The Republican presidential candidates are assembling this week in New Hampshire for another debate, to be broadcast on CNN. Now I know what you’re thinking: “You mean there was a first debate? How did I miss that?” It’s understandable if the first debate completely passed you by, and you failed to notice that it was won by Herman Cain. You probably couldn’t tell Herman Cain from Tim Pawlenty if both of them sent you pictures of themselves naked, so I’ll give you a clue: Herman Cain is the black guy. He’s not an African-American; he won’t use that term. He describes himself as an ABC candidate – American, Black, and Conservative, in that order.

Why Roger Ailes lets him get away with confusing the voters about which television network he represents is beyond understanding. Herman Cain is one of several candidates in the race who represents the sovereign state of FOX News, and one of the first things you need to know about Republican presidential campaigns is which candidates represent Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. There are all the candidates who represent FOX News, and then there’s everybody else. That’s a start to handicapping the candidates, which is relatively easy because all the candidates who aren’t on the FOX News payroll have a serious handicap in the first place. The second thing you need to do is think like a Republican, which of course is asking too much of our readers because they haven’t been lobotomized yet, so I’m here to help (I grew up in a family of Goldwater supporters so I was already lobotomized at a very young age). Here, then, is everything you need to know about our next President of the United States, assuming Barack Obama doesn’t fire Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke before it is too late.

Citizen Cain, or Black Man vs. The Bachmann

Roger Ailes, president of FOX News, must like sumo wrestling. In fact he looks a bit like a sumo wrestler. To be eligible for a bout in the sumo ring, you have to belong to a “stable” of wrestlers, who are fed a diet of barley and rice, rich in proteins and guaranteed to beef you up to 400 pounds in no time. That’s really how Roger Ailes grooms his candidates for president. He feeds them healthy servings of the mother’s milk of politics – money, and then puts them on the air as “commentators” or “guest hosts” so they can develop the important political skills of speaking in sound bites, ignoring the real issues, and pandering to the prejudices of the God, Guns, and Gay crowd of voters who decide things in Republican primaries (these voters love the first two but hate everything to do with gays).

Notice I didn’t say Gods, Guns, Gays, and Abortion. First of all, that ruins the alliteration and doesn’t make for a good mnemonic to help the typical cerebrally-challenged Republican candidate. But more important, no Republican candidate for higher office, or any office really, can succeed with Republican voters if there is the slightest hint of weakness on the abortion issue. Abortion is Evil – end of story. You may safely assume that all candidates in a Republican debate accept this religious doctrine.

Roger Ailes has at least four wrestlers in the ring: Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee. We are going to dismiss Mike Huckabee from the start. He has a regular show on FOX News but so far has sat out the campaign, having made modest progress in the last one. Maybe he likes the money that he earns on television too much, or maybe the 2008 campaign was just too hard on him. Either way, he looks like he is going to end up to be another Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who was once a serious candidate for president but is now selling reverse mortgages on television to senior citizens.

Sarah Palin may be going down this path as well. She has not officially declared herself a candidate for president, so she won’t be at the debate this week. You get the feeling with Sarah Palin that she thinks she is above all this debating stuff, and that the nomination is hers for the taking if she merely announces her interest. So she plays coy – I would have said she plays coy with the press, but she doesn’t bother to talk to the press. In fact she hates the press, because they play “gotcha” politics, which means they ask her questions that expose her appalling ignorance about any contemporary issue, or for that matter any basic fact about American history. It is true she has a devoted following among Republican voters. When she mistakenly said this week that Paul Revere was out riding about the countryside to warn the British (The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming!), her fans sprung to action and immediately went on Wikipedia to alter the official record so that Paul Revere was made into an American traitor out to help His Majesty’s troops.

This is the thing that Sarah Palin has going for her. The average Republican voter may have learned about the real Paul Revere back in grade school, but if FOX News says over and over that Paul Revere was a traitor, they are definitely going to believe FOX News. Candidates like Sarah Palin are dumb as a post but must always be taken seriously in these campaigns; they have a natural advantage. Sarah Palin’s strategy of avoiding the press, and saying whatever the hell crosses through the vacuum that constitutes her brain, still gives her a shot at this nomination. Even though she won’t be at the debate this week, we still need to steel ourselves to the possibility that someday in the near future President Palin may be delivering the State of the Union address.

With Sarah Palin still officially on the sidelines (though sucking up precious air time whenever she wants to), there is room for another factually-challenged woman, and Michelle Bachmann, Congresswoman from Minnesota, has been sent forth from FOX News to battle for the crown. Her shtick, which she practices relentlessly on FOX News, is to attack Barack Obama at every opportunity. No one really knows if she has any positions of her own, because all her time is spent reminding Republicans that Barack Obama is destroying America with his socialist, communist, Muslim ways. Oh yes – he’s probably not born here either and should never have been allowed to be president in the first place. Republicans love this stuff; in fact they would prefer to see a debate where all the candidates spent two hours attacking Barack Obama rather than talking about the “issues”, because it would be just like watching FOX News! Count on Michelle Bachmann to be throwing out red meat to the crowd.

