With the new year, the rubber hits the road in the campaign for President of the United States. Today (Tuesday), voters in New Hampshire go to the polls in that state’s Republican primary. The field after last week’s Iowa caucus has changed. It is still an open race. The pace is quickening. As former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney abides as a kind of pack leader no one seems to want, campaign language is sharpening.

The results from last week’s Iowa Caucus—Mr Romney beating former Senator Rick Santorum (R–PA) by eight votes and Representative Ron Paul (R–TX14) in a nearby third place—led Representative Michele Bachmann (R–MN6) to withdraw from the race last Wednesday. But former Utah Governor and Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, having skipped Iowa, re-enters the race. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (R–GA6), a distant fourth in Iowa, is not going anywhere soon, especially with reports of an influx of five million dollars from a wealthy donor into a pro-Gingrich Super PAC. Texas Governor Rick Perry, a curiously enigmatic, faint and fumbling candidate, has recommitted—again—himself to the campaign.

Twice last week, I found myself watching C-SPAN as a candidate defined their campaign—once as Ms Bachmann, in Iowa’s wake, wound down hers and once as Mr Huntsman, in New Hampshire, revved up his. Their styles and much of the grist of their speeches differed. But there is something that united their speeches: A vision of an America in peril, in need of rescue, and their curious immunity to the implications of their thinking.

Ms Bachmann, surrounded by family, hewed closely to the paper script on the dais, delivering an almost breathless speech laced with a quiet but distinct evangelism. Our founders, she argued, and the country they started are “witness” to a commitment to liberty singularly American, singularly rooted in the Christian Biblical tradition and singularly good—all of this a part of God’s plan.

She was motivated to enter the race, she said, to protect against the unparalleled threat to liberty posed both by political reform in healthcare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare” in her words), singling out the dramatic expansion of government spending and the threat of publicly financed abortion, and finance (the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act or “Dodd-Frank”), asserting the burdens imposed on corporations by the law’s reporting requirements. Repealing these laws, the clearest signs of her defense of this vision of American liberty, was (and remains) her commitment, she argued. This, she said, was the vision she took to the electorate.

What effect her showing in the polls? Its relevance to her political vision? The divine plan?

Seemingly, there is none. She may have left the presidential race. But, according to her thesis, the issues to which she dedicated herself because they are so important as to fuel her desire to ask for our vote are seemingly so important as to be immune from it.

Mr. Huntsman, meanwhile, script seemingly implanted in him, floated through a seamless 20-minute presentation punctuated with local flavor (‘I was at a diner in INSERT TOWN NAME HERE and folks there told me INSERT LOCAL STORY HERE’) and demonstrating a kind of polished and amiable fluency no other Republican candidate seems even to pretend to have. Still, like Ms Bachmann, Mr Huntsman’s is a vision of an America at risk. It is not an America in ontological and even theological peril, as it is for Ms Bachmann. Rather, for Mr Huntsman, America is unproductive and untrusting. In what should be a rhetorical death knell for Mr Huntsman’s campaign, he argued that a “cloud of malaise” plagues us.

For Mr Huntsman, America requires not redemption but restoration by means of a by-gone but inherent industriousness combined with a new-found savvy internationalism. We will get things done and we will restore our faith by getting things done.

What is noteworthy is not only these candidates’ ideas of an America at risk and the kind of commitment necessary to defend and revitalize America but a willing suspension of concern for the coherence and implications of what they are saying. As Ms Bachmann presented herself last Wednesday, the legitimacy of her vision was predicated in large part on the combination of historical witness, divine planning and electoral affirmation—one of which demonstrably failed with unknown implications for what remains.

As Mr Huntsman presented himself, his vision is predicated on the same set of facts as signs of both our demise and the sign of our once, future and inhering dominance. Our productivity, our hold on the global economy and our citizens’ faith in government are simultaneously at historic lows and the measure of our historic greatness.

Whether one listens to Ms Bachmann or Mr Huntsman, each seems committed to a vague and patently illogical—even directionless—campaign rhetoric. This approach is not new. It hardly belongs to Mr. Huntsman and Ms. Bachmann alone. Rather, it defines political discourse. Mr. Huntsman’s and Ms. Bachmann’s speeches merely are among the speeches I saw last week that struck this nonsensical, unreal cord.

The problem with this scenario is that it leaves the electorate to choose between the power of invisible money and the power of magical thinking. This may offer the electorate a choice—but only in the worst sense. Whatever our decision, its effects at a minimum fuel a state of affairs not in which things stay the same but in which they get worse. The candidates offer bromides and we accept them—or, worse, ignore them. With most political actors readily acknowledging and campaign developments evincing the power of money in campaigns and meaningful campaign finance regulation all but erased by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, decided 21 January 2010, allowing vast sums of constitutionally unfettered and faceless money to flow indirectly into campaign coffers, the cost of our commitment to or ignorance of these mysterious ways only mounts.