… will hate Daniel Fisher and Jon Bruner’s recent Forbes feature, “Power For Sale: Cheap.” Fisher and Bruner challenge the conventional wisdom that big money has been flowing into recent elections.

Political strategist Douglas Schoen once relayed a question to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers: When you were president of ­Harvard, if someone agreed to donate a quarter-million dollars, could he or she have gotten a ­meeting with you? The response: “Not a chance.” But what if that same quarter-million was going into politics? “You can get Romney, you can get Gingrich,” said Schoen, who served as a Bill Clinton’s chief pollster in the White House. “You can get a meeting with the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, the President—anyone.”

Why is it cheaper to buy access to a President of the United States than the president of a university? That market imbalance explains why Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson is singlehandedly floating Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, why Mitt Romney was able to dominate the recent Florida primary, why Democrats are frantically courting their big donors—and why 2012 represents a ­watershed year for the relationship between money and power.

Put simply: Political influence is currently a bargain. “The most undervalued asset in America,” as one influential billionaire told FORBES. That quarter-million gets a presidential sitting because campaign laws still cap direct campaign contributions in federal elections at $2,500 per candidate, magnifying the influence of those who are sidestepping the traditional party structure entirely.

The authors say more money is bound to flow into political races.

More is on the way. For all the huff and puff about the escalating cost of a presidential election—some predict it will consume $6 billion this year, up from $5 billion in 2008—these figures are a pittance relative to the assets marshaled by American billionaires. The ten richest Americans alone are worth $266 billion. There are thousands of people who could singlehandedly fund a presidential candidate the way Adelson has propped up Gingrich (the $11 million he and his wife gave to a super ­PAC backing Gingrich as of the end of January represented about 13 hours of his 2011 personal wealth creation). They can influence politics in a big way without impacting their lives or those of their children or grandchildren. Tens of thousands can do the same for a congressional candidate.

This imbalance means that the money is going to flow.