Rick Perry just digs his hole deeper and deeper with each one of these tongue-ties, doesn't he? During a speech in Iowa on Sunday touching on energy policy, CNN Political Ticker has Perry saying this:
While criticizing President Barack Obama for picking winners and losers in the energy industry, he bungled the name of the most famous energy company to go under despite government assistance.
"No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money," Perry began. "I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda."
OK, we'll admit that when we first read about Solyndra, we weren't entirely sure how to pronounce it. (It's suh-LIN-druh, for the record.) We'll even given Perry the benefit of the doubt and assume Perry knows Solyndra is a company, not a country, and some stray synapse in his brain misfired because, gosh darn it, Solyndra does sound like the country's name. But when gaffes comes in a series that now includes...
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- forgetting the voting age
- forgetting the number of Supreme Court justices
- and of course, forgetting the name of one of the three government department he'd like like to cut, Energy, coincidentally the topic of Sunday's speech
...something has to give in voters minds as these sorts of word slips from Perry just become unsurprising. Which of course might explain Perry's only polling at 7.3 percent according to Real Clear Politics. But maybe even more troubling for Perry's 2012 (or even 2016) prospects is that Perry's hecklers at this point cared less about his gaffes and more about his policies. Specifically, his position against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell earned him some ire on Sunday:
As he left the stage, Perry was confronted by several hecklers scattered around the room. The closest was Warren Blumenfeld, who teaches a gay studies course at nearby Iowa State University. Blumenfeld got quite close to the governor while yelling, "Why are you marginalizing people in this country? Why are you demonizing gay and lesbian people?"
...
"Why can't gays compete in the military?" yelled 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran Jason Arment.