The only newsworthiness to come out of the most newsworthy political event of last week was the remarkable lack of anything new. While it's true that Scott Walker finally proved he can deliver a speech without transporting his audience to Oz's field of poppies, and while it may also be true that that's news in its own Colbertian newsiness sort of way, the Iowa Freedom Summit was but a tedious replay of the far right's eternal unhappiness. Speaker after speaker sought to fill the assemblage's grim void with rousing, make-believe bombast about the triumphal corner they're about to turn, but speaker after speaker has been performing the selfsame act since at least 1964.
The patsies just never tire of it, they never lose grip of the proffered fantasy: that somehow, someday America will return to a savage, Gilded Age thunderdome of fierce Hayekianism, blessed by a national Christianity bereft of its Social Gospel. They're on a bizarre holiday from reality, and their tour guides aren't about to slap them awake. The latter see profit in further deluding the pre-deluded.
That's the most unfathomable angle to this particular traveling circus. While most of the Summit's speakers — Cruz, Carson, Perry, Trump, Santorum, Palin, Huckabee — are as self-hornswoggled as the far-right multitude, others — Walker and Christie — are conspicuously aware enough to know where the reddest of brick roads leads: to an electoral abyss. Still, they pander — Walker, vaguely, Christie, delicately — which will doom them down the road, in the general election.
Which is precisely why Jeb Bush should have joined Saturday's circus. He has already conceded that he must lose the primary to win the general, which is a profound paradox of the highest Republican truth. Steve King's summitry spectacle was Bush's prime opportunity to slap the crowd that will never vote for him anyway — to at least gently remind them that Common Core is no communist conspiracy, and self-deportation is rather unlikely to catch on — and thereby appeal to those rank-and-file Republicans who haven't completely lost their minds.
Why should Bush have taken the risk? Because it wouldn't have been a risk at all; because he already knows that a nomination achieved by schmoozing King's crowd is a nomination not worth achieving — because such a nomination is a sure, general-election loser. Better to lose in the first half of 2016 than squander another half-year in a punishing gauntlet of no ultimate material value.