Seriously: Who would give this man fifty million dollars?
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  • Seriously: Who would give this man fifty million dollars?

This week, Kentucky senator Rand Paul held a summit with his closest supporters to talk about his presidential run, which is now for all intents and purposes a certainty. Paul will start hiring staffers at the beginning of the year, and he's likely to announce his intentions in April. The only technicality in Paul's way right now is a Kentucky law stating that no candidate can be on the same ballot twice. Politico's Mike Allen says, "If Paul wins the GOP nomination, he might drop the Senate race." I've been concerned about a Rand Paul primary campaign for a long time now. I think it'll be possible for Paul to reposition his dad's libertarian leanings into a more Republican-friendly stance (Mitt Romney, after all, somehow transitioned from a squishy Massachusetts Republican into a hard-right neocon while running for president, and his party swallowed that crock of shit with a huge grin). Right now, conventional wisdom states that Paul will never win his party's nomination, but I could see Paul coaxing a Bush-fatigued Republican electorate into voting for an energized young candidate who promises to unite and not divide. (And if that sounds like 2008, it's not by mistake: I think the Paul campaign is absolutely mimicking the Obama playbook. They're already more organized than just about any potential Republican candidate.) Paul is also leading the 2016 Republican pack in polls. On the other hand, at one point last cycle, Herman Cain was leading the pack, too.

But some people, God help us, actually think Rand Paul is too much of a loony liberal to run for president as a Republican. Those people have started to organize for Senator Ted Cruz. The Stand for Principle super PAC launched just after the midterms, and its goal is to raise fifty million dollars for Cruz by March of 2016. Cruz is reportedly already searching for office space for his national campaign headquarters. I'm not very frightened of Cruz as a presidential contender. I think he's too far to the right to even make broad gestures toward uniting Washington; he's more of a Santorum, in other words, than a Romney. And with Santorum set to run again in 2016, Cruz's base is likely limited.

And neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who is already publicly flirting with a presidential campaign for presumably the same pundit-aspirational reasons as a Donald Trump or a Herman Cain, this week announced that he would crack down on illegal immigrants who are committing voter fraud by revoking their citizenship. I think it's safe to say he's more entertainment than threat.