More than halfway through a panel discussion before Republican rainmakers in Aspen, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, while extolling his own foreign policy credentials, referred to himself “as the president.”

Recognizing his mistake, he repeated it, this time with a head-bobbing cackle straight out of former President George W. Bush’s playbook. Then he shot the crowd a knowing look and corrected himself.

“As the governor of Texas,” Perry continued Friday, as the crowd roared with amusement, “we had the opportunity to meet with a substantial number of international leaders. … It is clear this administration’s … lack of commitment to having a clear foreign policy has put America in jeopardy.”

The swashbuckling 61-year-old was the main attraction in an hour-and-a-half conversation with Aspen Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson along with four other governors: New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.

He and the others were in town for the Republican Governors Association’s two-day executive roundtable convened by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Despite its liberal reputation, Aspen is increasingly becoming the backdrop for conservative headline makers and, with momentum mounting in the polls, all eyes were on Perry to see whether he’ll make a viable presidential candidate.

Asked point blank if he’s going to run, the governor said he’ll know in three or four weeks.

“I’m going through a thoughtful process. I’m asking the right questions,” he answered, prompted by Isaacson. “I’m basically asking people, ‘Do you think there’s room in this presidential election for a full-throated, unapologetic fiscal conservative? And if you do think there is room, are you going to help?’”

While dodging a direct declaration of his candidacy, Perry didn’t hold back on his thoughts about gay marriage, Lance Armstrong, the economy and his self-perceived foreign policy chops. Nor was the aforementioned slip of the tongue the only verbal fumble that interrupted his smooth-talking spiel.

Despite attempts to distance himself from the last Texas governor who became president, Perry has an uncanny ability to channel many of Bush’s good-ol’-boy swagger, mannerisms and word mangling. His pronunciation of “theater” calls to mind Bush’s obliteration of the word “nuclear.” In Aspen, Perry even coined a new word — “preception” — when “preconception” or “perception” would’ve sufficed.

Yet this candidate is taking a decidedly different tack when it comes to wooing the Grand Old Party. Instead of preaching compassionate conservatism, Perry is preaching firebrand social conservatism.

“I’m pro-life. I’m pro-traditional marriage,”  he said.

But there is a caveat. He repeatedly made it abundantly clear that he is a champion of the 10th Amendment, imploring that the federal government should not decide socially controversial issues.

Take gay marriage, for instance.

“Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me,” he said. “That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.”

(Unsurprisingly it didn’t take long for his Republican rivals, not in the room, to jump on Perry’s words. “So Gov Perry, if a state wanted to allow polygamy or if they chose to deny heterosexuals the right to marry, would that be OK too?” presidential candidate Rick Santorum would tweet several hours later.)

Perry again invoked the 10th Amendment when asked about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s doping probe that has targeted part-time Aspen resident Lance Armstrong and other elite cyclists.

“The fact of the matter is our federal government is engaged in way too many things that they shouldn’t be involved with at all,” Perry said. “The idea that they’re telling us how to deliver health care. The idea they’re telling us how to educate our children. The idea they’re telling [Gov.] Susana [Martinez] how to build transportation infrastructure in her state [of New Mexico] is just completely and absolutely out of the main line thought of our founding fathers. They had no preception [sic] of what that would look like in 200 years but they knew they wanted to enumerate those powers and have a few powers for the federal government and then leave those powers to the states.”

Finally getting to the point, he declared: “The idea that the FDA is spending your tax money going after Lance Armstrong for something someone said he did in France is an absolute atrocity.”

The nation has better things to do, he said, like strengthening security at the U.S. southern border.

“We are wasting our time as a country having a conversation [about] immigration policy — ‘Do you think it ought to be this or it ought to be that?’ — when the fact is the biggest issue that is facing this country is the absolute abysmal failure of the federal government to secure our border with Mexico,” Perry said. “That’s the issue that we’ve got to address first. You cannot have an immigration policy discussion until you first secure that border. Sharing a 1,200-mile border with Mexico, I know what’s going on there. I just signed a piece of legislation, a budget, that directed $152 million of Texas taxpayer money to our Texas Rangers and other law enforcement to help try to secure the border because of Washington’s absolute ineptness. The idea that the president of the United States six weeks ago would come to the border with Mexico, to El Paso, to stand up and say the border between the United States and Mexico is safer than it’s ever been is ludicrous on its face.”

Before underscoring immigration, Perry shrugged off the debate over raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

“We’re getting to watch some great political theater in Washington, D.C. That’s basically what’s going on. The fact is I suspect they’ll come up with some deal. But there’s nothing going to change the future of our country until we elect a United States Senate, add to the United States Congress and elect a president that understands how to create jobs in America and the private sector is the only place jobs will be created in this country, period,” he said as hundreds of Republicans in the room cheered.

When an audience member solicited Perry’s thoughts on the Arab Spring, the governor noted he recently met with Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Domrovskis and former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, as well as Israeli leaders. Then he took direct aim at President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

“Our president has been criticized by the left and right as being unwavering, or wavering, or meandering — really hard to identify what his foreign policy is,” Perry said. “Or, he actually does have a belief and does have a clear foreign policy and that foreign policy is that America is not an exceptional country, and that he believes America has been arrogant with the way it has treated the rest of the world and that his ideas about the United States from the standpoint of the rest of the world is ‘Look, we just need to be another country out there and be one amongst equals.’ I don’t know which of those is correct frankly. Either way it is dangerous for America. I happen to think this world needs a strong America. An America that is strong economically and an America that is strong militarily. Our friends need to know that we will be standing with them. The Latvian president who was in my office this week, Walter, does not know where America stands relative to their defense in central Europe.”

