The Des Moines Register has anointed Terry Branstad as the likely winner of the 2010 GOP gubernatorial nomination. He’s got the money, 300 county chairs, and name recognition in early polls of likely Replutocratic voters. There is just one problem. Terry is already road kill on the Highway to Heaven in Iowa. The Christian Taliban, know-nothings, gun nuts, Palin-drones, tea baggers, and Obama-haters are never going to vote for a tax-and-spend business conservative like Branstad.

Bob Vander Plaats will be the Replutocratic nominee for governor, or he will run against Branstad and Culver as the “true conservative” candidate in Nov. 2010.  Vander Plaats has the endorsement of 2008 Iowa Caucus winner and guitar-strumming preacher Mike Huckabee; television tough guy and beard model Chuck Norris; and most importantly, the Iowa Family Policy Center PAC.

In Steven King’s “The Dead Zone,” his clairvoyant character foresees a slick presidential candidate starting a Christian nuclear war when they shake hands. I’ve met Bob Vander Plaats and shaken his hand. He’s upbeat and personable, but I got a glimpse of his hoped-for future – subservient women in modest garb, children force-fed creationist claptrap in school, and of course that ultra-conservative Jesus Christ reigning from Des Moines. It still sends a shiver down my spine.

Branstad is running a state-of-the-art 1980s campaign – tapping 300 establishment Replutocrats across Iowa as county chair-warmers, vacuuming in money from the party establishment, and trumpeting 30-year-old economic nostrums for Iowa’s 21st century problems.  By contrast, Bob Vander Plaats writes a blog, is tied into the national conservative propaganda and fund raising behemoth, and understands that the paramount issue in recession-ridden Iowa is gay marriage bashing.

It’s hard to come up with the best metaphor to describe Terry. Is he Rip Van Branstad, waking up after a 12-year nap and tripping over his beard in an effort to attract rabid extremists? Is he a caveman, defrosted from the political ice and ready to work with Joy Corning and all those other traditional Republicans to really get Iowa moving again? Or is he the last of the great Whig politicians, mouthing irrelevant platitudes in a world that has left him behind?

Branstad is an old-timey, main street Republican who pays lip service to right-wing kooks when he has to, but who does not understand that he is now as helpless as a toddler wearing water wings while swimming in the riptide of extremism, willful ignorance, and Astroturf populism that defines the current GOP. His management of Iowa in the 1980s is of no interest to tea baggers today. Can you picture Rush Limbaugh championing Branstad and his love of the sales tax? Or Sarah Palin popping in to say that she and Terry can see Heaven from his porch?

In the unlikely event that Branstad scrapes by in the Republican primary, he will face both Culver and Vander Plaats in the fall. Vander Plaats has not promised he will support the GOP nominee, or ruled out a run as an independent conservative.  The Iowa Family Policy Center has flatly stated it will not support Terry if he wins the primary. Speaking in Des Moines at an Iowa Family Policy Center PAC rally, Danny Carroll, a former Republican legislator who is chairman of the PAC’s board of directors, denounced the GOP during a statehouse rally.  “Now is the time for people who care deeply about a Christian world view to be heard. Now is the time to put principle, Biblical principle, before political parties” (Des Moines Register).

 ~ Duncan Stewart would be a pillar of salt in Vander Plaats’ Iowa.