“Marco Rubio, Gen-X Fraud”: The “John McCain Of The Millennial Set”
On the surface, Marco Rubio is such a perfect 2016 Republican nominee you might think he was created in a lab. He ticks off all the demographic boxes that the GOP has struggled with for the past decade: A young (43) Latino who likes Tupac! He is adept with social media, talks like a person who watches the same dumb TV as you, and is pleasantly self-deprecatory when the occasion calls for it. Pundits and consultants are giddy with the prospect of a “generational choice” between Rubio and the rest of the field—not to mention Hillary Clinton.
Analysts aren’t wrong to suppose that a race against Rubio, in either the primary or the general, will expose a generational fault line. But it’s far from certain that Rubio will be one with the youth vote on his side.
Take away Rubio’s biography and look at his positions and he becomes less the voice of his generation and more Benjamin Button. If I told you about a candidate that was anti-marriage equality, anti-immigration reform (for now), anti-pot decriminalization, pro-government surveillance, and in favor of international intervention but against doing something about climate change, what would you guess the candidate’s age to be? On all of those issues, Rubio’s position is not the one shared by most young people. The Guardian dubbed him the “John McCain of the millennial set,” which isn’t fair to McCain, who at least has averred that climate change exists.
Indeed, with those opinions, the only demographic Rubio can plausibly claim to represent is old white guys. Well, even old white guys support marriage equality these days—63 percent of all Americans do. But Rubio has the olds on other issues! Americans 65 and older are the only age group with a majority against marijuana decriminalization and the only group who deny anthropogenic climate change; those 50 and older are the only group with a majority that believes the government surveillance “has not gone far enough.”
Advisers have bragged that, unlike other candidates, Rubio would not be “competing for who can be the whitest, oldest rich guy,” a claim which is both obvious and beside the point. Of course, he’s not competing to be a rich old white guy, but he’d be a fool not to be competing for the whitest, oldest rich guys. Staking his nomination on the non-white or youth voters of the Republican Party would be a comically doomed strategy: The GOP primary electorate is 95 percent white. In every state with an early primary (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida), over half of those who cast Republican votes are over the age of 50. (In Florida, 70 percent of primary voters are over 50.)
Indeed, the Rubio team’s assuredness about his youthful appeal may come from the fact that they’re all in Florida. Winning “the youth vote” in Florida amounts to sweeping the retirement communities rather than the nursing homes.
What’s more, Rubio has competition to be one of the non-whitest, youngest guys in the GOP’s crowded field: There is at least one honorary Hispanic (Jeb Bush) and one black candidate (Ben Carson), and several who are close to Rubio in age: Scott Walker (47), Rand Paul (52), Ted Cruz (44).
The redeeming quality of Rubio’s “youth strategy”—why it just might work!—is that it is fundamentally insincere. Which is to say, he’s not competing for the youth vote at all—he’s competing for the old rich white guys who think they know what the youth of the country want.
All those electoral post-mortems have apparently convinced at least a few of the GOP’s decision-makers that they are no longer the most influential demographic in America. But they didn’t finish reading those reports, I guess, because they don’t seem to realize why they aren’t as influential. They think it’s just about age and race, and so we get Republicans in mid-life-crisis mode, without thinking through what issues made young people reject them.
This is the latest in conservative identity politics, a facile assumption that all you need to do to win someone’s vote is to run someone that looks a little like them. But millennials in particular have proven to be demographic-agnostic when it comes to picking their heroes and spokespeople. They’ve made meme-worthy icons of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Betty White. A recent survey found that the business person millennials most admire to be Bill Gates (59), not Mark Zuckerberg. In politics, it was John F. Kennedy, who might considered permanently young, but he surely doesn’t represent the future.
As far attracting young voters, Rubio’s campaign will probably go about as well as most old-people-try-to-guess-what-the-young-people-want strategies go. Marco Rubio is the GOP’s Cousin Oliver, a desperate gimmick by the out-of-touch to spark interest in a moribund brand. That Rubio is a gleeful participant in this exercise makes his distance from the actual dreams and desires of this country’s young people all the more apparent.
By: Ana Marie Cox,
“Rand Paul’s Past Continues To Haunt Him”: He’ll Face The One Thing His Father Never Had To, Attack Ads From Republican Rivals
About four years ago, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) faced booing during debates for the Republican presidential candidates when he said American foreign policy led to the 9/11 attacks. The response – from the audience and the other candidates – made clear that the party has no use for such an argument.
Four years later, it’s Ron Paul’s son who’s now running for president – and he’s said largely the same thing.
