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The entire Republican primary, thus far, has had the quality of a dream within a dream. The real contrast has not been between the candidates’ ideas, but between the high stakes—our country’s future—and the carnival atmosphere to which we’ve been treated, as if war could never be anything but a rumor. (At the risk of encouraging anyone to quote Churchill, one thinks more of Europe’s “Phony War” period, in late 1939 and early 1940, than of Pearl Harbor.) Historical events, distant and near, have been mangled in the debates, to the extent that playing a video of Ronald Reagan saying something he said a thousand times comes across as subversive—as a “gotcha.” And the present hasn’t been treated much better, either; nor has what we can glimpse of the future, in terms of climate change or public health, for example. The detachment from reality has been profound.

But politics is not, ultimately, a fantasy. Politics has a solid reality to it, one that the candidates are about to confront when people, with real lives, walk into the polls. If their campaigns have not glimpsed that already, at the doorsteps and events and conversations in diners, than they have already lost, and rightly so. Calling what happens on an actual election day the “ground game,” or G.O.T.V.—Get Out The Vote—makes it sound like another scene in the play, but it’s the one in which the candidates learn that they are not the only actors, or even the most important ones. If there is one thing we have learned in 2011—in which Time, in a better than average choice, picked The Protester as the Person of the Year—it is that the lifespans of political frauds do have an end. Maybe, in a few cases, that will come as soon as next Tuesday.

Amy Davidson’s commentary on Newt Gingrich and the republican primaries in The New Yorker

(Source: newyorker.com, via newyorker)