Hamline University poli sci prof Dave Schultz is a perfectly fine human being.  But it’d be a stretch to say he’s got the pulse of the GOP, much less its’ best interests in mind.

Over at Schultz’s Take, he writes about the straw poll:

Bachmann wins, Pawlenty is out. What do learn from the Iowa straw poll? Whatever political moderation existed in the Republican Party, it rapidly disappearing as the GOP is being remade in the image of Palin and Bachmann.

Schultz says that like it’s a bad thing.

OK, seriously, now?  Schultz is betraying just a bit of parochialism, here.  While personalities do indeed move the needle in politics – there’s a reason Michele Bachmann is a serious presidential candidate and Harry Reid isn’t – conservatism isn’t about personalities.  It’s about ideas.

So it’d be more accurate to say that the GOP is remaking itself in the image of Hayek and Goldwater.

And the talking heads who are moaning about the “death of moderation” in the GOP are being myopic at best, disingenuous at worst.

We’ll come back to that.

Schultz recaps the dynamics of Bachmann’s campaign and future outlook – you can read that over at his blog.

I called this post “Kael’s Take” for a reason:

Look beyond Bachmann. She received 28.6% of the vote, Paul 27.7%–together they accounted for 56% of the straw poll. These are two candidates who represent perhaps the most extreme agendas among the GOP field. Add to them Santorum who polled at 9.8% and one finds that nearly two-thirds of the straw poll went to what would appear to be non-mainstream candidates. Pawlenty, perhaps the most mainstream and establishment candidate who participated in the field, polled barely 14%.

Schultz, who teaches at Hamline, which is a reliably “progressive” echo chamber in the middle of Saint Paul (aka “Chicago on the Mississippi”) might be forgiven for thinking that Bachmann and Santorum aren’t “mainstream”…among Iowa Republicans who care enough about politics to drive to Ames on a gorgeous Saturday to vote. And Paul, nutter though he is, has at the core of his campaign plenty that resonates with an awful lot of mainstream libertarian-conservatives, myself included.

It’s because GOP activists, now, a year and a half away from the election, are doing what I wrote about three and a half years about in this space; staking out what they absolutely, positively want out of the party in 2012.  At this stage of the race, politics isn’t a horserace; it’s a tug of war – or rather, eight of them.  And the goal at this point of the campaign is to grab the rope that represents what you believe, and want out of the GOP, and to pull like hell.

Which is what Iowa Republicans did on Saturday.  They drove to Ames, and grabbed the ropes marked “cut taxes”, “repeal Obamacare”, “pro-life”, “get the state off our backs”, “Balanced Budget Amendment” and such, and they pulled like mad.  They pulled so hard that Tim Pawlenty, seen as more “moderate”, dropped out of the contest (and John Huntsman would, too, if he had any sense).

The GOP has moved to the right.  Why do you suppose that is?

Schultz:

This is a party that has moved dramatically to the right of the one that picked Romney as the Iowa straw poll winner and McCain as their nominee in 08.

And why does Professor Schultz suppose that the GOP would move away from a tack that lost in a near-landslide?  One closely tied with the ideological, inside-the-beltway rot that led the party to the debacles of 2004-2008?

That worked so well for us before.  Perhaps that’s what Schultz wants – it’d be understandable – but it’s hardly rocket science.  Perhaps Schultz thinks Republicans are stupid – but even we know that rejecting the “moderate” GOP was behind the wins in 2010.  The mood of the nation, to say nothing of the party, has left Schultz’s “moderate” GOP in the dust (with Pawlenty as collateral damage).

The GOP had redefined itself. It is–as I have argued for months–no longer the party of Ronald Reagan.

Dave Schultz has stolen Ronald Reagan.  I’m here to steal him back.

Schultz argues:

Sarah Palin successfully remade the party into one captured more firmly by the Tea party and owing much of its ideological allegiance to a blend of Barry Goldwater, Pat Robertson, and Ayn Rand.

I have to ask – what does Schultz think Reagan was?

More “moderate” than Bachmann?  Perhaps in some rhetorical terms – but in his era, he had to remake the GOP itself from a moderate-left to a moderate-right party.  Still, the left – and Schultz himself, I’d imagine – responded to Reagan’s calls to limit government, and to face down Communism, in terms no less rabid, foamy and Alinski-ite than they do Michele Bachmann today.

And Schultz is aiming at the wrong target – because there is no battle between a “moderate” and a “conservative” GOP; the battle is between Northeastern conservatism (pro-business, socially-moderate, comfortable with big government – think Romney, Huntsman, George HW Bush), Southern conservatism (socially conservative, fiscally all over the place; think everyone from Pat Robertson to Mike Huckabee) and Western conservatism (fiscal hawks, social libertarians – which includes everyone from Goldwater and Reagan to the Tea Party and its candidates), and a few candidates that try to split the difference (Pawlenty being a great example).

And so Schultz’s argument is wrong; the Tea Party is the Reagan legacy – if you leave off the edges to that legacy that Schultz has sanded off to make it fit his premise.

Schultz concludes:

Within a party of vanishing moderates, Bachmann can win.

And within a nation that’s moving to the right – the Western, small-government, sick-of-utopian-promises-that-are-leaving-our-grandchildren-in-debt-from-whatever-party right – any conservative can win.  The “moderate” GOP is irrelevant to that goal; even Romney is going to have to tack to the right to stay in contention.

Because that’s where the party – and, I argue, the nation – is.

And that’s the message from Ames.