Perry’s 2012 run was testament to the way the glare of the national stage can wrongfoot even the most dominant state-level pol. (Sound familiar, Scott Walker?) Later, he confessed he hadn’t been feeling himself—he had had back surgery just a few weeks before starting the campaign and was on heavy doses of painkillers. Having watched all of his Texas gubernatorial debates, where his performances were not half bad, I believed this explanation. But Perry’s Texas critics had always considered him an airhead. (The late liberal columnist Molly Ivins dubbed him “Governor Goodhair.”) The “oops” moment seemed to confirm it.

After 2012, Perry changed: He started wearing those stylish glasses, which came to symbolize a larger makeover, from swaggering red-state conservative into a wannabe cosmopolitan. He gave policy addresses and talked about moving to California. He adopted the mien of an earnest student, inviting experts to Texas to learn from them, then inviting reporters to talk about what he’d learned. But even as Perry was getting all ivory-tower, Texas politics was moving in the other direction. Perry’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, lost a Senate primary he was supposed to have locked up to an upstart Tea Partier named Ted Cruz. Conservatives in the legislature fought Perry’s projects and won primaries up and down the ticket. The governor once regarded as a more extreme and ideological version of George W. Bush began to look downright moderate.

It was, of course, the prelude to a comeback, or an attempted one. For his second presidential campaign, Perry wanted to redeem himself by being the smartest guy in the room. He gave a thoughtful speech about racism at the National Press Club, backtracking on his once-vocal support for the Tenth Amendment. He repudiated the Texans who were convinced that U.S. military training exercises were really a secret prelude to martial law. He railed against Donald Trump and “Trumpism,” calling the flamboyant Republican frontrunner a demagogue, a carnival barker, and a “cancer on conservatism.” Nobody was more shocked by this newly thoughtful character than the Texas Democrats Perry had driven into near-extinction. “Where was this guy for the last 20 years?” asked Jason Stanford, a Democratic consultant and columnist.

Since his surgery, Perry couldn’t wear cowboy boots anymore. But he still had the power to blow away the room with a speech. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last year, for example, he took the toughest speaking slot—9 a.m.—and somehow managed to bring the sleepy crowd to its feet. But in the straw poll afterward, he drew just 3 percent. People liked him. They liked hearing him talk. They just didn’t think he should be president, and nothing Perry did could convince them otherwise. (Sound familiar, Chris Christie?) In a presidential cycle where we keep hearing how paramount the power of authenticity is for voters, Perry is a reminder that charisma only gets you so far.