GOP Smackdown: The Winner of South Carolina won’t be Romney, Gingrich, Santorum or Paul

There will be one loser in Saturday’s South Carolina primary: The GOP.  The winner will be Citizens United, which has unleashed the Godzillas of funding in the Battle of the Billionaires! Who will be the top in the schism of the selfish sects of the Republican Party? A handful of billionaires have spent more than 50 million in just three primary contests to gain control of the general election.  Which billionaire’s scheme will reign supreme?!

It’s a BIG BIG billionaire GOP Smackdown!

Tag Team One, the Wall Street billionaires. It’s housing bubble vulture John Paulson and uber-insider Sheldon Adelson.

They’ll face off against Tag Team Two, the crazed Christian billionaires: The DBC’s Foster Friess and his Libertarian loon friends the Huffines brothers, the Koch brothers, James Dobson, the DeVos family and the Coors clan.

This Saturday is the Alamo for the Christian and Libertarian Right. If they can’t score big in the reddest of the red states, then their flavors of Reaganism, draconian social agenda and dismantling the government from within will ride the back of the GOP bus for a decade or more.

They have to take down Wall Street guys who are with the Libertarians on ripping regulations, but they find that the Congressional Teahadis’ blind destruction of America’s shining credit rating last August unacceptably slowed their unbridled greed.

Romney is the darling of Wall Street billionaires. John Paulson, one of the biggest of the Romney backers, is a billionaire hedge fund manager who made a bundle betting on the collapse of the housing industry.  He’s worth a few million in the primary, and more in the general. He is joined by the owners of a multi-tiered marketing firm called NuSkin, a few other mega-wealthy hedge fund managers, some Bain Capital investors, and the Marriott family funding the pro-Romney SuperPAC Restore Our Future. They’re spending millions to slam the insider’s man, their only real spoiler: Nine Lives Newt.

Rick Perry departed from the race yesterday. His shot at Romney over the weekend has rattled through the media echo chamber as the revolving primary door hit him in the ass on the way out:

“There’s a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism,” Perry told Fox and Friends last week. “I don’t believe that capitalism is making a buck under any circumstances.”

Perry endorsed Gingrich, a politically wise calculation for a guy hoping for a VP nod.  He tends to court the same extremist Christian and Tea Party voters stoking the fire for Santorum.  Why not throw his hat in that ring? The two Ricks?  

Perry hopes that Gingrich needs him.  Newt is a pure-play old-school rebounder from the Hill to K-Street, in spite of his lip service to the Christian crazies and the Teahadis.

Gingrich, whose poll numbers have narrowed to a dead heat with Romney in the last few days, is looking for the South Carolina Miracle. He struggled with funding and organization early in his campaign after the over-spending that caused key staffers to resign.  The stops are coming out in South Carolina, though, as his rich backers see an opportunity to weigh in.

American Casino mogul and Israeli newspaper publisher, longtime friend and ally of Gingrich, Sheldon Adelson, backed one pro-Gingrich Super PAC, Winning Our Future to the tune of $5M.

The money is largely being spent in the show-down in South Carolina on advertising to defend Gingrich from the onslaught of the attack ads and to lash out at frontrunner Romney. [1][2]