NEWTON, Iowa -- Well, this didn't end well.

It was the second stop on Joni Ernst's Just One Thing, 24-hour, Wingnuts Over Iowa Tour. It had begun that morning in Ankeny, at a bagel shop, and it had wound itself up through the sprawling, autumn-browned landscape up to the Newton Manufacturing Company, a century-old firm specializing in the production of promotional detritus for other businesses, large and small. If you're a feed company in Iowa, and your marketing team desperately needs bottle openers with your company's logo on them, this is the number to call. Ernst was joined at the plant by incumbent Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who is ahead by a couple of dozen lengths, and by a gaggle of other candidates for other offices, including the intriguingly monickered Dr. Marianette Miller-Meeks, who has no strings to hold her down, to make her fret or to make her frown, and who is running for Congress despite the fact that the local Tea Party folks don't trust her, possibly because she's a doctor, and you know how those people are. Anyway, Ernst was clearly the star of the proceedings, and she was sailing through her stump speech when she said this:

"A couple of weeks ago," she said, "I finished up our 99-county tour. I visited all 99 counties of Iowa, and Iowans are telling me that Washington, D.C. is not working. That the president's failed policies are not working. Congressman [Bruce] Braley's perpetuation of these policies are not working. The higher taxes, the greater spending, the rising national debt, the insecurities we are facing in foreign policy and military affairs because we have and apathetic president who, like Congressman Braley, refuses to lead."

That was a new one, I admit. Over the past six years, I've heard Republican candidates tear up the language trying to come up with polite synonyms for "lazy," when they weren't trying to come up with polite synonyms for "uppity." But "apathetic" is one I hadn't heard before. Taken literally, it meant not that the president was incompetent to do his job, or even that he was too indolent to do his job, but that he didn't care enough, for the country and its people, to do his job. It would be interesting to know if Ernst meant that as well so, when she came to the back of the hall for a brief press gaggle, I asked her about it.

"He is just standing back and letting things happen," she explained. "He is very re-active, rather than pro-active. The same as with ISIS. He dismissed ISIS as a junior-varsity team and, if he'd only listened to his military advisors, and his own Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, he would have known it was a serious threat."

OK, that's an opinion. I don't necessarily agree, and it certainly doesn't bespeak apathy so much as it bespeaks, in Ernst's formulation, a mistake in judgment. But then she went on to her second example, and the trolley went off the rails entirely.

"With Ebola, we see he's very hands-off. He's not leading. He's not leeeaaading," she said, drawing out that last word like a conjurer casting a spell. I suggested to her that, well, at that moment, one person in America -- Dr. Craig Spencer -- had Ebola. Her eyes went hard, like the wheels of a slot machine fastening on tilt.

"Well, you're the press. That's your opinion."

Say what?

"But that's not an opinion. It's a fact. Only one person in America has Ebola."

"But he's not a leeaader," Ernst said, again. "What he can do is make sure that all of those agencies are coordinating together and make sure that he is sharing that information with the American people, that he cares about their safety."

Ah, I thought. We are finally back to the conventional definition of "apathetic." This was what I'd wanted to know in the first place.

"So he doesn't care about the people with the disease?" I asked.

"I don't know that he does. He hasn't demonstrated that. I'm sorry. I'm done. Anybody else?"

And then she was off. She had 21 more hours to go.

***

I can tell you one thing. She's got the handshake down pat. Firm, confident, eyes meeting yours squarely. We had met briefly that morning, at C. J.'s Bagel Basket in Ankeny when she thought I was a supporter, come out before dawn to help her kickoff the final 24-hour campaign binge. (That'll teach me to put my notebook down.) She is a very talented, and very formidable retail politician, who has risen from obscurity, and from the far ideological frontier of Republican conservatism, to stand one very small step from replacing in the Senate Tom Harkin, the last true New Dealer, and the last of the liberal lions. She has sold herself, and done it very well.

"I've been a Young Republican since I was at the University of Iowa," said Harry Reid, perhaps the single most ironic of Ernst's supporters, as the crowd thinned out at C.J.'s. Reid's been with the campaign from the very beginning and, by now, he's a running gag at events. Ernst loves to introduce him around the crowd. "Still a Republican, always have been. I just knew that she cared about people. I saw, and I felt that, immediately."

She also has been helped immeasurably by her opponent. Braley has run a campaign that is a masterpiece of bumfuzzlement from start to finish and, not long before the bagel shop opened, Harkin himself had contributed to the general hash by comparing Ernst to Taylor Swift.

"In this Senate race, I've been watching some of these ads. And there's sort of this sense that. Well, I hear so much about Joni Ernst. She is really attractive, and she sounds nice. Well, I got to thinking about that. I don't care if she's as good looking as Taylor Swift or as nice as Mr. Rogers, but if she votes like Michele Bachmann, she's wrong for the state of Iowa."

How is this stupid? Let me count the ways. On the day before the election, when two new polls showed the race a dead heat, as opposed to that Des Moines Register poll showing Ernst up by an improbable seven points, Braley had to spend the entire day choosing whether to distance himself from the beloved old warhorse he happened to be traveling with, or explaining how what Harkin said about Ernst doesn't represent his own views. In either case, he was spending his last 24 hours talking about anything except what he wanted to talk about. Meanwhile, Ernst got to play the victim-of-sexism card, which she did with considerable aplomb because, well, she was.

"I was offended, yes," she said. "To be compared to Taylor Swift? I guess that's OK, though, because she's a very successful woman. It's absurd. If my name were John Ernst, and I were a guy, he wouldn't be saying those things. So, it's offensive to think that I can be a conservative and for him not to consider me woman enough, I don't know. I'm confused by their message."

By contrast, Ernst's campaign deftly has managed to soft-pedal her long history of loopy conservatism (Agenda 21? Really?) by whispering the conjuring words -- "leadership," "values," "the Iowa way" -- over and over again, until enough banality is summoned up to mask what she really thinks, and what she really believes, and what she doesn't know, and what she likely will do if she is elected. She doesn't know what she doesn't know but, by now, you're going to need four-point restraints and a tanker truck full of sodium pentothal to get her to tell you what she doesn't know. It's why she ducked, not only the editorial board of the Register, but every newspaper in the state. You live within the character that the events of the campaign create, and you control that process the best you can, and you don't get into fights with your neighbor about chickens -- or, at the very least, you know how to handle it if it ever comes up.

Watching her work a room here at the end of the campaign is, may Baal forgive me, not unlike seeing Doctor Professor Warren down the stretch in 2012. She has learned well, and learned fast. If Joni Ernst wins on Tuesday, it will not be as a repudiation of the president, or of Democratic policies. It will not be as a triumph for conservative ideas, or even of the values of The Iowa Way. If Joni Ernst wins on Tuesday, it will be a victory for the traditional craft of building a candidate and then building the best narrative within which that candidate can succeed. If Joni Ernst wins, it will be a triumph, at last, not of leadership, but of the most basic politics.

UPDATE -- Greetings to Mr. and Mrs. Intertoobz and all the ships at sea. Unforgivably, I neglected to include Ernst's rather epic answer to a follow-up question from Ben Terris of the Washington Post who wanted to know how the president could be "apathetic" and, at the same time, be dictatorial. Her answer is as follows:

"That's where he is a leader. So many of the actions that he proposes taking are actions that should be done by Congress. Not by the president. He is our executive. He is our leader. He is our president. Congress should be making the legislative actions."

This is a fact: There is one person in America with Ebola.

This is my opinion: There is one more person in America with Ebola than there are people who understand what in the name of John C. Calhoun's eyebrows she's talking about here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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