Based on current rules, Jason Lewis, the one-term ex-Congressman needs three more years in Congress to qualify for a modest but still pleasant Big Gummint pension. I’m thinking that’s one good reason to run for Tina Smith’s Senate seat.

Last week, when Lewis, who is also an ex-talk radio host, announced his latest campaign, I immediately thought of comment by Tim Alberta, the long-time congressional reporter with deep Republican sources. (For years Alberta covered Capitol Hill for The National Review and is now chief political correspondent for Politico. He’s been around a while, knows a lot of stuff and prominent people talk to him in very candid ways.) Alberta’s been making the media rounds for his new book, “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.“

Chatting recently with Ezra Klein on Klein’s Vox news podcast, Alberta was asked (again) to explain Congressional Republican’s astonishing fealty to Trump, a flagrant, blowhard know-nothing. Is it a matter of fear or is it, you know, bona fide principle?

Said Alberta, ” … one of the first rules I learned in covering Congress is that self-preservation is the name of the game. I don’t mean to sound malicious or cruel here, but it’s just a fact. So many of these folks who get into electoral politics and come to Congress know they ain’t going to make $174k doing anything else. They don’t have the skill set, they don’t have the background, they don’t have the education. So when a lot of these folks come to Congress, when they get that job they know it’s going to be the best job they’re ever going to have, and they’re going to do whatever they need to do to keep it. I think at a very fundamental level that informs the thinking that everyone in the Republican party has taken to Donald Trump.”

Put another way, the answer is “No, it has nothing to do with principles.”

Now, as a bit of a disclaimer, I’ve interacted with Lewis over the years and have no problem saying he’s an amusing guy to spar with — either on radio shows or over beers. He likes the rhetorical game of partisan politics, and as an entertainer he’s good at it. But from my admittedly jaded and much less credulous perspective (compared to his true-believing fans) it’s always just that … a game. … and only that. Like Oakland, there’s no detectable “there” there, in terms of bona fide beliefs. He says what sells and what sells is what he says.

There’s always an argument to be made for the citizen legislator. The non-lawyer, non-careerist running to do the right thing.

But Tim Alberta’s description is a spot-on portrait of Jason Lewis. In no way shape or form has he prepared himself for work as a serious legislator. He’s a performer, pure and simple. A self-serving actor very good at following memes and scripts. Never mind the ground-level consequences of the things he purports to know something about. (One my favorites was his “plan” for blowing up Obamacare: a high-risk insurance pool only for the seriously sick. Just don’t get into pesky, fundamental math-y details like how insurance works and what that pool would cost someone with, say, diabetes.)

The highly-ironic connection to the era of Trump is actually kind of amusing.

It’s this: the 30 year-long, self-serving game played by Lewis and all the other regional Rush Limbaugh-wanna be talk show hosts — inflaming the greivances and prejudices of the already ill-informed for “advertiser value” — coalesced in 2016 into a mass of the clueless who installed a corrupt buffoon, the embodiment of the talk radio ethos, in the White House. And now everyone in the Republican party has no choice but to bend a knee to literally everything moronic Trump says. It’s a stark dilemma of self-preservation. To revolt against Trumpist idiocy — you, know nuking hurricanes, raking forests and easily winning trade wars — risks getting beaten at the ballot box by precisely the same sad fools they riled up in their years on the radio.

The issue with Lewis isn’t intelligence. By no means is he a stone-cold idiot like say Louie Gohmert of Texas. Nor is he (as far as I know) a reprehensible charlatan like Devin Nunes of California or Matt Gaetz of Florida. With Lewis it’s more the gaming of “the game.”

Talk radio is all about gaming the issues. It’s about creating a character and costuming up that character with rhetorical flourishes. Modern Republicans love guys like Newt Gingrich, famously described as, “What dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.” So it is with Lewis. You get up in front of a crowd and drop a line here or there about the Bretton Woods Agreement, or something/anything about foreign policy from the Heritage Foundation and, voila!, you’re the next incarnation of Paul Ryan. A real deep thinker. A goddam font of bold notions.

Needless to say, gun control is always a gross infringement on the most cherished of ‘Murican rights and climate change has been happening for millions of years so let’s all calm the [bleep] down.

Frankly, I doubt Lewis has a chance in hell against Tina Smith. (Still, I can’t wait for him to get out there and razzle-dazzle Minnesota farmers with some Three Card Monte justification for Trump’s trade war and the Chinese not buying soybeans.) But Jesus, could you find any two people that are more polar opposites? Nerdy church mouse Tina versus Say-Anything-That-Turns-a-Buck Jason.

Here’s the thing, though. While winning the election would be nice, and guarantee him a Big Gummint pension. Simply running — on someone else’s money — restores his profile and improves his leverage for another show biz contract. It’s “the game”, man! I hear those Sinclair folks are hiring.

Chucklehead right-wing talk radio has been re-relegated to the AM spectrum here Minnesota. But put a “tax and spend ultra-liberal” back in the White House and demand will spike for people with the schtick and chops to offer “clear-headed” rebuttals to “out of control socialism.”