It was that kind of a day for Perry. He had the floor and an adoring crowd. The other governors charitably let him steal the spotlight, which Perry did, interrupting them to get in his two cents.

He claimed he never thought about running for president until his wife, Anita, a nurse, sat him down to explain “our country is in trouble.” “Obamacare,” she lamented, was “putting the practice of medicine, the delivery of health care, in jeopardy.” Concerned for the financial future of their 27- and 24-year old sons, Perry said “she said you need to get out of your comfort zone. Your country is in trouble and you need to do your duty. And I listen to my wife,” Perry said.

The crowd clapped and whistled.

The more he went on, the more clear it became that Perry is posturing for a 2012 campaign. After the Freudian slip in which Perry imagined he already was president, Isaacson sounded convinced of it.

“We didn’t have to wait three weeks!” Isaacson exclaimed.

Although Penry jumped into the campaign strongly this summer, winning “rising star” status from popular Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza, he has recently struggled.

Even though he posted large fundraising figures for the first quarter, for example, he was overtaken by primary rival former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis. Penry raised $400,000 and tweeted about it proudly only to be deflated when McInnis later announced he had pulled down $545,000, establishing himself as the clear frontrunner, enjoying the edge in experience, name recognition and cash.

Penry worked for McInnis as a Congressional staffer and never fully succeeded shaking the impression that McInnis had his number. McInnis fueled the impression by appearing unflappable in the face of Penry jabs. McInnis refused to debate Penry or even to appear in straw poll events with him.

Josh Penry

Penry also seemed to be losing momentum on his message. Although he opened the campaign with a clear platform based on admitting to Republican fiscal failures, he soon seemed to be casting about, attacking Gov. Ritter with arguments designed for dramatic effect but increasingly untethered to facts. It was as though the budget crisis that is forcing Ritter every day to announce cost-slashing measures was undoing Penry’s planned program-cutting platform.

Penry’s complaints about Ritter’s prisoner-furlough program as carelessly reckless, for example, was the opposite of the reality. As the Colorado Independent reported, the program was meticulously thought out, a product of long planning based on research that showed incarceration and recidivism as a major financial drag on the state and that looked at which prisoners would be best to parole months early. In other words, it might have been exactly the kind of “hard choice” cost-cutting measure Penry described as essential to good government. His attacks seemed opportunistic and recalled the ugly national campaign that featured infamously furloughed Massachusetts prisoner Willie Horton in commercials run by George H. Bush in his campaign against Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Penry’s recent attacks on the Governor’s Energy Office were similarly reaching. He called the office a “silo of patronage” and said it should be eliminated. But asked to say which patronage positions he was referring to, he came up with merely two names, and neither person owed their position to patronage. One of the employees, in fact, merely used workspace in the Energy Office and was not paid out of the Office budget. Indeed, the Office budget had been slashed to the bone by Ritter and is now running almost entirely on federal funds.

In addition, Penry seems to have made a poor decision in his selection of campaign manager Mike Britt. The choice seemed antithetical to his “new GOP politics” message. Britt cut his teeth working for Karl Rove, perhaps the most visible GOP strategist of the divisive cultural politics of the past decade. Britt was under investigation as a political staffer in George Bush’s White House and last week news surrounding Britt’s suspect tinkering with Republican National Committee email lists overshadowed Penry’s campaign.

Wins by moderate Republicans in two governor’s races last week may also be weighing on the decision for Penry to move aside for McInnis. Moderate Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell beat their Democratic rivals in New Jersey and Virginia. McInnis is perceived as more moderately conservative than is Penry.

Cillizza is now reporting that in fact last week’s governor’s races influenced the decision.

Sources close to Penry suggested that he was heavily influenced by the victories for Republicans in New Jersey and Virginia last week — wins due, at least in part, to the lack of competitive primaries on the Republican side.

Penry was worried that a bruising August primary would potentially compromise the eventual nominee’s chances of beating Ritter. Combine that with his youth (he is 33) and his role as state Senate Minority Leader and Penry decided that dropping out of the race was the best option for him and the party.

Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer said the governor had no comment on the news of Penry’s decision, which he noted is yet to be confirmed.

In advance of the announcement, observers are speculating as to why Penry appears to be leaking the news in waves to Cillizza in Washington D.C. rather than to his home town paper, the Grand Junction Sentinel, or the Colorado paper of record, the Denver Post.

The Denver Post recently ran stories critical of Penry attacks on Ritter. Tim Hoover last month wrote a piece that scewered Penry‘s claims that Ritter had been expanding government. Lynn Bartels wrote the piece that punctured Penry’s “silo of patronage” claim regarding the Enery Office.

Michael Huttner, founder and head of liberal activist group ProgressNow, speculates in a press release that McInnis has had a hand in pushing Penry out through lobbyists in D.C., which he believes explains why the story is originating there.

“If this is true, it’s the old D.C. lobbyist guard stepping out of the shadows to clear the field for Scott ‘McLobbyist’ McInnis. McInnis’ ties to lobbyists, oil and gas interests, and corrupt cronies like Tom DeLay can’t help but make one wonder what’s really going on when his primary opponents start dropping out of the race.

[...]

And it should come as no surprise that this story broke first in Washington D.C. instead of Colorado, since that’s where ‘McLobbyist’s’ best friends are. We call on McInnis to disclose which of his lobbyist friends helped push Penry out.”

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