Here is a handy little image showing the relative wealth of the candidates. Unfortunately a few are so poor as to be invisible but perhaps that makes the point even more clear.

Romney is rich, filth. Just to put things into some sense of proportion: the estimated wealth of all three Democratic front-runners piled into one is $90.6 million, while Romney’s alone is $294.6 million.

So why isn’t he winning? The obvious suggestion is that that is his personal wealth, rather than the money accumulated for a run. But this is not good enough: in addition to being partially self-financed he has accumulated a vast amount of donations from the typical sources. He seems suitably…Flexible for the billionaires that generally finance such endeavours and while most see his shift of ideology to exactly what votes want him to be as base opportunism and a worrying lack of actual earnestness the backers consider a suitable reverence towards power.

So of all the campaigns only Giulini’s even verges on being as financially lubricated and the others are minuscule by comparison, record breaking web-based fundraiser extravaganza or no record breaking web-based fundraiser extravaganza. McCain’s managed to almost bankrupt itself in the middle of last year and Huckabee has been using what Romney probably used to earn in an hour or so to fund his entire campaign.

And yet, and yet…

Romney seems to have become this elections equivilant of the Liberal/SDP coalition back in the ’80s: coming second just about everywhere and thus getting fucked over merciless by the FPTP system. The only difference being that Romney deserves it.

So what does this tell us? That the vast amount of money at his disposal is not enough, I suspect. That slickness and vast funds do not a winning campaign make and no matter how many adverts you bombard hapless viewers with if you are a reneging two-faced flip-flopper who distorts and reforms to fit the mould desired of him by whoever he is performing to then you may make a damn fine used car salesman {a common comparison} but will struggle to get popular enough to be voted in.

Much the same is true of everyone’s least-favourite ex-feminist Hillary Clinton, who had much more money than Obama after a few wealthy backers and a Hollywood entourage puffed up her coffers with maximum-donations and used a tactic of filling every television screen available as regularly as advertisement breaks would allow in Iowa, yet still received a pumelling.

It is possible that this could not hold true: perhaps Hillary or Mitt will resurge in the fashion that McCain remarkably did. But if New Hampshire’s outcome is a victory for Obama and a second triumph over the state for McCain then, especially given Huckabee’s savaging of Rich Romney in Iowa, we will be forced to the conclusion that the purchase of votes is not possible, scotching a long-standing legend that has bolstered cynics the globe over for many decades. It would seem that extreme wealth can give you economic power, control over the media if you are dedicated enough, but falters when in terms of political.

Which could have some very pleasing implications closer to home…