Neither money nor dynasty guaranteed success

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Neither money nor dynasty guaranteed success

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Not smiling now

IT’S amazing how little $25m buys you these days; $50m, on the other hand, is something to work with. That seems to be the moral pundits are drawing from this week’s primaries in Florida, where dazzlingly wealthy political novices spent small (by their standards) fortunes vying for the Democratic nomination for senator and the Republican nomination for governor. In the end the $25m-odd that Jeff Greene, a property mogul, devoted to the Senate race won him less than a third of the vote—at $90 apiece. But the $50m that Rick Scott, a hospital tycoon, lavished on the governor’s race secured a slender victory.

The two multi-millionaires are both unlikely candidates. Mr Greene made a mint betting that America’s property bubble would burst, and therefore profited, in a sense, from the present misery of millions of Florida homeowners. It did not help that he had run (unsuccessfully) as a Republican for Congress in the 1980s, had moved to Florida only two years ago and keeps getting into scrapes involving his 145-foot yacht and assorted tabloid celebrities. Mr Scott, for his part, founded a hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion to settle charges of defrauding the government during his time as chief executive. He maintains that he was not aware of any wrongdoing, but did not let this apparent laxity stop him from running as a can-do businessman.

Both candidates faced career politicians with past embarrassments of their own. Kendrick Meek, who defeated Mr Greene, helped secure government handouts as a congressman for a developer who had hired his mother as a consultant. Bill McCollum, Mr Scott’s opponent and Florida’s attorney-general, is a drab campaigner who has twice failed to win a seat in the Senate. A rebellion against the local party establishment, which backed him forcefully, may have played a part in his defeat.

Rebellious Republicans also seem to have deposed their sitting senator, Lisa Murkowski, as their nominee in Alaska. With nearly all the ballots counted, she trailed 2% behind Joe Miller, a tea-party candidate who was endorsed by Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor and darling of populist conservatives. But not all those accused of being RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) were defeated: John McCain, a senator from Arizona and former presidential nominee, easily vanquished his tea-party rival.

Indeed, it was hard to draw a consistent lesson from the results. Membership of a prominent political dynasty does not seem to have helped Ms Murkowski, but Ben Quayle, the son of former vice-president Dan, won the Republican nomination for a right-leaning congressional seat in Arizona. And as Messrs Greene and Scott proved, not even prodigious wealth is a guarantee of success.