Campaigns for billionaires and celebrity kooks

The Republican primary, however, was wildly entertaining. While it did feature the usual Republican presumptive front-runner anointed by the establishment because it was “his turn,” the rest of the field was a bizarre collection of odd ducks and opportunists: Newt Gingrich. Michele Bachmann. Rick Santorum. Herman Cain. (And if you consider too those figures who merely flirted with throwing their hats in the ring, the race also includes Donald Trump, who pouted like 12 year old over his ignominious roast at the White House Correspondence Dinner and marched out of the campaign in a huff.) While common sense might have dictated that the fringe candidates would exit the race early and without note, it was actually the so-called normal, moderate candidates, like Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman, who went down at the starting gate.

Tim Pawlenty had been that cycle’s inevitable Midwestern “reformer,” whom the political establishment always insists will be able to unite all the disparate factions of the GOP. This of course did not happen. Pawlenty spent a lot of early money trying to revamp his boring image and remake himself as a sexy GOP swashbuckler (as if that actually exists). Instead, he merely ended up making himself into a running joke, with his a string of bizarrely turgid videos and speeches, in which he inappropriately held forth, for example, about his “red hot smokin’ wife.”  He dropped out in August of 2011.

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman did make it through the early debates, but it was clear that he had made a strategic error of epic proportions. Huntsman had looked at the 2008 election and assumed that the country was moving away from the hardcore conservative politics of the past 30 years. He positioned himself as a thoughtful, bipartisan moderate — even joining the Obama administration as Ambassador to China. Oops! In truth, Huntsman could not have been more wrong in his analysis of the party’s mood. The GOP didn’t just fail to moderate in 2012; it actually doubled down on its extremist agenda. And poor Jon Huntsman ended up looking as appetizing to primary voters as a Hostess Ding Dong filled with tuna tartar. He barely made a ripple before he was gone.

But the rest of the gang of weirdos and flakes hung in there for months, providing the nation with a peek into the ideological soul of the Republican Party in a round of historically entertaining presidential primary debates filled with legendary gaffes and missteps.