One advantage the Democrats have over the Republicans is that they are not afflicted with a swarm of grifters that specialize in diverting money intended to advance political causes into the well lined pockets of said grifters. Nothing suits them better than to advance the cause of a candidate with no actual chance of winning, but who, for one reason or another, is great for fundraising. Ben Carson is a case in point:
In Iowa, he sits behind only Mitt Romney as the first choice of Republican caucus-goers, according to a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll. He’s on the verge of running for president, close to making the decision, so he has to learn about politics. The real challenge, he says, is not to learn too much.
Oh, I think he's safe there. If he runs he'll be getting advice from the folks who previously catapulted people like Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain into the spotlight. They'll be able to impart their collective wisdom to him on the first plane flight to Iowa somewhere between wheels-up and the time the first drinks are served. And yes, he will be presented as the alternative to Mitt Romney 2.0.
via Daily Kos (Emphasis added)
Carson is manna from heaven for the folks who made gobs of money off of Bachman, Santorum, and Cain. He's black, which means the rubes can play the “this proves I'm not a racist” card, and he's fairly good at articulating the right wing nonsense that they lap up. For the grifting industry winning is entirely beside the point. In fact, when they lose, it actually helps business, because they can convince the rubes that the losses are the result of a left wing conspiracy that only the next avatar of Sarah Palin can stop.
2016 is shaping up to the year that a grifter backed candidate may very well get the Republican nomination, for the simple reason that there is nary a non-grifter backed potential candidate in sight, with the possible exceptions of Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Chris Christie, neither of whom, for obvious reasons, has a serious shot at the nomination. No, this time the choice will be among the likes of Carson, Paul, Cruz, Jindal, and who knows what other red meat pusher the grifters might dig up.
The fascinating question in this respect is this: Are the candidates in on the grift? You could certainly make an argument either way. In my own opinion, Sarah Palin wasn't in on it at the beginning, but, give her credit, she's a fast learner in some respects, and she's been in full control of her grifting brand ever since she resigned as Alaska governor in order to grift full time. I'd like to believe that Cruz, who went to Harvard Law, is in on it, if only because I'd actually like to believe that it really does take brains to get into Harvard Law. No matter, the fact is that each of these potential presidents will be a source of wealth to various grifters that will latch on to them, rendering their campaigns less effective in the process. Assuming Cruz is fully aware of the problem, he'll still be incapable of preventing the grifters from siphoning money away from his campaign.
It would be nice to believe that grifter dominated campaigns will always ultimately fail, but, sadly, that's not the case. We live in a quantum universe after all. As I said, for the most part, at least at present, winning is not a grifter objective, but these things happen.
At least three presidents in the last century or so were the products of grifter type salesmanship: Warren G. Harding, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Neither man was fit to be president, and that includes Reagan, whose handlers set the country on the path toward extreme inequality down which we careen to this date. I'll admit, the grifters running those campaigns were more focussed on winning than those that swarm around the current crop, but some of them have learned that winning is truly optional. Consider Karl Rove, who has amassed an impressive losing record at Crossroads, but who has made himself a much richer man in the process while retaining his reputation as a political wizard (nothing enhances your credibility in the Beltway more than always being wrong).
Yes, there'll be a lot of money diverted from productive uses on the Republican side of the 2016 presidential campaign. The shame of it is that it looks like Hillary Clinton will be the beneficiary of all that grifting. Perhaps there's a certain irony there, given how much money the grifters have raised stoking fear and loathing of the Clintons.
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