[P]olitical professionals expect more from a mainstream candidate such as Perry. After Perry’s birther Parade, strategist Karl Rove lectured his one-time friend Monday in a Fox News appearance. "You associate yourself with a nutty view like that and you damage yourself," he said. Rove added that the pandering to Trump "starts to marginalize you in the minds of some of the people whom you need in order to get the election."
Perry knows this. Perry, almost assuredly, huddled with "political professionals" before tipping his certifiably lunatic hand to Parade magazine. Yet Perry himself is a professional, which qualifies his lunacy. He knows that birtherism is crazy, whereas the peculiar audience to which he's pandering doesn't know nuts from prime rib.
But when one is a Republican presidential candidate and one is miserably down in tin-foiled, evangelical Iowa, one often does what one needs to do -- drool whole puddles of the wildly preposterous.
That doesn't mean, however, that one's drooling is inherently or necessarily enthusiastic (in some cases it does: see M. Bachmann). If Mitt Romney, for example, were abysmally down in polling, he might be tempted at the urging of political professionals to say that he possesses no "definitive answer" to, let's say, 9/11 Truthers, merely to pump up his lunatic-base numbers. As he premeditated it, Romney would resist every letter of that ambiguous wording, and again later, as he heard himself -- although this is profoundly unlikely -- uttering it.
Romney, however, would also be intelligent enough to know what Karl Rove knows: one is then stuck with one's own words in the far saner primary states, not to mention the general election. Kaboom.
Perry? He's simply not as bright as the ineffably elastic Romney -- and God knows he's more desperate. Yet that doesn't necessarily mean that Perry is enthusiastic about peddling crazy.
I offer this merely as a defense of common politics, which, like it or not, is all politics.