This -- and not a flashy bus tour to overshadow a former staffer's devastating expose and to reinforce her inexplicable Foxie popularity -- is what a presidential candidate sounds like:
We already have a hired staff in South Carolina, in New Hampshire, in Iowa — we have people on the ground ...
which was preceded by ...
The announcement will be made in Iowa, and it will be made in Waterloo and we’ll give you the date and the time.
In one sense Michele Bachmann is running a bit behind schedule: she has yet to ensnare the media into a fiery investigation of "anti-American" members of Congress. On the other hand, her subterranean efforts to snap off a huge chunk of the disoriented, discombobulated and frankly disturbed GOP and from it someday create a distinct Tea Party are bubbling along quite nicely.
I once briefly worked for a fellow who was perhaps America's most pretentious, pseudo-intellectual fop ever (the relevance of this sentence will be shown momentarily). He, one day, about some insignificant matter I don't recall, bellowed disagreeably to a colleague: This will not obtain. At the time I couldn't suppress a guffaw or keep the coffee out of my nose, at any rate I have retained that quote for an opportune moment such as this: In Michele Bachmann's steeping tea-party brain, This -- any residual GOP Establishment -- will not obtain.
She's on a hallucinatory mission of an ideologically cleansed America in which not only liberals hold no power, but stuffy conventionalists like Mitt Romney of, shall we say, ideological flexibility hold none within the GOP as well. But that of course is a mission impossible, organizationally and electorally speaking, hence Bachmann -- who, like Palin, clearly has no interest in actual governing -- ultimately will devote her messianic passions to a third-party Creation.
Amid the intriguing underbrush of this speculation is that Iowa's GOP establishment, such as it is, would likely cheer on the likes of a Michele Bachmann -- elsewhere; that is, in some other party. For it's beginning to sense nothing but doom for its caucuses' preeminence. As Politico reported yesterday:
Leading Iowa GOP officials worry that after 2008 — when John McCain won the GOP nomination despite finishing fourth in Iowa — a victory by a deeply conservative candidate who doesn’t ultimately become the nominee could sound a death knell for the Republican caucuses, encouraging any establishment governor or senator to stay away from the caucuses in the future for fear the vote is controlled by the most ideological elements of the party.
As if to confirm the Tories' prognosis of Iowa's coming irrelevance, if something's not done and done soon, there was this inspired derangement from one Jeff Jorgensen, chairman of the Pottawattamie County GOP:
In our area, in western Iowa, the story that is being missed is Herman Cain.... I think he’s going do very well at the caucuses.
The hell of it is, Jeff is probably right; and if not Cain, then a Santorum or a Bachmann or, if she were running, a Palin.
These, for now, are the ideological extras -- not authentic political stars -- who are stealing Iowa's show. And this, as one prodigiously pretentious fop once said, will not obtain.
Not much longer. By 2016, I'd wager, the GOP's ideological runoff will, well, run off or be chased off into third-party status, since the GOP Establishment simply cannot survive its internal extortions of the tea party's killing positions, such as killing Medicare.