Now that Rick Perry appears to be on the verge of declaring his candidacy for the Republican nomination and has already settled into the second-place slot in the polls behind Mitt Romney, some of the commentary has turned to how these two candidates feel about each other. The verdict: not exactly warm and fuzzy.

From today’s Austin American-Statesman:

A heated 2006 conversation in Austin is often recounted in Perry circles. Romney was the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and had hired TV adman Alex Castellanos to help Republican candidates across the country.

Perry didn’t like that because Castellanos was also a key player in Carole Keeton Strayhorn’s inner circle. Strayhorn, a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent, was running against Perry that year. Perry and his camp wondered why the Republican Governors Association would hire someone who was trying to beat a Republican governor. But Romney kept Castellanos on board and hired him again to work on his 2008 presidential campaign.

The next year, Perry snubbed Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential field by endorsing former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. And then he singled out Romney for criticism in his 2008 book about the Boy Scouts, On My Honor.

But upon close inspection, how much is really here? There is certainly something to the first issue, of Romney hiring Castellanos while the latter was working against Perry during an election. I would imagine that would produce a bitter memory for Perry, and understandably so. But the other two leave me unconvinced. Notice how the author writes Perry snubbed Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential field by endorsing Giuliani. Was there any reason to assume Perry might endorse Romney? I don’t think so.

This doesn’t have much in common with Charlie Crist’s shenanigans in the 2008 election in which he promised to endorse Giuliani, then said he’d either endorse Giuliani or no one at all, then endorsed John McCain. But Rick Perry is no Charlie Crist–something for which the conservative movement is quite appreciative.

The Boy Scouts issue is actually an interesting one considering the scrutiny Perry has received for his stance on gay marriage–he supports the right of the states to legalize it, but would also support a constitutional amendment opposing it. The Boy Scouts were apparently excluded from volunteering in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics–when Romney was at the helm–and Perry speculated this might be because the Scouts had recently won a court battle to ban openly gay Scout leaders, and Romney was defending gay groups’ interests by not allowing the Scouts to participate.

But as the Statesman notes, Romney told the Scouts–confirmed by a Scout leader at the time–they could help in many ways, but many of them were under the requisite age for volunteering for certain roles. It was from those roles they were being excluded.

One additional footnote on the Romney-Perry battle: Romney today picked up the support of Ambassador Mary Kramer, an Iowa Republican who was George W. Bush’s envoy to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. This led Ben Smith to relay a story from Kramer’s memoirs, in which her replacement as ambassador demanded she vacate the premises quickly, forcing Kramer to break commitments she had already made. That replacement was Mary Ourisman, a Republican donor who was, Smith notes, “recently sighted at a Perry event.”