Rove, RNC and GOP bigwigs rig the rules against the right

For insider Republican bigwigs, 2013 is the year of the double deal. They pay homage to CPAC while they write rules for the 2016 presidential campaign designed to fix the game against conservatives whose issues they claim to champion. The new "blueprint" from the Republican National Committee should be read with a calculator, an abacus and a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince to understand that the real blueprint is to freeze out insurgent conservatives (does Rand Paul ring a bell?) and lock in establishment Republicans (does Bush 45 ring a bell?) at the presidential campaign level. Will we soon read a headline on Drudge revealing "GOP insider fix exposed?"

The plan is to shorten the 2016 campaign, to compress 2016 into rapid-fire battles, to end or limit caucuses that help insurgents, and to dramatically cut down the number of debates. Taken together, these actions give a great advantage to establishment candidates with better-known names and access to lots of money. Couple this with the ubiquitous Karl Rove (the power-mad insider whose recent record is worse than the defunct Intrade) who is raising the big dough for the favored friends of the bigwig elites, and we find a game that is being fixed and a deck that is being stacked.

Bad news for the bigwigs — they will not trigger an insider triumph, they will trigger an all-out GOP civil war when grassroots conservatives realize they are the target of a nefarious (for them) fix.

This will lead to what the media will call, and I am coining a phrase here, "the battle of the GOP super-PACS" as the big buck Rovians battle the big bucks right (as in Adelson and Koch) for ownership of the 2016 nomination.

Will this intra-party coup d'etat from the GOP establishment work? Probably not. The GOP base will not take kindly to those who address the CPAC meeting with friendly words as Brutus once addressed Caesar. Stacked-deck primaries can backfire if an insurgent catches fire early. The money advantage for GOP insiders will mean nothing unless Messrs. Koch and Adelson et. al. buy into the fix, which is unlikely.

My guess is that the word got out too soon. The conservative base will figure out the fix and move to bring the demise of this baby before it leaves the crib, leaving chastened insiders to give speeches at next year's CPAC event wearing trench coats and gloves and saying: "don't blame me, the other guy did it".

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