Is Rick Perry too mean?

Kevin Drum (a committed liberal partisan) thinks so: "He's too mean. He'll have a hard time pretending he's any kind of compassionate conservative, and outside of Texas you still need a bit of that. Aside from being politically ruthless and famous for holding grudges, Perry's the kind of guy who almost certainly executed an innocent man, never pretended to care about it, and brazenly disbanded a commission investigating it. This famously produced the following quote in a 2010 focus group: “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.” In Texas, maybe that works. In the rest of the country, not so much." That's quite a charge. Perry is certainly ruthless, but so are a lot of pols (even Obama when he needs to be). But is he fundamentally mean? I dunno. That's too broad a term for me. Does Drum mean petty, unkind, cruel, spiteful, malicious? Which is it? Assuming Perry is not into malice (which would be a problem), I'd be more concerned about his penchant for holding grudges. The last guy with that pathology was Richard Nixon. And we paid a high price for it.