Ross Douthat has a good column on Iowa, but he accepts the conventional wisdom that this year’s GOP contenders constitute “the weakest presidential field of any major party in a generation.” It’s not true: they’re a sorry bunch, but they aren’t any sorrier than other Republican slates of recent years. The 2012 field has included the thrice-elected governor of the largest Republican state (Texas), the twice-elected governor of the most Republican state (Utah), the former governor of a key swing state (Minnesota), a Republican governor who won in liberal Massachusetts (Romney), and a bevvy of congressmen and senators who faithfully represent major elements of the party’s coalition: the evangelical right (Bachmann), the Catholic right (Santorum), and libertarians (Paul and Johnson).

That’s not really a weaker field than Republicans had in 2000, when a less accomplished Texas governor (Bush) vied with an irritable senator at odds with the party’s base (McCain), a rich man who had never held elected office (Steve Forbes), and Alan Keyes. The 1996 Republican field wasn’t exactly an Olympic squad, either, with such lights as Lamar Alexander (self-styled “Lamar!”), eventual no-hope nominee Bob Dole, and shock-jock congressman Bob Dornan. Even the comic relief of Herman Cain this cycle is matched — in improbability if not in flash-in-the-pan popularity — by Morry Taylor in ’96.

Yes, there are some bizarre and unappealing personalities among this year’s contenders, but most of them are no worse than the Republicans of yesteryear. The 2012 field has perfectly orthodox ideological and professional credentials. It’s not intrinsically weak,  and it wouldn’t have been any stronger if Sarah Palin or Mitch Daniels had got in or if Pawlenty had not dropped out — if you wanted Daniels, you could have had Huntsman. (And I guess you still can, for about a week.) Yet it’s true that Republicans look more foolish than ever. Why?

Perhaps because the party is more indulgent than ever of a media even more infantile than that of the 1990s. The quantity no less than the quality of debates has been degrading. Pundits have hyped nonsense polls and nonsense candidates into the stratosphere. If Alan Keyes had run this cycle, he would have been anointed front-runner at some point. The kingpins of the conservative movement share the blame: they haven’t been at all effective at electing leaders who will govern as conservatives — instead, they’ve helped elect the likes of George W. Bush — but they have been remarkably thorough in getting philosophically suspect candidates to sign blood oaths restricting their appeal to only the most rigid ideologues in the party. A Tom Coburn who thinks taxes sometimes have to go up, but who appears to be quite sincere about cutting government, is unacceptable. Mercenaries of the Gingrich, Perry, and Romney variety, however, are perfectly fine, as long as they sign on the dotted line. Unsurprisingly, this produces leaders like Bush, who never raised taxes, never appointed an abortion-rights supporter to the Supreme Court, and never had a holy clue about little things like war and fiscal policy.

The candidates are mostly terrible, but for the most part they have always been terrible. The infotainment media and govern-by-numbers pressure groups, however, keep making them worse.