Byron York: Why Perry bombed

(By Byron York, Washington Examiner) - When Rick Perry quietly shook up his campaign on the weekend of October 22, bringing in a number of veteran Republican consultants and giving effective control to former Bush administration disaster management chief Joe Allbaugh, one of Allbaugh's top priorities was to improve Perry's poor performances at presidential debates. Perry has had the bad luck of being a weak debater in a campaign dominated by high-profile televised debates. At the time of the shakeup, he had just had his best debate, the October 18 face-off in Las Vegas, and Allbaugh's job was to keep the improvement going.

Now, after Wednesday night's GOP debate in Michigan, that improvement has not only not continued but Perry has suffered through the worst debate performance in memory. His inability to remember the third of the three federal departments he proposes to eliminate led to 45 excruciating seconds of onstage fumbling that might well end his campaign. The only question left is why it happened.