Perry is starting his comeback in Iowa

By Bryan Fischer

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Newt eventually is going to flame out. He was still supporting the individual health mandate as recently as May, 2011, and has been a worse flip-flopper than Romney on any number of other issues, ranging from the mandate to climate change to cap-and-trade to when human life begins. The only thing keeping his candidacy afloat right now is voter ignorance of his abysmal policy record.

Ron Paul has been beating Newt about the head and shoulders for his "serial hypocrisy," and he is exactly right to do so.

Rush has been complaining that conservatives shouldn't be criticizing other Republicans at this stage since the enemy is Obama. He's wrong about this, and by the way, violated his own tenet by going after Paul on his program yesterday.

But, as Abraham Lincoln observed, "Politics ain't bean-bag." I want to see the GOP candidates going after each other right now hammer and tongs. We are in the playoffs, and we are looking for a Super Bowl contender. I want each of them to bring their A-game and show us why they deserve to be the conservative standard-bearer.

If they leave the opposition bloodied and bruised, so much the better. We'll know who the strongest horse is to run against Obama in the big race. I want to see them go at it. Let it rip, and may the best man win.

Newt is essentially a big-government Republican. He loves government. He loves to tinker with it and come up with solutions that can only be implemented by government bureaucracies. He has supreme confidence in the wonderfulness of Newt to do what no one in history of the world has ever been able to do, make big government the servant rather than the master.

He has the unbridled faith in the magical power of government rarely found outside the Democratic Party and never found in the GOP base. Newt is essentially, as Michele Bachmann put it yesterday, a "frugal socialist."

For instance, Newt agrees that the EPA is a disaster. So rather than doing away with it, he wants to replace it with the "Environmental Solutions Agency," whatever that is. In other words, he wants to replace one government program with another one.

What he utterly fails to acknowledge is that there is no constitutional warrant whatsoever for an Environmental-Anything agency. None, zip, nada. Doesn't matter whether the enlightened Newt is in charge of it or not.

He's much like Democrats who love socialism and admit that is has failed wherever it has been tried, but only because the right people have not been in charge. Newt's like that: government can offer solutions; it never has in the past, he would agree, but only because I haven't been pulling the levers of power. Put me in charge, Newt says, and watch what government can do for you.

A Newt Gingrich presidency, in other words, would be a nightmare for genuine conservatives.

So Newt wants to build a bigger, better government, which is hardly a conservative proposition. Rick Perry has been the only voice so far who is talking about taking a "wrecking ball" to Washington, D.C.

And that is exactly what we need. We do not need a reformer in the White House, we need a sledgehammer. The federal government right now is a gargantuan, monstrous, out of control Leviathan exerting a tyrannical grip on the American people and our freedoms. Somebody needs to go in there and start breaking some china, and Perry is the only guy right now talking about doing that.

Newt wants to be the artiste in the china shop, and Perry wants to be the bull. We need a bull right now, and a Texas longhorn might just be the ticket.

When the air starts to leak out of Newt's tires, it's going to go into somebody else's balloon. It will have to go to somebody who is already in the race, a candidate to whom voters are willing to give a second look.

A Newsmax story today indicates that Perry might be that candidate:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whom some pundits had written off as the GOP's nominee, may find a second coming in Iowa, if new poll data holds up.

As Mitt Romney's campaign has suffered a startling decline in recent weeks, only to see Newt Gingrich eclipse the former Massachusetts governor's front-runner status, the battle for the Iowa caucuses set for Jan. 3 has become a wide-open race.

New survey data prepared for the Perry campaign and shared by a source close within the campaign shows that the Texas governor may be poised to do much better in next month's Iowa caucuses than earlier polls predicted.

The survey by the Austin, Texas-based Baselice & Associates firm shows Perry firmly in third place with 13 percent — trailing Gingrich's 29 percent and Romney's 19 percent. The poll was conducted Dec. 3-4.

But the internal polling data shows that Perry's "strongly positive" rating has jumped 6 points since the firm's previous Iowa survey, just three weeks ago.

And, significantly, Perry's positive rating among likely Iowa caucus-goers is at a commanding 67 percent. And a stellar 71 percent view him positively after having seen one of his commercials.

Other numbers that suggest a potential rise: Perry stands at 78 percent positive among self-identified tea party members, according to the survey.

But he also enjoys strong support among Iowa's undecided voters, at 71 percent.

One of the poll's most interesting findings: 67 percent of respondents overall — and a whopping 75 percent who are leaning toward former House Speaker Gingrich — state that they still may change their minds. That finding suggests that, with just a few weeks to go before the caucuses, the Iowa electorate remains very fluid.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Perry Could Rise in Iowa, Polling Data Shows

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)

© Bryan Fischer