Citizens United v. FEC is still an odious decision, but billionaires have done little more than offer stimulus to the struggling media sector when shoveling elephantine sums of money into national elections, with Jeb Bush being the latest evidence. It’s just very difficult to paper over an undesirable candidate or message. Another reason: Small donors feel a connection to their candidate that will get them to the polls. Well, at least the Tea Party-powering Kochs don’t yet know the winner’s curse on the biggest stage, though state and local elections seem more prone to stupid wealth. 

The opening of “How to Waste a Billion Dollars” by Michael Beckel of Politico:

The political world is discovering an unsettling truth: Money isn’t everything. The latest evidence comes from the just-expired presidential campaign of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican who dropped out on Tuesday, saying, “This is not my time.” Jindal had wallowed in the low single digits in polls and was relegated to the undercard debates even though groups allied with his campaign consistently ranked among the top sponsors of TV ads in Iowa.

Or consider the staggering confession made by conservative billionaire Charles Koch last month. The man who along with his brother David has spent or steered hundreds of millions of dollars into reshaping U.S. politics in recent years said, in effect, that he believes he has been wasting his money. “We looked like we won. [But] as you can see by the performance, we didn’t win much of anything,” Charles Koch told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in October. “So far we’re largely failures.”

Koch was only conceding what has become, more and more, an obvious fact. With the advent of Republican Paul Ryan as speaker of the House and a budget deal that will prevent more government shutdowns, the Koch-funded Freedom Caucus has been, for the moment, declawed.•