Other candidates whacked mercilessly at Perry after that—Mitt Romney declared that opposition to illegal immigration “doesn’t mean you don’t have a heart. It means you have a heart and a brain.” Perry himself delivered the death blow in a subsequent debate when he forgot the third of three federal departments he wished to eliminate. “Oops,” he said. 

This time around, Perry has accented the need to police the border and has hewed much more publicly to orthodox GOP positions on immigration—at least as espoused in Washington. The change appeared to be an attempt to mitigate what one GOP strategist in 2012 called Perry’s “surprisingly tin ear” when it came to how immigration was viewed by his party.

In a recent appearance on Fox, Perry fell comfortably in with some of the party’s angriest voices when he implied that Obama had orchestrated the movement of children and others from Central American countries beset by violence and poverty.

“The federal government is just absolutely failing,” he said. “You either have an incredibly inept administration or they’re in on this somehow or another. I mean, I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean, how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort?”

Called on that statement later by ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, he insisted that the border crisis, from the administration’s perspective, meant that “you are either inept or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from.”

In Perry’s ongoing national tour, he has emphasized areas where his views and record are most akin to Republicans at large. He has talked up job gains in Texas, reiterated his conservative views on gays and other issues, and exhorted  his belief in a government that is small and based in the states, not D.C.

His odds in 2016 would seem to be long; the path from laughingstock to front-runner is rocky and circuitous. But the Republican field is replete with potential candidates whose upsides are negated at least in part by substantial downsides. And now Perry has a chance, if he can navigate it, to return to his party’s good graces on an issue that proved a big part of his undoing last time out.

It may have been with a modicum of personal hope that Perry made a point during a House committee hearing last week in McAllen, Texas. If politicians don’t secure the border, he said, “the American people will address this in a number of ways, electorally and otherwise.”