip to woo the Big Apple's GOP?

Malpass generally referred to as an economist. But wait. He is not just –an– economist. He is a former chief economist. After working in the both the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, he filled that role at failed investment bank Bear Stearns. That's the same Bear Stearns that was at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco and which, in 2008, went cap-in-hand to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for a $25 billion bail-out.

So why is Perry hanging around with the economist behind an August 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Don't Panic About the Credit Market," authored just as his firm was liquidating hedge funds? (At the time, Wall Street blog The Big Picture called the article "astonishingly inappropriate" and said, "If there is a more imperfect messenger for telling everyone to 'please calm down' than ANYONE from Bear Stearns, I am at a loss to imagine who that might be.")

Since Perry's economic policy has been a heady mix of "steal jobs from other states with a thick slathering of incentives" and "all jobs, no matter how minimum wage, are created equal," expect that to be another issue getting serious scrutiny by the national press corps. Same story on his foreign policy: Aside from hanging around with suspected conspirator to murder Pervez Musharraf, Perry has also apparently been hanging around with some of the same Neo-Cons that got the US so deeply mired in Iraq.

Of course, there are still real questions about the seriousness of Perry's candidacy. With less than two weeks before his 'pray for votes' gathering, The Response, Perry's people are telling the Houston Chronicle that they still don't know if he'll be speaking or not.

And how good is the Ames poll? In the five held since 1979, Amesians correctly predicted the winner of the GOP nomination twice (Bob Dole in 1995 and George W. Bush in 1999.) It's not even that great a predictor of the winner in the statewide caucus: It got Bush right in 1999, and Bush Sr. in 1979, plus a tie between caucus winner Dole and Phil Gramm in 1995. So a 40% hit rate on presidential nominees, and it only gauges Iowa voters correctly half the time. No wonder Perry's in no rush to be included.