Dreamy Rubio is really just Cruz with a prettier face
by digby
I wrote about Rubio's bogus "mainstream" reputation for Salon today:
The GOP presidential campaign has now shifted away from the heartland evangelical wonderland of Iowa to “live free or die” state, New Hampshire, where the elbows are notoriously sharp and a whole bunch of Republican establishment candidates are hunkering down to stage their last stand. It remains unlikely that any of them will be able to dislodge Trump in the number one slot — it’s much more his kind of electorate than the pious social conservatives of Iowa. There are lots of angry white right-wingers and independents there who aren’t as concerned about their religion as they are about their guns and the threat of Mexicans and Muslims “pouring over the border” to make them eat mole and follow Sharia law.
But after Iowa there a feeling of excitement in the air that the Trump balloon may have finally burst, and there’s a possibility that the air could go completely out of it over the next couple of weeks. (
Nate Silver mused yesterday that Trump may just end up being like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul.) One suspects that all the other candidates are having fever dreams about making a big last-minute move as Rubio did in Iowa to either usurp The Donald or come in a close second and be touted as this cycle’s Comeback Kid. Cruz and Rubio are, of course, the two best positioned to do this, with Rubio probably a little bit better positioned than Cruz simply because
he isn’t quite as dependent on evangelical voters, even though he turned himself into the second coming of Oral Roberts in the last couple of weeks to get himself a slice of that Iowa evangelical pie.
Yesterday morning, the campaigns wasted no time with niceties, as Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich were practically waiting on the tarmac for the Iowa Three to alight from their private planes to begin the battle,
mano a mano. So far they seem to be sticking with the “Trump will implode eventually” strategy and are setting their sights on one another. As is his wont,
Chris Christie was the first to deliver a roundhouse punch to the man who came in third in Iowa but was declared the winner, Marco Rubio
:“Let’s get him up here – let’s get the boy in the bubble up here. Let’s see if he’ll handle your questions and take that. I don’t think he will. Now it’s time for him to man up and step up and stop letting his handlers write all of his speeches. I’m fascinated to hear his answers, and I’m sure you are too.
“Maybe he’ll answer more than two or three questions at a town hall and do more than 40 minutes and deliver something that isn’t the same canned speech he gives every time. This isn’t the student-council election everybody. This is the election for the president of the United States.
“Let’s get the boy in his bubble out of his bubble, and let’s see him play for the next week in New Hampshire. Let’s see if he’s ready to play because I’m ready to play.”
It’s pretty clear what Christie’s saying there: Rubio’s a punk. Rubio’s campaign manager responded by calling Christie a liberal Obama lover who’s full of “hot air,” which undoubtedly made him feel very sad.
Jeb Bush meanwhile is facing a different problem: too much campaign spending on his behalf. It sounds weird, but according to
this Washington Post story, Bush’s Super PAC is inundating people with expensive campaign swag to the point where it’s making them recoil from the candidate.This has happened before. In California, eBay magnate and GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman saturated the state with advertisements for many months, and it made
people hate her. There is such a thing as too much exposure. (It’s worth noting that
Whitman had an unusual business arrangement with strategist Mike Murphy — the same Mike Murphy who runs Bush’s Right to Rise Super PAC.)
Meanwhile,
after his Super PAC ran a very unpopular negative ad against Marco Rubio and he asked them to take it down, Governor John Kasich (who is seen as a possible New Hampshire latecomer) seems to have decided that he’s going to run as the positive, optimistic guy. It makes sense since there might be a few people in New Hampshire who aren’t convinced that their country is the dark and hopeless dystopian hell-scape the other candidates insist America has become.
And then there’s Rubio, who is telling everyone who will listen that he’s the only one who can “unite both the Republican Party and the conservative movement after what has been a divisive campaign.” He seems to think if he says it enough it will be true. And a lot of Republicans in D.C. are probably hoping he’s right.
Unfortunately, he and Cruz might share the same problem in the general election.
This Kasich voter gets right to the point:
Rubio and Cruz “really are too conservative, and I don’t really see them as compromisers,” said Judy Kohn, a 76-year-old retired librarian from Georges, New Hampshire.
Nobody is surprised that someone might think Ted Cruz is too conservative. But that nice young man Rubio? Well yes, as it happens, he’s just as right wing as Cruz. Sure, he joined the Gang of 8 to try to forge some compromise on immigration but that’s the only compromise he’s ever endorsed. It’s too bad for him that happens to be a litmus test issue on the right (and one which I’m not sure they can forgive).
”I like Marco but he has now turned hard right. Marco has no exception for rape and incest. I think it’s going to be very hard to grow the party among women if you’re gonna tell young women, ‘If you get raped, you’re gotta carry the child of the rapist.’”
“These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another…All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.”
It’s rare to hear even a far right wing zealot or hardcore libertarian suggest that Social Security and Medicare have “weakened us as a people.” The farthest they will usually go is to suggest that the program should be privatized. That’s a scathing indictment of our national character.
There's more at the link, especially about foreign policy. Let's just say he's the son Dick Cheney never had.
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