Call it Niall Ferguson's Pauline Kael moment . . . During the roundtable segment this morning on ABC's This Week, Ferguson, an academic with appointments at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, said that "all the Texans I know" can't stand Rick Perry.
Ferguson was reacting to host Christiane Amanpour's question about Perry's highly-animated New Hampshire address. Ferguson professed to like the "swaggering Texan" side of Perry he apparently saw in the speech. George Will had a caustic comeback. Video after the jump.
Watch Ferguson and wonder how much time the Scottish-born prof has spent speaking with average Texans. Perry, after all, is the longest-serving governor in Lone Star state history, and never lost an election there. Not everybody can't stand him, it surely seems.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: How many of you watched the Rick Perry video?
NIALL FERGUSON: I watched it: quite enjoyed it. I like that side of him, the sort of swaggering Texan. I can't get enough of that. The problem is all the Texans I know can't stand him. And that seems like a pretty bad sign to me. Because if he really was that guy that we saw, swaggering, they would love him.
GEORGE WILL: First of all, you know the wrong Texans. Cause the majority of Texans keep re-electing him.
NIALL FERGUSON: I know a lot of Texans. You want a list?
WILL: You know a minority.