BuzzFeed examines Kootenai GOP politics, Brent Regan, ‘wackadoodles’ and more…

Anne Helen Petersen, the senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, Idahoan and former professor at Whitman College, has a lengthy report out today on Republican politics in Kootenai County. The piece, headlined “Wackadoodles, Establishment Hacks, And The Big, Ugly, Local Battle For The Heart Of The GOP,” includes an interesting portrait of Brent Regan, Kootenai County Republican Central Committee chairman and board chair of the Idaho Freedom Foundation; you can read the full article online here . Here’s the opening:

“Brent Regan doesn’t work the room during the monthly meetings of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, because he doesn’t need to: People come to him, as if before a ruler, or a king. He has the confidence of a man who’s rarely challenged but always has the upper hand when he is; he’s used to others agreeing that he’s the smartest person in the room. Over email — the only way he’ll speak to reporters, after a history, he says, of being misquoted and misunderstood — the community college graduate and Mensa member wields his intellect combatively, like a tenured professor dressing down an unprepared freshman.

“He frequently “rejects the premise” of a question and invokes everything from “Cartesian relativism” and “Greco-Roman philosophy” to the Magna Carta when asked to describe his political beliefs. “Your conclusions about conservatism remind me of the Indian fable about the blind men trying to describe an elephant,” he told me.

“It’s this didactic tendency that has helped keep Regan, a man described as both the sugar daddy of the hard right and the godfather of North Idaho politics, from winning elected office. His only attempt — a run for school board trustee, back in 2014 — fell flat. But Regan doesn’t want for power. According to those who’ve observed him closely, the loss, one of the few in a gilded life, taught him a lesson: He wasn’t a politician. He was a puppet master.”