The GOP debate and the other elephant in the room

The August 6th Fox News-sponsored, two-tiered debate of the GOP presidential primary candidates has shown anew that the Republican Party’s continuing to explore different ways a political party can self-destruct.

Two developments last week underscored the GOP’s raging intraparty war and identity crisis as more serious than ever.

First, Donald Trump’s remarkably bad performance at the so-called top-ten debate in Cleveland — and his outrageous insults hurled at Fox News’ Megyn Kelly afterward — immediately and justifiably alarmed the Party’s professional operatives even more than his initial entry into the race.

For one thing, despite all his television experience, that Trump couldn’t bob and weave his way through such a low-pressure question-and-answer reality show means he shouldn’t have been there at all. His egoism is simultaneously so powerful and yet so fragile that he immediately became flustered and defensive when asked probing questions.

He was there, however, because his great wealth shields him from having to seek the GOP’s “permission” to run. And, ironically, because his indifference to Republican ideology has enabled him to champion more openly and harshly the Party’s doctrine of tough-guy posturing, of cruelty and exclusion that is an addiction with the GOP base.

In other words, Trump’s candidacy personifies how the Republican Party’s organizational integrity is being erased by both its wealthy class of supporters and those who make up its rank and file. Jon Stewart, the satirist and former host of The Daily Show, got it exactly right in late July when he said, “People like Trump are supposed to buy the candidates — not be them.”

But Trump has shown that billionaire outsiders like him can run for the presidency because the U.S. Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United ruling of 2010 struck down limitations on political spending. The GOP lobbied for that decision because they thought it would enable them to defeat President Obama in 2012 and, backed by the dollars of the business sector and wealthy individuals, forever destroy the Democratic Party’s national political prospects.

What GOP leaders didn’t understand was that by erasing limits on political spending, Citizens United also destroyed political parties’ organizational ability to significantly control how wealthy donors’ money got spent. It produced an explosion of fund-raising vehicles — super PACs — completely independent of the parties’ control. And it undermined the ability of the parties to keep an unwanted rich outsider from injecting himself or herself into the presidential sweepstakes.

Last week’s second important development was the invitation-only conference for the uber-wealthy right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch staged at a luxurious California resort. Amid extraordinary secrecy, the Kochs invited just five of the announced GOP candidates to pitch the 450 attendees for support.

The conference is just one part of the Kochs’ multifaceted campaign, using a web of nonprofit political organizations they’ve created to put a Republican in the White House in 2016 — an effort on which they’re prepared to spend $889 million.

An article in the Washington Post last week noted that the Kochs and their allies “have built a quasi-political party outside the traditional infrastructure [of the GOP], one made up of nonprofit groups financed with secret donations free of campaign finance limits.” It went on to say the new entity is “both a valuable ally and a rival power center to the Republican National Committee” and that recent tensions over their separate data-mining efforts led the RNC’s chief of staff to warn it was “very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how.”

The power struggle was subsequently papered over by a joint agreement to share data throughout the current election cycle. But isn’t the tension between the traditional GOP bureaucracy and the new independent “quasi-political party” of uber-wealthy conservatives evidence that there’s now another elephant taking up space in the Republican Party’s tent?

Of those two elephants, which one is growing larger and stronger every day, and which is fading to ghost status right before our eyes?

Lee A. Daniels’ latest collection of columns, Race Forward: Facing America’s Racial Divide in 2014, is available at www.amazon.com