ELIANA JOHNSON: Rick Perry Rides Again: And it looks like he’s ready.

Perry likes to say that America loves second chances, and he is doing everything to ensure that his encore on the national stage bears little resemblance to his debut, which was marked by missteps and a lack of careful planning from beginning to end. He wasn’t prepared to talk about national issues; his team missed a deadline to qualify for the Virginia primary; and he was hopped up on medication from recent back surgery.

Where there was once chaos, now there is order. In Austin on Wednesday, in the nondescript offices serving as his nascent campaign headquarters, Perry was all focus, sequestered in a conference room, headphones in place, to practice his farewell speech. . . .

Thursday’s speech will offer a preview of the Perry presidential platform. The gun-slinging wild guy who once raised the specter of secession now sounds more like a sober and experienced old hand, though the tea-party sensibilities that excite the party’s base are still there. He is the longest-serving governor in Texas history and has one of the strongest records in the country. Greg Abbott, the state’s newly elected Republican governor, will be handed “as dynamic an economy as any state in the nation,” Perry tells me.

Not lost on the audience, on Thursday or in the future, will be the fact that Texas’s economic success has occurred as the American economy remained sluggish for much of the Obama era.

Indeed it has. Plus:

Over a thousand people a day have been moving to Texas, where the unemployment rate is under 5 percent. His economic reforms were “controversial among those who wrote opinion columns and hired swarms of lobbyists,” Perry will say. “But it wasn’t controversial for the trucker or the waitress, the farmer or the nurse, the quiet majority that feels over-billed and taxed to death.”

Stay tuned.