Rand Paul said in 2007 interview that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East was at the core of the reasons for terrorism and that the 9/11 Commission showed that the September 11th attacks were made in response to U.S. presence in foreign lands. […]
In the interview, Paul went on to take aim at then-President George W. Bush, calling him “ridiculous” for saying “they hate us for our freedom.” Paul said Americans should try to understand “why they hate us” and what policies create terrorism.
As the BuzzFeed report noted, Rand Paul said in the 2007 interview, “I mean, you have to recognize what policy creates terrorism. Because you can’t kill every Muslim in the world. There’s a billion Muslims. We have to learn to live together to a certain point.”
Is it any wonder the Kentucky Republican is eager to declare his pre-Senate remarks as irrelevant?
This area will only become more problematic for Rand Paul in the coming months. For one thing, he was quite active as a public voice for his father’s agenda and fringe worldview, delivering all kinds of speeches in which he made very controversial remarks. This BuzzFeed report is damaging in the context of the 2016 race, but similar reports will surface – many times – throughout the year.
For another, if Rand Paul is positioned to credibly compete for the GOP nomination, he’ll face the one thing his father never had to worry about: attack ads from Republican rivals. And in light of what he’s given for the ad-makers to work with, those commercials are likely to be pretty brutal.
Finally, as we talked about the other day, if the senator thinks he can dismiss the relevance of this record, he’s likely to be disappointed. Rand Paul has suggested quotes from 2007 to 2009 are out of bounds, as if there’s a statute of limitations that has run out.
But we’re not just talking about youthful indiscretions that seem irrelevant decades later – “Aqua Buddha,” this isn’t – we’re talking about public remarks Paul made as a surrogate for a presidential candidate.
Whether Rand Paul likes it or not, presidential candidates don’t have the luxury of declaring much of their adult lives off-limits to scrutiny. So long as he’s being quoted accurately, his public remarks on major issues of the day matter and deserve consideration as he seeks the nation’s highest office.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 16, 2015
“Searching Her Own Soul”: Hillary Clinton’s Evolution On Marriage Equality Shows How Change Happens, And Why Parties Matter
Over the last few days, Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed has been documenting Hillary Clinton’s evolution on the issue of same-sex marriage, an evolution that may now finally be complete. First Geidner posted some interesting documents from the 1990s showing Clinton and her husband explaining their opposition to marriage rights, then he got the Clinton campaign on record saying that she now hopes the Supreme Court will rule that there is a constitutional right to marriage for all Americans, which is actually a change from what she was saying just a year ago, when her position was that this was an issue best decided state by state.
So does this all tell us that Hillary Clinton is a chameleon willing to shift with the political winds, lacking in any moral core? Not really. Like every politician, she’ll tell you that her shift on this issue was a result of talking to people and searching her own soul, not some political calculation. If that’s true, then it mirrors how millions of Americans have changed their own minds. But even if it isn’t true, it doesn’t matter. She is where she is now, and if she becomes president, her policies will reflect her current position, whether it’s sincere or not. That’s how change happens.
We spend a lot of time in campaigns trying to figure out if politicians are honest or authentic or real, and one of the supposedly important data points in that assessment is whether they’ve changed their positions on any important issues. “Flip-floppers” are supposed to be feared and hated. But most of the time, that judgment is utterly irrelevant to what they would actually do in office.
For instance, few party nominees had in their history the kind of wholesale ideological reinvention that Mitt Romney went through. But what does that actually mean for the kind of president he would have been? Does anyone seriously believe that had he been elected, Romney would have flipped back to becoming a moderate Republican, just because deep down he’s a flip-flopper? Of course he wouldn’t have. Romney changed when his sights moved from liberal Massachusetts to the national stage, which also happened during a period when his party became more conservative. He would have governed as the conservative he became.
When public opinion on an important issue is in flux, politicians are emphatic followers. They figure out what’s happening, particularly within their own party, and then accommodate themselves to that change. It often looks like they’re leading when what they’re actually doing is taking the change in sentiment that has occurred and translating it into policy change. For instance, Barack Obama has taken a number of steps to expand gay rights, like ending the ban on gays serving in the military and pushing the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. But he did all that after public opinion demanded it, not before.
In the end, what’s in a politician’s heart may be interesting to understand, but it doesn’t make much of a practical difference. Does it matter that Lyndon Johnson was personally a racist who spent his early career as a segregationist? No, it doesn’t: When his own party and the American public more broadly moved to support civil rights for African Americans, he passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and became an advocate for equality.
It’s possible that Hillary Clinton believed in marriage equality all along, but didn’t have the courage to advocate it publicly until she finally did so in 2013. Or maybe every shift in her public stance was a perfectly accurate reflection of her views at that moment. Either way, now that the Democratic Party is firmly in support of marriage equality for everyone in every state, that position is going to guide her if she wins.
