Rick Perry finally admitted to himself that he has no chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 -- and on Friday he officially suspended his campaign (dropped out of the race). This is no surprise. Anyone with any knowledge of politics has seen this coming for at least a month now.
The cartoon above (by Nick Anderson in the Houston Chronicle) illustrates what happened. Party donors, especially the big-money donors, have noticed Perry's inability to get beyond low single-digits in voter support -- and they stopped giving money to his campaign. And a campaign without money is no campaign at all.
Perry had already officially closed his campaign in South Carolina, and effectively done so in Iowa and other states. It was just a matter of time before he dropped out. Now he has become the first of many to give up and drop out of the 2016 presidential race.
Perry liked to brag about all the good he did while governor of Texas, and did so again during his drop-out speech. It's not true. He was a disaster as governor, and the people of this nation should be happy he won't have the opportunity to be an equally-bad disaster as president.
Some might wonder which candidate will get Perry's supporters, but in reality, there weren't enough of those supporters to matter (even for those other candidates at the bottom). Perry had based his political career on appealing to the teabaggers and evangelicals, and in the end, those two groups abandoned him in droves.
