In the tenth paragraph of a page A15 Times piece, Rick Santorum accuses Barack Obama of engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.” What are they? The article doesn’t say. The quote appears without explanation or comment, in an article entitled “Santorum’s Challenge: Broaden His Appeal Beyond Evangelical Christians.” Nor does the line show up anywhere else on the Web—apparently no reporter in the mob following the candidates through the last days before the Iowa caucuses thought it worth writing down, and no blogger thought it worth repeating. It was just a throwaway line, a hunk of spoiled red meat tossed at the crowd in a Sioux City coffee shop, no more newsworthy than saying, “It’s a great day to be an Iowan!” And the crowd ate it up, applauding lustily. According to the Times, Santorum, surging in the polls, “became emotional at times.” He “wore a beaming smile on his face.” He said that he was running for his children’s sake. A supporter from a nearby town said that he liked Santorum for his avoidance of hyperbole: “Santorum doesn’t make crazy statements.”

Several things are worth noting here. The first is that, in today’s Republican politics, one reliable way to reach beyond the Christian base is by whipping up nationalistic hysteria with language lifted straight from the McCarthy era. If criminalizing all abortions and nullifying all gay marriages are a little too sectarian for you, surely you’d like to try some old-fashioned traitor-hunting. (Santorum has also accused Obama of “sid[ing] with evil” in Iran, a country with which he plainly wants to go to war.)

The second is that this kind of gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it’s not worth a political journalist’s time to point it out. In 2008, when Michele Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-American, there was a flurry of criticism; three years later, when a surging Presidential candidate states it flatly about a sitting President, there’s no response at all. Certain forms of deterioration—like writers using “impact” as a verb, or basketball coaches screaming about every foul—become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they’re wrong.

And the third, related point is that, once demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.

I’m as interested as anyone in who will win, place, and show in Iowa; and whether Santorum’s surge can last or he’ll go the way of Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich; and whether South Carolina will be Gingrich’s firewall or his grave; and whether Romney will wrap it up in Florida or find himself in a trench war with one or two surviving conservatives; and whether Ron Paul can hold on till Tampa and make the convention interesting. (It would be too much to expect a brokered convention, though every four years someone predicts one. The last was sixty years ago, when the Democrats in Chicago finally chose Adlai Stevenson.) This is what makes campaigns fun. No one can accuse the Republicans of failing to deliver in the departments of horse race and spectacle, and I’m with Ryan Lizza—I want it to last longer.

But political journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers? On the other hand, there’s an endless appetite for stories about Santorum’s effort to reach out beyond his evangelical base, or Gingrich playing the expectations game in Iowa. This stuff is political candy.

The great puzzle of the Republican campaign is that, in an era of unprecedented ideological fervor, the party will almost certainly nominate the candidate who is the blandest, least ideological, and least trusted by conservatives of them all (that would be Mitt Romney—Jon Huntsman doesn’t count as long as he’s in the low single digits). The reasons for this are not easy to see, and in some ways they’re fluky. Romney, forever stuck at twenty-five per cent, understands his situation acutely, and he’s telling anyone in Iowa who will listen that he loves America, prays and reads Scripture (while wishing he did it more), hates illegal immigrants as much as the next guy, and thinks that Obama has destroyed this country at home and abroad. Romney is like an actor who normally does investment commercials and is improbably cast in an ad for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He’s doing a credible job playing an intellectual thug, because that’s the only way to win the nomination.

It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he’s elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn’t let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.