“Rubio Suddenly Notices Trump”: The Fervor Of Someone Who Has Undergone A Deathbed Conversion
What a difference a sense of urgency makes.
Having finally stood up to the bully Donald Trump in Thursday night’s debate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio continued his assault on the GOP front-runner on NBC’s “Today” show.
But the most remarkable part of Rubio 2.0 is the hypocrisy and shamelessness of that same urgency.
“We’re on the verge of having someone take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party who’s a con artist,” Rubio said. “His target audience is working Americans who are really struggling over the last few years in this economy but he has spent a career sticking it to working Americans.” Remember the phrases “con artist” and “sticking it to working Americans” – you’re going to hear that a lot from Rubio, who famously excels at hitting his talking points. In the “Today” interview, for example, he used the former expression four times and the latter three in a four-and-a-half minute interview. (The line of attack is actually quite strong, not least because it has the virtue of being correct – this morning’s clips will make good fodder for Hillary Clinton’s admen in the fall.)
And how did we get to be “on the verge of” of a Trump victory? Rubio’s answer, of course, is the media: He, Rubio, has had articles written about his driving record, he complained, while the tyrant of Trump Tower is “always making things up and no one holds him accountable for it. … He’s being treated with kid gloves by many in the media in the hopes that he’s the nominee. Some of them are biased – they’d love to see a liberal like Donald Trump take over the Republican Party. And others know he’s easy to beat once he gets there.”
It’s as if Rubio just wandered into the race and realized that the party of Saint Ronald of Reagan is on the verge of being taken over by Trump. How could such a thing happen?
Don’t blame Marco! It’s not like he’s been sitting meekly for months watching up close as Trump runs roughshod over the party, right? Marco Rubio hasn’t been on the debate stage and the hustings, treating Trump with “kid gloves,” failing to hold him accountable for his nonsensical ravings and – lest we forget – abetting his neofascist Muslim bashing, right? It was literally two days ago on the very same TV show that Rubio dismissed the idea that he had to attack Trump as “a media narrative,” piously saying he “didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans.” (Except for Ted Cruz, whom he was busy ripping apart.)
I get that Rubio’s campaign learned the lesson of Jeb Bush and was smart enough to deliberately not telegraph the volley of punches they planned for Trump. And Rubio doesn’t bear all the blame alone – fellow survivor Ted Cruz, for example, made a conscious strategy of bear-hugging Trump for much of the last several months. But Rubio’s shock – shock! – that Trump has been allowed to get this far is rather rich.
Rubio suddenly has the fervor of someone who has undergone a deathbed conversion, which is pretty much what he has. As I wrote yesterday, the extent to which Trump is in the catbird seat is reflected by the fact that the Florida primary – where the former reality TV star is doubling Rubio in the polls – is an existential test for the freshman senator but not Trump. A loss there kills Rubio, while vanquishing Trump would merely mean holding serve at home.
So we’ll see if Rubio’s mad stop-Trump scramble pays off. If it doesn’t and he wants to blame someone for losing his beloved conservative movement to a con artist, he can start by looking in the mirror.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, February 26, 2016
“Staying In Harmony”: Christie Endorses Trump, And They Sing A Duet Of Contempt For Rubio
Just when it looked like it was Donald Trump against the Republican world — a world for which Marco Rubio was to be the savior — along comes an endorsement that cannot be ignored: Chris Christie, an Establishment candidate before he became the odd man out in New Hampshire, has embraced the Donald. If, like me, you didn’t see that coming, you have to admit it makes sense from a stylistic and geographic perspective. Boisterous is probably the euphemism for the rhetorical qualities the two share, along with a Greater New York orientation. And it is probably a relief for Christie, after he’s spent years sucking up to conservative activists, to join a campaign where it’s okay to admit the public sector has duties other than fighting wars and enforcing contracts. Christie will have to deal with hearing his own words mocking Trump’s Muslim-immigration-ban idea quoted back to him; he will need, and is no doubt formulating, a quick response or just a brush-away reference to coalition politics.
But it’s clear Christie and his new candidate of choice won’t have any trouble staying in harmony on the subject of the day: Marco Rubio as a stone loser, per the New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman:
At Friday’s news conference announcing the endorsement, which was peppered with demeaning insults of Mr. Rubio by the two men, Mr. Christie repeatedly attacked Mr. Rubio, calling his behavior at the debate “desperate” and reflective of a “losing campaign … ”
Mr. Trump heaped praise on Mr. Christie for tenderizing Mr. Rubio during the final debate in New Hampshire, where the Florida senator wilted under blistering criticism from the governor.
