It's hard to believe that it was only a few short weeks ago that Texas governor, Rick Perry, was riding high in the polls and burnishing his image with an ear-splitting explosion of a Vin Diesel-like campaign ad designed to reduce the competition to a collection of smoking loafers.
The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll (pdf) now has Herman Cain standing on the proverbial hood of his proverbial hot rod, pecs rippling with the recoil of proverbial automatic rifle fire of Republican electoral support.
And if that wasn't enough to take the crash out of Perry's crescendo, a new PPP poll puts him way back in fourth, with Newt Gingrich ramping from an off-the-grid service road to land slightly ahead.
Lest we begin to doubt that Perry's Vin Diesel injection has made him at least at potent as Tim Pawlenty, consider Nate Silver's observation that while Perry has lost about 15 points in the polls, almost none of that support has gone to Romney.