Watching the debate, I’m admittedly taken in a bit by the smooth delivery of Mitt Romney and a bit disappointed in the rather halting, clumsy responses of Rick Perry to the inevitable attacks on the front runner. Romney is the better debater as he was in 2008 when he lost the nomination to the fumbling, bumbling McCain. But, and this is the big but, in this political horse race, when it comes down to deeds done, Perry is several furlongs ahead of Romney.

Republicans only get elected in the Peoples’ Republic of Massachusetts when the electorate is gagging on the latest Democratic outrage. Even then, Republicans do not win high office without having something in them that appeals to the basic liberal instincts of the average Massachusetts voter. Think Scott Brown. Think about this: can you name a hard-core conservative from the Bay State? Try going back a few years. Can you come up with even one even then?

Somehow in my mind, the idea of electing a man to the presidency who was acceptable to the Massachusetts electorate, creates uncomfortable little cringes in my political gut. Massachusetts is a very small, very liberal, political entity far removed from many of the mainstream realities of its larger sister state, Texas, such as humongous oil fields, large-concept agriculture and an international border of several hundred miles.

Citizens of Massachusetts consider the 200 mile drive to New York City an ordeal while citizens of Beaumont face an 830 mile drive to El Paso with equanimity, knowing that a realistic speed limit of 80 to 85 miles per hour makes it a manageable day trip. That 600 mile differential represents a lot more than just land miles. It takes a whole different kind of person to impose his political will on the diverse populations stretching from Beaumont through Houston, San Antonio and El Paso and the 600 miles worth of points in between, than it does to do the same in a state where its opposite borders are but 250 miles apart.

Texans have historically suffered the eastern elite stigma of thinking too big. What to the eastern effetes appears grandiosity is nothing more than rational thinking born of geographic reality. When your state is almost a thousand miles from corner to corner, you damned well better think big or you are going nowhere in the political system. One of the qualities that made Ronald Reagan’s transition from California governor to president was his experience in having to have had to think big as chief executive of one of our largest states and one of the world’s largest economies. Those same realities hold true for Rick Perry.

Truth tell, Rick Perry probably has brought more prosperity to Texas in terms of real dollars than Reagan did for California. Not wanting to research those particulars, I will leave myself open to challenge from some ardent Reaganite. But the point to be established here is that the chief executive of an economic engine like Texas or California is by nature of his economic prominence, a leader who has had to face and deal with vastly more challenges than the governor of a smaller state like Massachusetts. To any green liberal reading this, I would even submit that Rick Perry has done far more for the furthering of wind energy than Mitt Romney simply because he has more of two needed resources for such programs, land area and wind.

Mitt is a good talker but when his economic accomplishments are stood up against those of the less verbally agile Texas governor, they pale in comparison. That is the same reality that will lead the American electorate to vote for Perry in preference to Obama, whose national economic accomplishments are dwarfed even by Mitt’s in Massachusetts. In 2008 we elected the smoothest talker and we are living with those results.

Will we repeat that mistake in 2012?