Good luck with that.
Republicans are already
extremely alarmed at how their presidential primaries are shaping up. Ex-congressman and current Fox News talking head John LeBoutillier notes that in the past, the Republican establishment held enough control over funding to ensure that their preferred candidates would enter the primaries well-heeled and the self-described "conservative" candidates
were shut out:
It was always the conservatives who were underfunded. [...] And thus the primary outcome was preordained: After the initial dustup-up in Iowa and perhaps South Carolina, the establishment money wore the conservative(s) down and ultimately prevailed in a war of attrition. [...] That is not going to happen in the 2016 election cycle.
(Strange formatting omitted because the author apparently entered his op-ed column in Excel spreadsheet form.)
Ah, but this year the self-described conservatives are awash in money. Swimming in money. Got money coming out the ears.
[W]e are about to witness something we have never before seen: A full-on, well-funded-on-both-sides, nuclear war inside the GOP pitting the establishment (mostly former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) versus the Tea Party (Cruz, Ben Carson and others) versus the neo-cons (Florida Sen. Marco Rubio) versus the libertarians (Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul) versus the hybrid (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has both establishment and Tea Party support). [...]
Do you know what that means?
It means thanks to the collapse of campaign finance reform, Republicans have gotten the dream landscape they worked so hard for? A land where any upstanding wealthy person can choose the candidate that will kowtow to their needs the most efficiently, and single-handedly turn them into a national contender? A land so awash in purchasable candidates and Americans wealthy enough to purchase them that competing wealthy people, each wanting national policy to hew to their own vision and none other, battle each other for control of the party on the presidential debate stage?
It means that campaign consultants will have plenty of money to do what they do best: going negative!
That's what I said.
Anyhoo, the dramatic reveal here is that having competing wealthy Americans each backing different Republican "contenders" (I use the term loosely here) means that every last sodding crackpot now has at least one sugar daddy capable of funding their smear campaigns against all the other candidates. And that, my friends, suggests that the primaries are very quickly going to turn into a total bloodbath. And Serious Republicans, the ones who have watched Ted Cruz and Rand Paul enter the race, are eyeing the cash those oddballs are raking in and realizing that they're powerless to stop that bloodbath from happening.
Thank goodness. And here we were worried that the slow collapse of our representative democracy was going to be boring.