Please explain why Hillary is a serious candidate but Rick Perry is a longshot

The point here is not necessarily to endorse Rick Perry for president. I'm not saying he has to be your choice and I'm not saying he's necessarily mine either, so you really don't need to comment with TED CRUZ 2016!!! or whatever. Forget about that for a moment. The point here is to look at how and why certain candidates get taken seriously, while others are treated as jokes or longshots.

Case in point: A one-time senator and Secretary of State whose record of achievement is alarmingly thin, but whose record of dishonesty and corruption is stunningly robust, is treated as a virtual lock for her party's nomination. Contrast that with a guy who served for 14 years as governor of one of the nation's largest and most prosperous states - and who can point to quite an array of policy choices by which he can can plausibly claim to have helped make it or keep it that way. That guy would seem to be a serious candidate for the presidency, without any question, right? Especially when you really get into the details of his record:

In 2001 he was lucky to inherit a relatively prosperous state. Texas’s chief economic advantages include its lack of personal and corporate income taxes. It’s also a right-to-work state, which has weakened labor unions. Yet Mr. Perry deserves credit for growing this political endowment. In 2003 the state capped damages for pain and suffering in medical malpractice lawsuits at $250,000, which has helped cut providers’ insurance premiums by nearly half. This has attracted more doctors to the Lone Star State to accommodate increasing patient demand.

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In 2005 Mr. Perry signed a workers compensation reform that has helped slash business insurance premium rates by half. A 2011 “loser pays” tort reform has reduced the cost of business by warding off frivolous lawsuits. The Tax Foundation ranks Texas’s business climate tenth best, and the state’s growth spurt vindicates the Perry formula of low taxes and a light regulatory touch. Between 2000 and 2010, Texas gained a net 781,542 domestic migrants—second only to Florida—while California lost 1.9 million, according to the Manhattan Institute. Last year Texas boasted the three fastest-growing counties with populations above 250,000 (Fort Bend, Montgomery and Williamson). Between January 2011 and 2015, Texas had the third-highest job growth in the country at 12.5%, after North Dakota (22.3%) and Utah (13.9%). That compares to 10.5% in Florida, 6.2% in Ohio, 6.1% in Wisconsin and 4% in New Jersey. During Mr. Perry’s tenure, Texas created more than three of every 10 new jobs in the U.S. The only states that experienced faster economic growth between 2000 and 2013 were Alaska, Wyoming and North Dakota.

Now a voter could certainly look at a guy with that record and still decide for any number of legitimate reasons that he is not the best choice. But when you look at the full assortment of candidates at the outset, and separate the serious contenders from the fringe candidates, how can you possibly put Perry in the latter category? I understand that his campaign in 2012 didn't go very well, but should that really be criteria as opposed to his governing credentials? Executive experience? Tons of it. Policy choices? Maybe some negative but an awful lot of positive. Results? Find a state that's doing better. Perhaps the better question is this: If some candidates are seen as real contenders and others are seen as pursuing pipe dreams, who decides these things and what criteria do they use? To the extent the Beltway media and political pundits choose the real contenders by virtue of who they decide to cover - and in what way - it seems to me they are much more impressed by any given candidate's "political brand" than by any real record of accomplishment. They built up Obama as a serious option because they were impressed by his presence on the stump (and of course the whole "historic" narrative), and they helped elect a president who was woefully unprepared and deeply unqualified - not to mention being too prideful to learn anything once in the job. If Perry's "brand" is defined by the fact that he had a brain lapse in a debate and said "oops" when it happened, that tells you very little about Perry and a lot about the people who craft these narratives - specifically that they're dumb as a box of rocks. You might prefer Ted Cruz because you think he's more conservative. Or you might prefer Scott Walker because he achieved his economic goals in a blue state amidst far greater political challenges. Or you might prefer Jeb Bush because you prefer a more establishment approach, or maybe because you think he gets a bad rap as a moderate. I'm not here to argue with any of the above. I only wish to assert that if you look at Perry's overall record and think he deserves to be treated as a joke candidate - while you see the likes of Hillary Clinton as an obvious top-tier candidate - you are a blithering idiot.