It couldn't have happened to a nicer College Republican.

When Luke Esser was a student at the University of Washington, he was, by at least one local blogger's account, the nicest guy in the world, a genuine friend to fellow students both right-wing and left-wing. How ironic, then, that Esser, in his current capacity as chair of the Washington State Republican Party, has lately become the laughingstock of grown-ups both left-wing and right-wing, both statewide and nationwide.

Democracy geeks nationwide likely already know the reason why: On Feb. 9, caucus day in Washington State, Esser made the unilateral executive decision to stop counting the votes in the state GOP caucus and declare John McCain the victor over Mike Huckabee--with 13 percent of the votes still uncounted and a mere 200-vote margin between the two candidates. Huckabee naturally took offense, especially since he had been leading early on as the votes were being counted. His campaign chair, Ed Rollins, directly challenged Esser's action, publicly proclaiming, "In my 40 years of politics, I have never known anybody to announce a vote count before the vote is counted."

Such amusing intra-party rancor, as democracy geeks nationwide also have likely noted, stands as further evidence that the conservative movement in America, and the Republican Party for which it stands, has now reached a tipping point towards a grand old political implosion which has been brewing for years. And Luke Esser, erstwhile nice guy to all, may soon join George W. Bush among history's grand old catalysts for the self-destruction of the Reagan Revolution.

Here's where the plot thickens: When Esser was attending the UW School of Law, he joined the staff of the UW Daily, where he first tried his hand at "objective" reporting on campus affairs before settling into the humble role of a sportswriter. One noteworthy exception to that humility occurred when Esser wrote an opinion piece published in the Daily on Nov. 3, 1986, the day before that year's midterm election, titled "God-loving Republican wants rain on your parade," from which the following prescient passage is taken verbatim:

Like any sport worth its salt, in politics you have adversaries, opponents, enemies. Our enemies are loudmouth leftists and shiftless deadbeats. To win the election, we have to keep as many of these people away from the polls as possible.

The only means of persuasion left available to us are Acts of God, who we know is exclusively on our side. I'm talking about seriously inclement weather. I want Biblical floods and pestilence. I will settle for rain, sweet rain. The deadbeats won't even go out in the rain for their welfare checks (they send one of their social workers to pick it up). There's no way they'll vote if it's raining.

It should be granted here that Esser may have conceived the above as harmless collegiate mirth, perhaps even an in-joke among himself and his liberal Daily colleagues. It certainly smacks well of the apparently time-honored Daily tradition of College Republicans getting hired as token conservative op-ed columnists trafficking in similarly snarky screeds against The Campus Left--some of them funny, some of them appallingly not. Nevertheless, Esser's youthful paean to vote suppression uncannily foreshadowed the increasingly ruthless politics, and policies, developed by the American Right over the last two decades--a gun which it increasingly appears the GOP is now turning towards itself.

Which leads us to where the plot sickens: As the state GOP caucus catastrophe unfolded, caucus leaders in certain key counties--notably Snohomish and Pierce counties--reported noticing that the sign-up sheets, where participants declared their candidate preferences (which effectively counted as their "votes" in our state's tangly caucus-and-primary system), did not match the final delegates declared by the WSRP. Add that to the much-noted fact that Esser for many years has worked for and been associated with state Attorney General Rob McKenna--who is by mere coincidence the state chair of the John McCain campaign--and a suspicion that the fix was in in Washington State surely must emerge. And it has, most passionately among bloggers and pundits both left-wing and right-wing.

The ensuing intra-party catfight between the McCain and Huckabee campaigns fits quite nicely within a certain emerging sea change in American politics. The aforementioned Reagan Revolution appears to now be finally and inexorably rending itself asunder as its long-ill-fitting factions of Talibangelists, Bomb-Iran-mongers and anti-tax wackos behave more and more each day like rats in a cage, driven mad by ideology as well as claustrophobia, and therefore madly gnawing off each other's faces--in both the public and private senses.

All of this delightful ideological drama can be attributed to many individual actors, Luke Esser the latest among them. Each can best be described with another analogy of madness and pathos, namely a certain Captain Ahab, who, rather than hunting for the greater good of the whaling trade, obsessively pursued a single white whale, seeking its destruction, only to be defeated by the whale and consumed by the sea along with his ship. It couldn't happen to a nicer ideology.