Perry's flirt with birtherism

It's over:

In an interview with a local television news station in Florida, Perry downplayed his previous Birther applause lines, and said that people need to "lighten up a little bit." "I don’t think I was expressing doubts," he said. "I was having some fun with Donald Trump."

But it'll still hurt him, notes the Washington Post:

Message discipline — the ability to say what you want to say (and, as importantly, not say what you don’t want to say) is an essential piece of running a winning campaign for any office but particularly in a presidential race where every utterance is highly scrutinized.