an “entertainer,” as King said when introducing the reality television personality.
In fact, this was an insult to the future president. Whereas Trump actually spoke of policy, however fleetingly and unintelligibly, the former Alaska governor delivered a speech that was incoherent bordering on clinically insane.
“GOP leaders, by the way, y’know the man can only ride ya when your back is bent,” Palin said. “So strengthen it. Then the man can’t ride ya. America won’t be taken for a ride.”5
At another point, Palin remarked, “When will they let us control our own care? When will they do to stop causing our pain, and start feeling it again? Well, in other words, um . . . is Hillary a new Democrat or an old one? Now, the press asks, the press asks, ‘Can anyone stop Hillary?’ Again, this is to forego a conclusion, right, it’s to scare us off, to convince that—a pantsuit can crush patriots?”
It was an appalling display from the person whom John McCain had proposed to place one heartbeat away from the presidency. With much of the national media and GOP consultant class assembled in Des Moines for the event, Palin’s crackpot appearance became the talk of the town. Even her staunchest defenders on the right wondered aloud whether something had gone wrong, seriously wrong, for the vice-presidential nominee turned carnival barker.
CELEBRITY ENTERTAINMENT NOTWITHSTANDING, THE STARS OF THE day were Scott Walker and Ted Cruz.
Walker, the Wisconsin governor who had crushed the state’s unions (only to survive a recall election in 2012 and then win a full second term in 2014) put to rest doubts about his political skills. He reminded the Republican faithful of a salient fact: While the national spotlight fixated on the GOP’s dysfunction in Washington, its governors and state legislatures were acting as highly effective and fiercely partisan laboratories of democracy, churning out tax cuts, balanced budgets, deregulated state economies, and expanded school-choice programs.
(Left unmentioned were the party’s more distressing ignominies out in the provinces. This included Michigan governor Rick Snyder’s negligent management of Flint, a once-thriving city placed under state supervision after decades of industrial rot doomed the economy, only for its drinking water to be inadvertently poisoned as the result of a cost-cutting maneuver.)
Walker gave a spirited and commanding talk, weaving mention of his Iowa upbringing into a tale of his clashes with the left in Wisconsin and the blueprint they provided for reclaiming the White House in 2016. Once viewed by the national political class as too bland to be considered a serious contender, with a single speech Walker had vaulted into top-tier status.
And then there was Cruz. Nobody arrived in Iowa with higher expectations. Not only had his campaign-in-waiting been working the state hard, recruiting volunteers and hunting for high-profile endorsements, but Cruz’s celebrity had soared during his brief time in Congress. Two years into his freshmen term, the Texas senator had replaced Jim DeMint as the right’s favorite street fighter in Washington, a man whose take-no-prisoners approach made him a hero to the grass roots nationwide. And Cruz had a unique Iowa advantage: Steve King.
He had worked the congressman hard from the day he arrived on Capitol Hill: long dinners, spontaneous coffees, countless bottles of red wine, even a pheasant-hunting expedition. (“Both of us popped our guns to our shoulders and shot simultaneously as if it were one bang,” King recounted afterward. “That pheasant folded in a cloud of feathers.”) King couldn’t announce his intentions just yet; remaining neutral would allow him to influence the race and build suspense, making his eventual endorsement all the more impactful. But the congressman was all-in on Cruz. Not since Ronald Reagan, King would whisper to his friends and allies, had conservatives seen someone of this talent.
Cruz was already operating under a strategic theory of the race: It would boil down to an establishment favorite and a conservative challenger. By merging two distinct lanes of the Republican electorate, evangelical Christians and Tea Party populists, behind his candidacy, he could emerge as the consensus anti-establishment candidate.
Previewing this pursuit, Cruz built his introductory speech to Iowans around paeans to his spirituality (at least a dozen of them) and denunciations of empty rhetoric from his fellow Republicans. “Talk is cheap,” Cruz warned the crowd. “The Word tells us, ‘You will know them by their fruit.’”
One conservative favorite and possible 2016 contender wasn’t in attendance: Mike Pence.
Like Rubio, he wasn’t keen to share a stage with King. Pence had, while in Congress, compiled a record of unquestioned conservatism on