The Party's Plot to Stop Mitt

During his presidential campaign 45 years ago, Michigan's Governor George Romney copped to being brainwashed. It wasn't the most politically astute remark to make during the Cold War, a few years after the release of the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. However, the question before Americans today, and by that I mean the millions of Americans who believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in, is not whether Mitt Romney was brainwashed along with his dad. The things that come out of Mitt's mouth would not come out of the mouth of anyone who had his own dirty old brain. No, my fellow Americans, and by that I mean the millions of Americans who believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in, the question before us is whether Mr. Romney is trying to brainwash the America millions of Americans believe in, yes, trying to brainwash us into believing in the America he believes in, where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America Mitt loves, and you better believe it. From Michigan, Massachusetts, and Manchuria... with love.

But I write to you today, my fellow Americans who believe yada yada, not to pander to your fears of a modern Manchurian Candidate, but to put your minds--your very own unwashed, God-given, dirty old brains--at ease. The Powers That Be in the Republican Party have been alert to this insidious threat to our country and our way of life for several years. The Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy to stop Manchurian Mitt is well under way.

The signs are everywhere that the party elites, the conservative pundits, and the rank and file are timid and moderate in their support for the Massachusetts Manchurian. Recently Joe Scarborough has been talking up the possibility of a brokered convention, something that hasn't happened in my memory. And I'm not an elephant myself, but my memory, unwashed as it is, isn't too bad. I remember George Romney's brainwashing remark, as well as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Art Hoppe's lampoon of Romney complaining to the laundry service, "You shrunk it! Too much starch!" But that was then, this is now, and... uh, what's different? Once again we have a clean, starched, shrunken brain who wants to be our president.

But the publicly-aired, dirty-laundry discontent over Manchurian Mitt isn't the full story. Not even close. The fact is that the discussion wouldn't even be taking place right now if the Party Fathers (and maybe some Mothers too) hadn't spent the past three years preparing the ground for their Manchurian War. They knew the war was coming. They knew that the Massachusetts Manchurian came out of the 2008 campaign well-positioned to capture the 2012 Republican nomination. They did not sit around as the "Bain of the conservatives" raised the hundreds of millions of dollars and built the nationwide organization that even now some pundits still claim makes his nomination a foregone conclusion… as historically inevitable as the collapse of capitalism predicted by Marx. To stop Manchurian Mitt, the GOP Powers That Be, working patiently in Smoke-Filled Rooms in every state capitol, quietly engineered the biggest change in the presidential nomination system ever seen within a single, four-year cycle.

There have been many efforts in the past to reform the nomination process, and some have succeeded while producing unintended consequences, but the details of this history is the stuff of which political science courses are made. So here are some key points.

In 2000, a GOP commission to reform the nomination process declared, "It is an indisputable fact that in every nomination campaign since 1980, in both parties, the eventual party nominee was the candidate who had raised the most money by December 31 of the year before the general election." A lot of high-minded (not brainwashed) Republicans thought that it was a bad thing for the party to have the best presidential candidate money could buy, and they wanted to change it.

But the sad truth is that reform is rarely wrought for lofty, altruistic reasons. There has to be something in it for the Big Guys, and a few years ago when the Big Guys looked ahead to 2012, they saw not just an opportunity to reform, but a necessity. It was the best way to stop the Manchurian Candidate. That 2000 Republican commission pointed to the increasingly front-loaded schedule of primaries and caucuses as the main reason that presidential candidates spent several years raising ungodly sums of money. The compressed schedule meant that the well-financed candidate could crush his opponents in the kind of "shock and awe" air war that Manchurian Mitt unloaded on Newt Gingrich in Iowa. In any other campaign year it would have worked--Newt wouldn't have had time to recover. The campaign should already be over, but it's not.

And here's why not. For 2012, the Republican Powers That Be have crafted the most relaxed schedule of presidential caucuses and primaries... ever. It is a schedule that allows candidates who start out with little money to raise contributions as they go, winning a primary or caucus here and there, attracting more support over time. The key word is time. For several decades, American voters haven't had time to know who the candidates really are... until now. Out of sheer self-interest, the Republican Party has given Americans, and by that I mean the millions of Americans who believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in, the long, dirty, gritty, grungy presidential campaign that can stop the clean, starched, shrunken brain who wants to be our president. It is exactly this relaxed schedule that allows Joe Scarborough to ponder the prospect of a brokered convention. This is what the Republican Party elites want, and to get it, they have pulled off the most silent and invisible revolution in history. In so doing, they have given millions of Americans, something to believe in: an alternative to the historical inevitability of a presidency bought by Manchurian Mitt's millions.