Although Iowa's Republican governor Terry Branstad regards Mike Huckabee as the state's caucusing "favorite," he'd also just love to see, he recently said in all apparent seriousness, a Palin-Bachmann contest.
"If Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann participate," Branstad told PBS last weekend, "this could break all records and could get to be really really wide open and very interesting."
In short, even Iowa's governor no longer pretends the state's caucuses -- and by extension, subsequent GOP caucuses and primaries -- are about thoughtful policy differences or, for that matter, any policy at all. They are instead an open and flagrant freakshow, or so Branstad hopes, good for tourism and curiosity-seeking, but little to nothing else.
Which brings me, in turn, to Karl Rove's much buzzed about interview with New York magazine.
Rove may be a villainous racketeer, a blackhearted scoundrel, a reptilian myrmidon, but the man has vividly seen the future of the Republican Party, if, that is, it's packed with the purely self-promotional and isolated likes of a Sarah Palin.
"Rove is skeptical of Palin’s TV show as a smart political move," writes the magazine's Joe Hagan, "but he’s just as disgusted that Palin didn’t go to Delaware to support O’Donnell’s candidacy." And then a Rove quote, more aggressively critical than any I've ever read from an insider about one of his party's wannabes:
"And why? Cause she’s off for God knows how many weeks, during the summer of a vital election year, in which candidates and party organizations are crying for her presence in races in order to raise money and visibility, and she’s spending -- whatever -- June, July, August, in Alaska doing a travelogue reality show."
Added Rove, more to his relevant point: "Some of her people have talked to me and said, 'Look, the old rules don’t apply.' In essence, the candidate is the message. We’ll see. That’s an interesting view, and we’ll see how accurate it is."
I suspect Rove sees what I see, and it's frightful. It's also nothing new, notwithstanding how many times a Palin or Bachmann or some other wingnut of the right insists he or she has reinvented the political wheel.
This is but old-fashioned populism of the rebarbative demagogue sort, straight out of the turn-of-the-last-century Democratic South -- courtesy the "Pitchfork" Tillmans and the James Kimble Vardamans, all of whom argued, as today's Palins do, that their power, as New York magazine put it, is "bottom-up, divorced from the top-down organizing structures."
In reality there was of course no "bottom-up" power; the demagogues dangled and the multitudes snatched whatever prodigious imbecilities the former had to offer. There was little party structure to temper "the message" and in the process smooth its rough edges and broadly democratize it. Theirs was all about tribalism, hatred, and division.
Rove's most-admired political era was that of William McKinley's. I'm sure he never suspected that he, as the modern Mark Hanna, would someday find himself battling that other party, from within.