How about since at least the mentioned Williams Jennings "Cross of Gold" Bryan (and if you haven't sampled his speech, I highly recommend it, probably the best political oratory in US history, even if wrong headed)? Or the Crédit Mobilier scandal a quarter century before then? And "money in politics" was one of the biggest issues with Watergate, leading to our current largely counterproductive campaign finance "reforms".
But it's "the mother's milk of politics" (credited to Democrat Jesse M. Unruh in 1966 per Wikipedia), and has been critically important for so many generations ... yeah, no one should be this naive.
Well that's the real trick, isn't it? The DNC had already picked their nominee a year or so in advance, which makes one's vote a "take it or leave it" proposition.
In fairness, the RNC had probably secretly anointed Jeb, but their ability to dictate events was weakened by their nomination design. Look for them to borrow the superdelegate concept from the DNC.
It's not hard to see a lot of the disenfranchised casting a "F@ck Y@@!" vote just to upset the apple cart for the well off. There was an interesting program on about a month ago about the Trump nomination, and who to "blame" for it.
http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/blame-elites-tr...
The Trump campaign emails would probably also be fun.
It's hard to imagine his campaign functioning without something like email, then again, I'm old fashioned and prefer it to all other forms of person to person/small groups of people methods, and the Democrats right now are teaching the rest of the world how not to do InfoSec....
I mean, how do you draft position papers (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/) without at minimum running them past a nuts and bolts editor?
The author can't possibly be this naive. I am not surprised at all; in fact, I'm glad that this is being aired. Yes, the Republican Party has been the "money in politics" whipping boy since Reagan, but it shouldn't be news to anybody that there is plenty of money propping up the Democratic Party as well. Obama did not get elected on hope alone.
I personally don't have serious qualms with a Jeffersonian paternalistic republic, so long as I have the power to vote the "parents" out of power when they fail to represent my interests.