Even as the Romney campaign prepares for Rick Perry as a kind of hurricane event—a huge, scary thing that shakes everything up, but fades away relatively quickly—Rick Perry is doing everything he can to be treated seriously. To wit: He's meeting with Donald Trump next month.

The Trump meeting comes after a spate of calls Perry has made to the TV personality and developer, who opted not to run for president but who had championed the kind of in-your-face message about President Obama that Perry has also made his own

Romney is taking vague, frontrunnerish jabs at Perry (calling him a career politician without calling him out by name, and hitting him on his weird Social Security stance) but it could be that his strategy of waiting for Perry's moment to pass is the right thing to do. If Perry is considering taking advice from Donald Trump, that could mean he's interested in attracting the wrong audience—the fringe Republicans, basically, and the starfucking political media. Those are not the folks who win elections.