Politico.com reports that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has embarked on an extreme makeover to make erase memories of a disastrous — and short-lived — run for the presidency last time around.

He’ll need it, badly.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/rick-perry-extreme-makeover-105843.html?hp=t1

Perry reportedly is more relaxed and confident sounding these days, Politico reports. That’s as it should be, given that he’s a lame-duck governor. He’s held the office seemingly since The Flood and is now heading for some other mission in life.

He wants to be president, or vice president perhaps.

My own feeling is that he’s got a long way to go before he achieves either office.

A friend of mine — a former Republican state legislator who is no friend or fan of Perry — thinks the governor actually wants a No. 2 spot on the next GOP presidential ticket. He believes Perry knows his brand as a Republican presidential nominee has been damaged beyond repair, so he’s willing to settle for running as the GOP veep nominee in 2016.

“Where I have noticed it profoundly is in the last few weeks, the national TV appearances, whether he’s been on a number of Fox shows or Jimmy Kimmel and some of the others, he just seems like a very confident, upbeat and articulate spokesman for conservative policy and values,” former Perry aide Ray Sullivan told Politico.

Perry’s brand is well-established in his home state of Texas, where his unique brand of good-ol’-boy conservatism plays well. It hasn’t yet taken hold in the rest of the country, let alone in the rest of the Republican Party, which is full of tea-party conservatives who so far have done a better job of selling themselves to a willing party base.

Let us not forget that those infamous pre-2012 GOP primary gaffes — namely the “oops” blunder in which he couldn’t name the third agency he would dismantle were he elected president — will be on the record … forever.

Good luck with your makeover, governor. You’ll need to be unrecognizable from what you’ve shown us so far.