Rasmussen: Perry 29, Romney 18, Bachmann 13, Paul 9.

Just days after Rick Perry entered the GOP field of presidential candidates he has taken a double digit lead according to Rasmussen:

Texas Governor Rick Perry, the new face in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has jumped to a double-digit lead over Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann with the other announced candidates trailing even further behind.



The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary voters, taken Monday night, finds Perry with 29% support. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who ran unsuccessfully for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, earns 18% of the vote, while Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who won the high-profile Ames Straw Poll in Iowa on Saturday, picks up 13%.



Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who was a close second to Bachmann on Saturday, has the support of nine percent (9%) of Likely Primary Voters, followed by Georgia businessman Herman Cain at six percent (6%) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with five percent (5%). Rick Santorum, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, and ex-Utah Governor Jon Huntsman each get one percent (1%) support, while Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter comes in statistically at zero.

I gather the public prefers a candidate who tells it like it is and doesn't give a damn about political correctness.





[Update] InTrade also has Perry up with 39.8%, Romney 28.2% and Bachmann 7%.





[Update] Hot Air digs into the Rasmussen poll's internals and finds some very interesting results:

Let’s take a look at the internals of this poll. Perry scores highest among men (32%) and women (25%) than any of his competitors. Ron Paul scores best among young voters by a wide margin (29%), but Perry is the only other candidate in double digits (17%). Perry wins all of the other age demographics, and he also scores highest among Republicans (29%) and non-Republicans (28%). Perry also wins every income demographic, above the $40K level with 31% or more of the vote.

Go read it all.



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Video: Perry's First Campaign Commercial And Michele Bachmann Did Good In Iowa, Until Rick Perry Showed Up

Just a day after Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Ames straw poll, the tide turned a bit for her when Texas Governor Rick perry showed up in town where both candidates attended the Black Hawk County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner.



The Politico reports the contrast of Perry's style of campaigning person-to-person campaigning where he mingles, answers questions and doesn't shy away from interacting with voters, with Bachmann's "celebrity" type campaigning, was duly noted by those in attendance.

But the contrast that may lift Perry, and undermine Bachmann, in their high-stakes battle for Iowa had less to do with what they said than how they said it — and what they did before and after speaking.



Perry arrived early, as did former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. The Texas governor let a media throng grow and dissolve before working his way across the room to sit at table after table, shake hand after hand, pose for photographs and listen politely to a windy Abraham Lincoln impersonator, paying respect to a state that expects candidates, no matter their fame, to be accessible.



But Bachmann campaigned like a celebrity. And the event highlighted the brittle, presidential-style cocoon that has become her campaign’s signature: a routine of late entries, unexplained absences, quick exits, sharp-elbowed handlers with matching lapel pins, and pre-selected questioners.



She camped out in her bus, parked on the street in front of a nearby Ramada Hotel, until it was time to take the stage. Even after a local official’s introduction, Bachmann was nowhere to be found. It was not until a second staffer assured her that the lighting had been changed and a second introduction piped over the loudspeakers that she entered the former dance hall here. By the time she made her big entrance to bright lights and blaring music, the crowd seemed puzzled.



Bachmann’s stump speech drew mostly polite applause until she closed by giving a large apple pie to “the oldest mother in the room” – a local centenarian.



Then she stayed on stage, signing T-shirts from above, which her staff then distributed to a steady but not overwhelming crowd.



Finally, she swept through what was by then an empty ballroom behind a phalanx of six aides who shielded her from reporters and the handful of Iowans who remained.

Perry has also released his first campaign commercial showing the differences between his record and Obama's dismal failure over the last 2 1/2+ years.



Video below:







Rick Perry's official website can be found here.



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Video- Michele Bachmann On Obama's Lack Of Empathy With Victimized Americans

Video Below:



Michele Bachmann surprised many with her performance in the GOP dbeate in New Hampshire recently. Many of those that only knew her from the media "soundbites" in the past, saw a concise, thoughtful, intelligent candidate that knew how to focus on issues and answered questions asked of her clearly.

Opinion from friend and foe alike was that she did well in that debate and now she has some choice comments about Barack Obama in the video above.

Watch, decide for yourself if you think she is right or wrong.

H/T LA Times.

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VIDEO: Michele Bachmann In Iowa

Video below of Michele Bachmann speaking to conservatives in Iowa at Representative Steve King's conference.

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The Politico headlines with "Michele Bachmann steals the show in Iowa", highlighting some of the meat and potato moments for those who do not have 24 minutes readily available to watch the whole clip.

She then started firing up the crowd, saying, ”Does anyone remember the trillion dollar stimulus bill? Did President Obama correctly diagnose the problem with job creation. ..what’s his level of credibility on job creation?"

The crowd replied, "No!"

"Not so much, that’s right!" Bachmann said. "Iowans are very intelligent people, despite being extremely good-looking and very well tempered."

After a few other similar exchanges with the crowd, Bachmann invoked the president's failed Final Four predictions and said, "Now he’s got us engaged in another third middle eastern war? Talk about March Madness, can anyone say Jimmy Carter"

She also made a joke about Chinese President Hu and the national debt, saying "So we know now that Hu is your daddy."

And she drew massive boos from the crowd when she mentioned New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who recently said he is looking into a waiver from the health care reform bill for New York City. She noted he said last year, as first reported by POLITICO, that "the bill and I are one."

"This is I believe the greatest power grab that I have ever seen," she said, comparing "this movie" to the fiscal crisis in Greece and adding, "It's not a pretty picture."

"The Constitution holds the answer. … We the people," she said. "We are the answer to the problem today in the United States because you need to be pushed back in charge of your own health care. ... The federal govt doesn’t have a clue how to create jobs. You do."

Read the rest over at The Politico.

It has also been reported recently that Michele Bachmann will be forming a presidential exploratory committee by June.

I'll give Bachmann this, she certainly knows how to fire up a crowd.

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