Gov. Rick Perry has riled up his base lately, and the chattering classes — political junkies, columnists and (yuck!) editorial writers — are trying to figure out why.

One of the most intriguing suggestions is that the governor is trying to move closer to the political center in hope of earning a spot on the next Republican presidential ticket. (The speculation is about the vice presidential nomination. No one — not even Perry, except in his wildest fantasies — can envision him in the top spot.)

Perry himself vigorously denies that theory. His top political consultant, Dave Carney, said the recent speculation about a possible Perry-for-vice-president campaign was “one of the most retarded things about the political observers in Texas,” a trenchant comment, but one that fails to answer the political question, “What have they done with Rick Perry, and who’s that wearing the expensive toupee?”

The governor, you see, has never strayed far from his socially conservative base. It is generally understood that his deepest loyalties lie with the more monied interests in the Republican Party, but he has been careful to maintain close ties to the more radical fringes of the social and religious right. Witness the time in 2005 when he famously invited all Texas veterans of the Iraq war who might be gay or lesbian to move somewhere else once they were done fighting for their country.

So it came as a surprise to many social conservatives when Perry issued an executive order recently that mandates inoculation of young Texas girls against a virus that can lead to cervical cancer. Likewise, his State of the State address before the Legislature suggested such things as selling off the state lottery in order to fund endowments for education, cancer research and health insurance coverage for more Texans.

A lot of the governor’s traditional supporters felt betrayed; a lot of his traditional critics were simply bumfuzzled.

Enter the pundits, who came up with the vice presidential theory.

It was a Texan, John Nance Garner, who once said the vice presidency “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” He was qualified to comment — he had served two agonizing terms as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s veep.

Garner had been a powerful man in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was speaker of the House and primed to make a run for the presidency himself when FDR steamrollered the 1932 Democratic convention and threw Garner the vice presidential spot on the ticket as a sop.

A lot of able and assertive men have chafed at serving as vice president, with good reason. Roosevelt condescended to Harry Truman; John Kennedy did the same to Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson seemed to delight in humiliating Hubert H. Humphrey.

Two kinds of vice presidents seem to survive the job with their pride intact. The first kind — the rare kind — is the vice president who is allowed to play significant roles in the administrations of his president. Al Gore and Dick Cheney are the most recent examples. The second kind are the political nonentities who realize that the obscurity of the vice presidency offers them the best political deal they will ever get. Think Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew, the latter of whom resigned in disgrace after accepting bribes in his vice presidential office.

We have no idea if Gov. Perry is angling for the vice presidential spot on the next Republican ticket, but we have a pretty good idea of what kind of vice president he would be.

A little below Quayle, a little above Agnew.