Steve Deace--the Iowa talk radio host whom you've probably seen on cable news, always bewailing and weeping and grieving over his party's utter lack of real conservative direction--reveals his and his party's lack of conservative direction:
I don’t think you can underestimate how big of a moment this was. If the Iowa Caucuses were tomorrow, [Rand Paul] would win in a landslide.
All because Paul stood for 13 hours on the Senate floor this week and strongly suggested--through that ancient political gag of repeatedly insisting he was not suggesting--that President Obama might drone-whack you tonight as you're sipping a Schlitz in your humble bungaloo, and merely because you once raised a banner at a tea party rally.
Paul both did and did not depict a White House of such creeping despotism and galloping caprice that the Justice department was uncharacteristically reduced to bemused, almost comic brevity.
Here and there, Paul's grandstanding did manage to ask a coherent question or make a valid point. Yet because Paul is a registered lobbyist for the Bluegrass Institute for Demagogic Incoherence, whatever validity he gripped got washed away in his tub-thumping hysteria. Of all the potential paladins of a righteously distrustful movement against growing executive power, Paul is the least plausible candidate because of his irrepressible tendency to reductio ad absurdum.
Despite all this, or rather because of all this, "If the Iowa Caucuses were tomorrow, [Rand Paul] would win in a landslide." And Steve Deace is probably correct, mostly because Sen. Paul has no more intelligible idea of what he's talking about than does the Republican base, which Paul--and this, again, is typical--believes is located "in all the solidly red states throughout the middle of the country." Not the South, mind you, but the middle. It is there, according to Paul, that the GOP has its "good, solid niche."
Put it all together--the muddleheadedness, the stirring but vapid rhetoric, a colossally simplistic worldview and a stunning misapprehension of macroeconomics--and indeed you just might have yourself a GOP frontrunner in every caucus and primary from Iowa to the planet Demento. Then, in 2017, all the Steve Deaces would be back to bewailing and weeping and grieving over their party's utter lack of real conservative direction.