“I thought he was gonna die — good going, Chris,” Mr. Trump said.
Nothing like some Marco-bashing to bond two guys together, eh? But Haberman thinks Christie’s move will have more practical benefits than just messing with Rubio’s head:
Mr. Christie’s endorsement augments Mr. Trump’s appeal for working-class voters. But more significantly, Mr. Christie could become a catalyst for other leading Republicans to back him after they have held back from supporting the developer despite his recent string of victories.
We’ll see. I’d say Chris Christie’s endorsement plus 11 or 12 wins on March 1 would be a good one-two combo for Trump. And then, yes, Christie’s example could make it easier for other moderate or “somewhat conservative” pols to gamble their respectability on a front-row seat at that most improbable of events: the nomination of Donald J. Trump.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 26, 2016
“Quite Unpopular At Home”: Rubio’s Must-Win State Is His Own — And He’s Losing There
As political observers absorb Thursday night’s tenth Republican-candidate debate and argue over Trump’s untouchability or Marco Rubio’s new fight-club mentality, Nate Cohn of the New York Times takes on the more prosaic chore of examining how, exactly, Rubio might survive a losing streak and still win the GOP nomination.
The good news he offers Rubio and his growing circle of party and conservative-Establishment fans is that he doesn’t have to win a single state on March 1.
[I]t wouldn’t be optimal for Mr. Rubio to lose all 12 contests on March 1, Super Tuesday. His chances of amassing an outright majority of delegates, and becoming the presumptive nominee before the convention, would be quite low. But he would still have a real chance to take a clear delegate lead over , and win the nomination.
Rubio’s key to survival thereafter is to take advantage of proportional award systems by exceeding the 20 percent threshold necessary to win delegates in every (or nearly every) state. If he does that, a more ambitious goal may come into sight: edging out Ted Cruz for second place in enough states — especially in the South — to all but knock him out of the race and set up the long-awaited head-to-head competition with Trump.
On the other hand, says Cohn, excuses for Rubio not actually winning primaries come to an abrupt end on March 15:
Ohio and Florida will award their delegates on a winner-take-all basis. Missouri will award its delegates on a winner-take-all basis by congressional district, and Illinois isn’t much different. North Carolina, on the other hand, awards its delegates proportionally. It figures less prominently in the delegate math and as a result the candidates are unlikely to spend money there on television advertisements or campaign stops.
If Mr. Trump swept the day in the same way he is expected to sweep Super Tuesday, he would net nearly three times as many delegates as he would on Super Tuesday, defeating Mr. Rubio, 282 delegates to 40. For Mr. Rubio, winning Florida would make Mr. Trump’s advantage a more manageable 183 to 139, but his hole would start looking pretty deep.
With that sort of a deficit, Mr. Rubio’s chances of winning a majority of delegates would all but evaporate.
So Rubio really needs to win in Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois on March 15 to stay in the game with Trump (assuming Trump doesn’t stumble on March 1). And it goes without saying he must, must, must win his home state of Florida. Getting skunked there would decimate his delegate math, even if his Establishment friends somehow found a way to madly spin a home-court loss into something other than a disaster.
Signs are growing, however, that winning Florida won’t be easy for the state’s own junior senator. For months Rubio languished in third or even fourth place in Florida public-opinion surveys. Only with Jeb Bush’s withdrawal from the race — giving Rubio a boost in both elected official endorsements and favorite-son status points — has he begun to rise; a post-Jeb Quinnipiac poll has him within 16 points of the longtime leader in the state, Donald Trump. What should be more troubling to Team Rubio, however, is that Trump is now rivaling him on his home turf in all the indices of basic popularity.
This is made most evident by the very latest Florida survey, from Public Policy Polling:
[Rubio’s] approval rating as Senator has cratered to a 31/55 spread, compared to a much more evenly divided 41/44 when we last polled the state in September. Only 40% of voters in the state think he should continue with his campaign, compared to a 44% plurality who think it’s time for him to drop out. And he narrowly trails both Hillary Clinton (45/43) and Bernie Sanders (44/42) in head to head general election match ups. Rubio’s become quite unpopular at home over the course of his campaign.
