The NY Times, observing the symptomatic Ron Paul phenomenon:
His campaign, which has won a number of straw polls and is picking up momentum, has demonstrated its ability to organize and mobilize supporters, which is particularly relevant in Iowa.
A state which is particularly irrelevant. And growing more irrelevant to the nation each election cycle. Because it is unrepresentative of the American body politic. So unrepresentative, its caucus habitually hands victories to losers and losses to victors. See, most recently, Huckabee, McCain.
For the GOP, Iowa is the clearinghouse of insurgents, radicals, and the ideologically incurable. It is the asylum that gives hope to the doomed -- the Michele Bachmanns -- and a sigh to the preordained -- the Mitt Romneys.
For serious Republican presidential aspirants, Iowa is both essentially irrelevant in the selection process and, conceivably, the GOP's future. Which is to say, death. It is a microcosm of fracturing sensibilities, a pressure cooker of petty prejudices, a busy nest of blithe ignorance, an unresurrecting graveyard of spooky fundamentalists, a loony bin of economic libertarians. Iowa is the JOHN HANCOCK of the GOP's plucky declaration of rampaging dementia.
For now, Iowa's freakshow of Pauls, Cains, Bachmanns and Gingriches seems containable; that is, it has yet to hammer immovable stakes in the still-relevant primary and caucus tents of the continental U.S. So a Romney can bypass the spectacle and still star in the show. Yet with each cycle the Iowan diaspora becomes, paradoxically, while more and more irrelevant, more pronounced; the Cains become more competitive in the New Hampshires, and the guiding consumers of once-hopeless insurgencies, of pestilential radicalism and ideological incurabilities become ... the base. The only base.
Hence there is, in the sublime mathematics of electoral politics, likely no way the Republican Party can stay on this course and remain a national player; one within the two-party system. I suspect 2012 will be the GOP's 21st-century watershed -- the causation of 2013's revanchism, authentic conservatives retaking authentic conservatism. A formal Tea Party, the scattered precursor of which has already captured the delusional imagination of pseudoconservatism's third-party species, will erupt and in shorter order flame out, a victim of incoherent infighting.
Or I'm wrong, and we're all in much bigger trouble than we ever imagined. But, that I doubt. If America's political history were one of ideological instability and revolutionary ruptures, I wouldn't, but it isn't, so I do.