Herman Cain has been trained by Roger Ailes to pander to the biases of Republican voters, and even to create a few new ones. Unlike Michelle Bachmann, who reminds people time and again that Barack Obama is “illegitimate”, Herman Cain can’t play the race card as effectively, being black and all, nor can he go after gay people, because Rick Santorum has this prejudice locked up (more on him in a minute). So Herman Cain has latched on to the newest despised minority – Muslims. He has vowed not to appoint any Muslims to his administration nor name any Muslims to the judiciary, because as we all know, Muslims are out to replace our beloved Constitution with Sharia Law. Plus they killed all those Americans on 9/11.

Herman Cain has several other things going for him. It’s true he’s black, but he’s safe to have around your neighborhood because he is Conservative with a capital C – like that guy on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. In the 1990s Herman Cain had a business thing going as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, a subsidiary of Burger King, which was a subsidiary of Pillsbury. All these subsidiaries got spun off in leveraged buyouts, which means management worked in cahoots with Wall Street investment firms to take the companies private, steal all the pension money, fire a lot of workers, and then cash in five years later by bringing the company back to the stock market. Herman Cain therefore passes for what is considered these days as an “entrepreneur” and “successful businessman”. In fact, he is probably shameless enough to brag about how he knows all about managing thousands of people, when all he really knows is how to fire thousands of people.

But it gets better for Herman Cain. After his career as a CEO, he went on to Republican politician heaven – he became a lobbyist, for the NRA. No, not that NRA. This was the National Restaurant Association, where his proudest moment was fighting the Clinton health care proposals because of the enormous financial burden they would place on small businesses. Since then, tens of thousands of small businesses have gone bankrupt due to the enormous financial burden imposed by the private health care system that Herman Cain was so instrumental in preserving.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Herman Cain is an ordained minister and preaches at a church in Atlanta. As you can imagine, Herman Cain is moving up in the polls, ready to challenge the front-runner. A man to watch, to be sure, if only because he is probably the likely Vice Presidential nominee for the party no matter who wins the nomination.

Everybody Else

What about all those other candidates who don’t get free air time on FOX News? We can dismiss two of them right from the start.

First, there is Ron Paul, Congressman from Texas and legendary Republican crackpot. It’s been a while since people have called him that because reality has caught up to his ideas and made a number of them respectable. For example, he can’t stand the Federal Reserve and banks in general, and that puts him up several notches in the polls since he is obviously in tune with the feelings of the American people. Unfortunately, he wants to significantly scale back the American military presence overseas, so Republicans just aren’t going to vote for him (remember – God, GUNS, and Gays). He’ll have to wait until that idea gets vindicated, which is bound to happen, but not in this campaign.

Next up for dismissal is Jon Huntsman, a one-time governor of Utah, one of the most conservative states in the union. That would be a good thing for Huntsman, except he made a fatal mistake four years ago: he took a job as Barack Obama’s ambassador to China. Talk about going over to the enemy. Enough said.

Another ex-politician who just can’t get over his itch to be president is Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania. He seems to be a one-trick pony, however. Even though he tries to talk about other issues, voters always associate him with homosexuality, sodomy, polygamy, incest, and bestiality. He tends to get these things confused, and lumps them all together as anti-marriage, anti-family, and anti-procreation (well, maybe not the polygamy part). He was badly defeated a few years ago in his reelection bid to the Senate; it seems Pennsylvania voters have a fondness for sodomy and did not want to see the anti-sodomy laws restored. Nor did he endear himself to the LGBT community when he complimented homosexuality by saying at least it wasn’t as bad as “man on dog sex.” He lost the dog owners vote as well with that one. Expect him to struggle mightily to get traction on any topic other than sex.

Speaking of politicians associated with sex, we will always have Newt Gingrich. This was the man who was having an affair with one of his aides at the time he was leading the House impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton for his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich was acting within the very highest Republican traditions of hypocrisy, so it is not as if the voters won’t consider him no matter what. The problem is he married the aide, and she turned out to be a bit of a control freak. His entire campaign might be called the Newt-Callista show. It is Callista Gingrinch who runs his schedule, and who insisted he take a long vacation promptly after he announced his candidacy. This did not sit well with his senior campaign managers, all of whom resigned this week in disgust at the way things were being run. This will likely doom his campaign, which might distress both Newt and Callista, but at least she has a consolation prize. There is a $500,000 revolving charge account at Tiffany’s set up for her by Newt. A charm bracelet might be just in order.