And let’s not forget that almost every major Republican politician has gone through their own evolution on this issue as well. The first time it was a major issue in a presidential race, in 2004, Republicans advocated a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage everywhere. Most of them even opposed civil unions. But today, the opinion supported by every presidential contender who has been explicit on the topic is that the decision should be left up to the states, meaning it’s OK with them if some states have marriage equality while others don’t. A few do advocate a constitutional amendment—but not one to ban same-sex marriage nationwide, just one to preserve the ability of individual states to ban it if they choose.
That’s where the Republican Party is now, so that’s what the next Republican president’s policies will reflect. Until they evolve again.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 16, 2015
“Hillary Clinton Is Quaking In Her Boots”: Two More Candidates To Begin Doomed Runs For Presidency
What leads a man to look in the mirror and say, “I could be president of the United States”? Anybody can say they should be president, of course—after all, aren’t all your ideas the right ones?—but it takes a remarkably optimistic spirit to think that you can do what it takes to make it to the White House. Can you raise all that money, run that huge organization, out-strategize your opponents, overcome the inevitable stumbles and controversies, have the stamina and fortitude and cleverness to do it all better than anyone else, and convince the American people that you’re the one?
Somebody has to do it, of course. But if you’re a politician who last ran for office thirteen years ago, who had a relatively undistinguished record, who represents a wing of your party that no longer exists, and whom nobody ever accused of being charismatic in the first place, what makes you look in that mirror and say, “Yeah. I’m ready. Let’s do this”?
America, I give you George Elmer Pataki:
Ready to get on that train to Victorytown? No? No matter, Pataki is in New Hampshire, pressing the flesh and winning hearts and minds. And he’s not the only one with visions of electoral glory dancing through his head:
Mike Huckabee, who stepped down from his Fox News Channel show, “Huckabee,” in January, is expected to return to Fox this evening to make his 2016 presidential campaign official. Huckabee said Friday he is “moving toward” announcing a second bid for the White House.
Huckabee told reporters in Washington this morning he would make a little news on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” which airs on FNC at 6 p.m. ET.
Huckabee’s bid is, if equally destined for failure, at least a little easier to understand. Unlike Pataki, Huckabee isn’t a walking Ambien, and he’s kept in touch with the Republican electorate since his last run in 2008 by being a ubiquitous presence on radio and television. But he’s also a con artist who seems to spend most of his time devising ways to separate gullible conservatives from their money. Not only is that likely to be raised by his opponents should he actually gain any momentum in the primaries, running for president isn’t a good way to make money, at least in the short term. He already had what I assume is a lucrative career. So he must really believe he can win. After all, Huckabee is a man of fervent and sincere faith.
Maybe it’s the imperfections of the announced candidates that lead people like Pataki and Huckabee to give it a shot. After all, Jeb Bush is a Bush, Marco Rubio is a whipper-snapper, Scott Walker is untested nationally—if you were motivated enough, you could come up with a scenario in which everyone else falls and you’re left as the obvious choice. But these guys? I’m sure Hillary Clinton is quaking in her boots.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect,April 17, 2015
“Me, And The Family”: George W. Bush Concedes His Brother Has ‘A Problem’
Former President George W. Bush was in Chicago yesterday, giving a paid speech and reflecting briefly on the 2016 presidential race.
Jeb Bush’s candidacy has a problem, says brother George. “Me.”
“It’s an easy line to say, ‘Haven’t we had enough Bushes?’ After all, even my mother said, ‘Yes,’” the former president told an audience of 7,000 health IT experts here on Wednesday.
As the Politico report noted, the former president told the audience that voters won’t see him “out there” on the campaign trail in order to help put some distance between the two Bushes.
The former Florida governor, meanwhile, was in southern Ohio yesterday, stressing a similar point.
Republican White House prospect Jeb Bush kicked off a speech to business leaders on Tuesday with a series of personal recollections, saying he’s his “own person.” […]
He told the crowd he’s blessed to be the son of one president and the brother of another but “I’m also my own person. I’ve lived my own life.”
There’s more than one reason this is such a tough sell.
As we discussed a few weeks ago, even as Jeb urges voters to see him as his “own person,” he’s also relying on his mother, father, brother, and son to raise big bucks for his super PAC.
At the same time, he’s surrounded himself with the Bush family team of foreign-policy advisers, and reportedly brought on his brother’s chief economist to help shape his 2016 economic agenda.
As for Jeb’s claim that he’s lived his “own life,” the New York Times reported last month that he spent much of his adult life taking advantage of his family connections to advance his interests. In Florida, people went out of their way to get close to Bush in the hopes that he’d relay messages and suggestions to his powerful relatives – which he routinely did.
This isn’t going away.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 16, 2015
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