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Rick Perry has ended his quest for the presidency. After gaining early momentum and rocketing to the top of the RCP Average -- at one point he led Mitt Romney by 12 points -- a series of poor debates performances and gaffes effectively ended his bid by mid-November.

Still, he plodded on through a fifth-place finish in Iowa and a dismal showing in New Hampshire -- where he barely doubled Buddy Roemer's vote share -- because he still had a shot at regaining some momentum. Had Jon Huntsman taken down Romney in New Hampshire, had Perry performed just a few points better in Iowa, or had Newt Gingrich destroyed both himself and Romney with his attacks in South Carolina, the Texas governor’s chances could have suddenly brightened.

But none of these came to pass. Aside from the obvious, I think there are really only two takeaways here:

1) Running for president is not something you just do on the fly. I take Perry at face value when he says that he hadn’t really thought much about running before actually getting into the race. I suspect that, at some point in June or July, advisers began to tell him it would be a cakewalk to the nomination, given the weak GOP field. And given President Obama’s poor poll numbers, the presidency would be his. After being told that the prize was about to fall into his lap, who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to claim it?

If Perry had actually planned and prepared for this run, things could well have gone much differently for him. His debate performances steadily improved over the course of the season, to the point where he was a credible debater at the end. Had Perry taken the route of most presidential aspirants, building up an organization over time and carefully preparing to run, he may have been able to perform well earlier in the debate cycle. Had that occurred, there’s a reasonable chance that he would now be the front-runner.

It wasn’t just the lack of debate preparation, however. Running for the presidency requires careful planning on one’s positions -- and the messages to support those positions -- on a wide variety of issues, particularly those that rarely come up in state government. And it requires preparing for very different electorates than those found in Texas.

For example, had Perry joined the fray in April or May, he certainly would have had a different position on the DREAM Act than his assertion that opposition to granting in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants was “heartless.” More importantly, he would have rehearsed the list of Cabinet agencies he hoped to dismantle so many times in stump speeches that there would have been no “oops” moment on the debate stage.

Instead, Perry joins Fred Thompson and Wesley Clark on the growing list of late entrants whose best days as a candidate were their first days as a candidate. Hopefully he will serve as a warning sign to future credible candidates who consider putting off their day of declaration.

2) Perry ran with the wrong message. This is clearly secondary to the first observation, but there’s some evidence that, if Perry was hoping to make a stand in South Carolina, he was doing so with the wrong message.

I’ve mentioned Evolving Strategies before, a D.C. consultant group that does some really interesting online “experiments,” which are similar to focus groups. As attention began to shift to South Carolina, Evolving Strategies tested a number of advertisements. Basically, participants were shown a single Perry ad, then asked to rank him in the candidate field. The advertisement, titled “Values,” emphasized his socially conservative bona fides, but did very little to move him up in rank. This was the message the campaign used in South Carolina. It shouldn’t be surprising that it did not work there, a state that is roughly between Iowa and New Hampshire in terms of ideology.

Another Perry ad, “Leno,” which sought to explain away his debate “oops,” did a little better in the Evolving Strategies experiment. What it also found was that Perry did the best when he ran an advertisement emphasizing his outsider status (the ad was appropriately named “Outsider”). Seeing this spot increased the probability that Perry would be named first by over 10 percent of a viewing audience and put him in a near-tie with Romney and Newt Gingrich.

Would leading with a different message have been enough to put Perry in the drivers’ seat? Probably not, but it may have allowed him to leave the race on a bit of a higher note. And remember, even this failing is a manifestation of a campaign put together on the fly; with more preparation time, his staff surely would have had a better chance of discovering which messages worked best, and which ones didn’t.