This leads us to our two front-runners, the M & M boys. Tim Pawlenty is an ex-governor of Minnesota, and Mitt Romney is an ex-governor of Massachusetts. Romney leads all the contenders at the polls, with a 24% approval rating, but that certainly isn’t saying much. Romney has the advantage of having run in 2008, and the disadvantage (but good luck) of having lost to John McCain. His name recognition is high, but so are his negatives. He’s a Mormon, which makes him a heretic in the minds of millions of evangelical and fundamentalist Republican voters. The other candidates are all over him for the healthcare reforms he had approved as governor. They looked workable at the time, but now they look like Obamacare, and Republicans would rather die for lack of treatment for some horrible disease than suffer the indignities of socialist healthcare. Poor Mitt Romney is like Jon Huntsman, tainted with dallying with the Evil One, and his job this time around is going to be much harder.

Tim Pawlenty doesn’t carry this baggage but he doesn’t carry much of anything else. Voters don’t know what he stands for, and he is not mean enough to stand out among this crowd (neither would Lucifer, for that matter). Some party officials were enthused about his candidacy because he was competent as governor of Minnesota and well-liked by independents, but Republicans couldn’t give a hoot about those things. Competence is actually a bad word among the Republican voters – again it is too much like Obama. Republicans don’t want competence and they don’t want a candidate who will take governing seriously. Once in office, the candidate is expected to carry on with the George W. Bush program of dismantling the government, not running it (except for the beloved military, for which there is never too much money). Republicans want ideologues, and candidates have to pass the right religious tests to get their vote. So far, Tim Pawlenty has spent too much time talking about his abilities and too little time talking about his beliefs.

Dark Horse Candidates

With this uninspiring field, there is lots of talk of someone coming out of the blue and saving the party. This talk comes largely from the professionals in the party, who want someone who can have a chance at beating Obama. Again, Republican voters loathe Obama but “winnability” is by no means the only criterion for selecting a candidate. In the old days, the professionals would pull together a few hundred million dollars and place it behind a consensus candidate. This is how we got George W. Bush. This doesn’t work anymore, because if it did Jeb Bush would be leading the field (though he would have a significant “brand name” problem).

We may still see this happen. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is considering an “exploratory committee”, which is a sign that monied interests are stirring the pot up. Perry does not suffer from a reputation for competence; the governor of Texas has to do very little except sign death warrants. He has a big campaign at the moment to bring Jesus and prayer into the public sphere, and since he is not talking in general about God but specifically about Jesus, it means he is going straight for the jugular of appealing to the religious voters in his party. He seems popular with independents and some Democrats, though here too that is a concern mostly of the professionals. The hope is he could excite the field because he has none of the drawbacks of the others.

Standing out among this crowd isn’t hard. For awhile Donald Trump was on top of the polls, merely because he had some refreshing talk about standing up to China and invading Libya for the purpose of taking all their oil (this was way too much honesty for the professionals, but no one found a way to get The Donald to shut up). Eventually, Trump pulled out when he realized what sort of scrutiny would occur over his dealings with shadowy mob figures.

Trump learned the hard way the basic rule of all American politics: money stays in the background. Trump's money was so sleazy it was already getting attention in the press, which is always bad. Rick Perry’s money will always stay well concealed if he chooses to run, so that it looks like he is in charge. Roger Ailes funds his candidates with relative transparency; FOX News has even taken to giving a few million of its own dollars directly to the GOP governor and senator campaign funds. What isn’t revealed, however, is the much larger supplementary money that is fed to his candidate. Karl Rove, for example, has set up an organization for privately-funded television advertising that was instrumental in providing victory to dozens of Republican candidates for the House and Senate in the 2010 election. Rove absolutely refuses to reveal any of his donors, which almost certainly are large corporations, banks, hedge funds, and a few billionaires. It was only late in the 2010 campaign that we learned the Tea Party was largely a creation of money from the Koch Brothers and air time from Roger Ailes. You might notice that the Tea Party is no longer in the news even though the presidential campaign is heating up, and that is because Roger Ailes has chosen not to give it air time (as of yet).

In short, the people and corporations with money haven’t figured out whom they should support yet. It has to be someone who can get the religious zealots who vote in the primaries to come out with some enthusiastic support. Realistically, it has to be someone who has a shot at beating Obama, as much as the primary voters don’t really care. Hence Sarah Palin may no longer be on anyone’s short list, which would explain why FOX News has cut off her television time. It has to be a candidate who gives the illusion that they are their own man or woman, when in fact they will be perfectly subservient to the interests of the people who will fund their campaign. It has to be someone capable of saying one thing during the campaign and doing the exact opposite as president – sort of like George W. Bush and Barack Obama. That’s who they are looking for, and the only reason there isn’t someone clearly heading the field is because the money people haven’t tipped their hands yet.