Rick Perry And Campaign Science

I couldn't believe it, Rick Perry and science in the same sentence.  From the NYT, via the Big Picture:

But given the interest in Rick Perry, the Texas governor and new Republican presidential candidate, the portion of “The Victory Lab” about Mr. Perry will be published on Tuesday as an electronic book, “Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America.” Mr. Issenberg is also the author of “The Sushi Economy.” An e-mail exchange between Mr. Issenberg and me — slightly condensed — follows:
Q: What makes Rick Perry’s approach to politics different from that of other candidates?
Mr. Issenberg: No candidate has ever presided over a political operation so skeptical about the effectiveness of basic campaign tools and so committed to using social-science methods to rigorously test them.
As the 2006 election season approached, the governor’s top strategist, Dave Carney, invited four political scientists into Perry’s war room and asked them to impose experimental controls on any aspect of the campaign budget that they could randomize and measure. Over the course of that year, the eggheads, as they were known within the campaign, ran experiments testing the effectiveness of all the things that political consultants do reflexively and we take for granted: candidate appearances, TV ads, robocalls, direct mail. These were basically the political world’s version of randomized drug trials, which had been used by academics but never from within a large-scale partisan campaign.

He must have some brainier guys running his campaign, because he seems like a dumber George W. Bush.  Maybe I'm wrong, but he doesn't seem very bright.