WRITING about politics means spending a lot of time looking up from the front row of the auditorium as speakers on stage talk over your head. This in turn means becoming familiar with a place that most politicians keep hidden—the undefined region where the chin becomes the neck. I don’t know of a good word in English for this place: Russian has podbaradok, which translates as “under the beard” and could be borrowed if beards were not so rare at the top level of American politics. In a whole day of speeches at the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of conservative Christians in Ames, Iowa on August 9th, the only person with any facial hair was Iowa’s governor, Terry Branstad, who has a neat moustache. Processions of politicians giving stump speeches can prompt the mind to wander, partly because what is said is rarely original or changes anything very much. The exception to this norm is generally when a speaker challenges the assumptions of the audience and yet manages to win them over. Rick Santorum got closer to this than anyone else speaking inside the brutalist Stephens auditorium, which held the summit. In what has become a familiar theme, Mr Santorum told the hall that Republicans needed to stop harking back to Ronald Reagan, realise that the country has changed and work to broaden the party’s base.

Reagan nostalgia is still powerful stuff in today’s party. The parachuting nonagenarian, George H.W. Bush, does not move parts of the GOP who show up on a Saturday to hear Ted Cruz (pictured above), Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry. Mr Santorum’s moment seems to have passed, though. The other politicians who spoke were keen to assure the audience that everything would be fine. Mr Cruz, who is equipped with the most advanced reality-distorting field of any prominent Republican, gave a speech in which he said that conservatism was triumphing everywhere and that all Republicans needed to do was to stay true to their principles.

On the evidence of this showing, the attempt to graft disaffected libertarians onto the Republican coalition, an effort described by Robert Draper in the New York Times magazine, will be impossible, even for someone as persuasive as Rand Paul. Two speakers compared abortion unfavourably to the Holocaust (which claimed fewer lives). One, Rafael Cruz, the father of the Texan senator, linked the Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that limited school prayer to the spike in crime and general no-gooding in the 1970s and beyond. Conservative calls for more religious liberty along the lines of the Hobby Lobby decision do bear some resemblance to the kinds of things libertarians would like, but it is only superficial. The conservative appeal is for more liberty for certain groups. Libertarians care more about the liberty of individuals. The two are frequently in conflict, as when a company decides not to fund some types of contraception for its employees on religious grounds, and there is no tidy way of squaring that.

A more promising strategy for the GOP may be to find a candidate who appeals to business conservatives as much as cultural ones. One of the many interesting things in Pew’s recent report on political typologies, which tries to go beyond dividing the electorate up into left and right, is that “business conservatives” and “steadfast conservatives”, who between them make up almost 40% of the politically engaged electorate, do not agree on very much. Finding a candidate who can smooth over their differences will be crucial. And here, for me at least, was one surprise from the gathering. Mr Perry, who usually seems fairly relaxed even when he is not taking percocet or oxycontin, was able to get a crowd of values voters fired up. A colleague who has been watching Texas's governor for longer emails to say that this version of Mr Perry is not an innovation so much as a return to an earlier incarnation. If the GOP is looking for someone who goes over as well in Davos as in Des Moines, he could be a contender.

(Picture credit: AFP)