There are two new signs that the Republican Party, often said to be in the midst of a civil war, might be experiencing something more like the Internet bubble of the nineteen-nineties. First, there's the money: at a conference this weekend organized by Freedom Partners, a network built around the Koch brothers, donors met in Rancho Mirage, California, and resolved to spend eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars—the sort of number that gets rounded up to a billion—on the G.O.P.’s 2016 candidates, according to the Washington Post’s Matea Gold.
At the same time, at the similarly named, but differently catered, Freedom Summit, in Des Moines, Iowa, an event built around the alarmist Representative Steve King, potential Presidential candidates were on full, exhibitionist display. Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum were there, each claiming his own place on the strutting-stridency matrix; so were Donald Trump and Sarah Palin. Special bonus: Carly Fiorina. (Bobby Jindal was at his own rally, called The Response.*) Their presence onstage suggests that the G.O.P. field is wide open—far more so than it is for the Democrats—attracting boom-towners and political Ponzi-schemers, as well as ideologues. There will be plenty of money—hard and soft, smart and speculative—expended as giddily as anything that was ever put into Kozmo.com. A bubble can be less corrosive and bloody than a war, and there’s always a chance that an unlikely startup might make for a successful I.P.O. But it is not dignified.
There were a lot of businessmen at Freedom Partners; there was a lot of talk about ordinary people and "crony capitalism" at the Freedom Summit. The latter event probably had the edge in theatricality. After watching several candidates, a Cedar Rapids billboard salesman told the Des Moines Register that he wished some of the "real true conservatives" had the "gravitas" of Chris Christie. Trump berated Romney ("He choked!") and Sarah Palin improvised about the nature of freedom after her teleprompter went out ("The man can only ride you when your back is bent!”).
But it would be a mistake to see, in the coincidence of scheduling, a divide between the "establishment" and the upstarts. For one thing, a couple of the candidates, Walker and Cruz, made it to both Freedom pageants; Cruz, who in Iowa spoke about winning over "the forty-seven per cent," spoke in Rancho Mirage about how the criticism of the Koch brothers was "grotesque." Rand Paul and Marco Rubio opted solely for Freedom Partners, where Paul dismissed Romney, who was absent, in words only marginally more polite than Trump's. Rubio, meanwhile, congratulated members of the audience for not trying to bribe him: “I don’t know a single person in this room who has ever been to my office ... asking from government any special access.”
Jeb Bush missed both events; there may have been more people who were sorry about that in the Kochs' circle than in King's: it was King who described Dreamers as drug mules with "calves the size of cantaloupes," which is not quite where Bush wants to be seen standing on immigration. (King's Freedom Summit was co-sponsored by Citizens United, the group whose victory at the Supreme Court made all sorts of new political sponsorships possible.) Trump, in his speech, attacked Bush's position on immigration this way: "He said, 'They are coming for love.’ What? Half of them are criminals!” (A Politico dispatch describing the moment continued, "'Jeb and Mitt you can’t have!' Trump yelled. 'It’s over!'”)
But the coolness to Jeb is more a matter of degree. According to the Washington Post, Paul, Cruz, and Walker were "favorites" at Rancho Mirage, too: “It’s not as if there’s one perfect champion and five bad individuals,” a "person familiar with donor views" told the paper. The Post added that Freedom Partners "is still debating whether it will spend some of that money in the GOP primaries. Such a move could have a major impact in winnowing the field of contenders but could also undercut the network’s standing if it engaged in intraparty politics and was not successful."
Here, again, there might be an instructive contrast with the Democrats. The Republicans are looking at some dubious characters—but at least they are looking. If the G.O.P. is in a market bubble—whether of the tech or tulip variety—the Democrats might be experiencing something more like stagflation. The inflation is in the nominal price assigned to its main product, the putative candidacy of Hillary Clinton. That price keeps going up, without ever seeming to factor in her liabilities. The stagnation is in the party's development of new voices, and, as a corollary, new ideas. In 2012, the Democrats benefited from the churn on the Republican side and the calm on theirs—but that's largely because they were running an incumbent. (And it was Obama's defiance of a similar sort of anointment that allowed him to emerge in 2008.) Now, there's an artificial freeze on competition. Elizabeth Warren won’t say that she’s interested in running, and, even if she does run, her voice alone wouldn’t mean that there would be a broad debate. The peeps from the general direction of Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, have not been inspiring. (See Ryan Lizza on his travels with O'Malley.)
On both sides, in different ways, there might just be too much money chasing too few goods, to cite another economic dictum. Palin and Romney probably took the weekend's prizes as the most mockable and the most mocked. And yet, they are also distinguished by being the only two characters in this ensemble whom the G.O.P. has put on a national ticket. If McCain had done just a little better, Palin might have had a chance to fidget at the State of the Union and mortify Americans with her behavior at state funerals. Romney got forty-seven per cent of the popular vote. Do Republicans see either of their nominations as an admonishment, or an inspiration? They made it to the finals; maybe anyone can.
*Update: This sentence was revised with information about Jindal's event.