Winning has made Trump more popular. 64% of Republicans in Florida now have a favorable opinion of him to only 27% with a negative one. That actually puts him ahead of Rubio’s 60/28 standing.
Let that sink in for a minute. From the very beginning of the 2016 cycle, Marco Rubio’s ace in the hole has been high and positive favorability ratios all over the country. Nobody much disliked him, and that made him the likely beneficiary of the winnowing of the field. Now Donald Trump’s more popular than he is with Florida Republicans, at least according to this one survey. And PPP has more bad news for those who assume the fading of other candidates on and after March 1 will put Rubio over the top:
The most remarkable thing in this poll though is what happens when you narrow the field down to just Trump and Rubio- Trump still leads by double digits at 52/38. Rubio does win over supporters of Cruz (56/25), Kasich (47/32), and Carson (64/21) in such a scenario. But Trump has such a big lead to begin with and picks up enough of the supporters of the also rans that it gives him the overall 14 point advantage.
Is the PPP survey an outlier? Maybe, though the Quinnipiac poll that offered Rubio relatively good news also found that Trump’s “negative score” — the percentage of Republicans who say they could not support him — is now lower in Florida than Cruz’s and not much higher than Rubio’s. That may be the overriding reason Rubio suddenly went after Trump with a claw hammer in last night’s debate. A scenario where the mogul is as popular as Rubio in Florida is simply catastrophic, to the point that Rubio is willing to risk his own warm-and-fuzzies to undermine acceptance of Trump.
And Rubio can’t entirely count on another strong finish among late-deciders to win Florida for him: Early voting is a very big deal there, with some local election officials estimating a majority of primary votes will be cast by mail or in person before March 15. The option of lying in the weeds and waiting for Trump to self-destruct or for someone else to take him out has vanished for Marco Rubio. He’s potentially two and a half weeks away from watching his candidacy expire where it started.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 26, 2016
“Taking A Shit On The Constitution”: Senate Republicans Make Donald Trump Look Good
When a presidency is winding down we start to think there probably isn’t that much to fight over. Yet here are the Republicans acting like it’s 2009 all over again, and more. These moves on the Supreme Court situation and Guantanamo Bay aren’t just obstructionist. They are certifiably insane.
No hearing for the nominee? Not even a courtesy call? They’ve really gone ’round the bend. Look, there’s hypocrisy to go around on Court stuff. Reverse the situation, and a lot of people saying A now would be saying Not A. I get that. Although I don’t get what in the world that 1992 clip of Joe Biden that everybody’s showing and re-showing has to do with anything. He was speaking hypothetically. There was no nominee. The one time in Biden’s tenure as Judiciary Committee chairman that there was a flesh-and-blood nominee, Anthony Kennedy, the committee and the full Senate passed him through unanimously, and in an election year.
But since you brought up the old days, let’s talk Robert Bork. Bork was a crazy radical extremist. He saw no constitutional justification for the civil rights bill. He also thought states should be free to criminalize the purchase of contraception by married couples. Off the charts, that guy. But he was the president’s choice. The Democrats gave him a hearing.
Say what you want, conservatives, but I feel pretty confident that if the situation were precisely reversed, the Democrats would be going through the process. At the end of the day, a majority of them would presumably vote against a conservative, balance-tilting nominee in a presidential election year. So, you might say, it amounts to the same thing.
No. It doesn’t amount to the same thing. One approach is called respecting the Constitution. The other approach is called taking a shit on the Constitution.
I suppose I could be wrong about what my hypothetical Democrats would do. But I don’t think so. Why? Because the liberal-left base, while certainly ideological and often choleric, just isn’t the same thing as the right-wing base. The right-wing base, led by Limbaugh and all those blowhards, is the reason McConnell said what he said while Scalia’s body was still warm. The liberal groups would not have demanded of Democratic leaders that they just shut the process down.
And if I am wrong about the Democrats, I can 100 percent guarantee you this: I would have written a column calling their behavior shameful. Vote against the person in the end, I’d have written, but for Chrissakes, respect the constitutional process, you bunch of morons. And I think every other prominent liberal columnist I can think of would have done the same. I don’t recall these last few days seeing any of our conservative counterparts calling out the Republicans.
Obama and the Democrats better find a way to make them pay. Nominate an unimpeachably qualified Latino or African American, and let Latinos and/or black voters watch as the GOP stonewalls this person for months, and run 3,000,000 attack ads on ethnic radio stations. (This is the paragraph where conservatives on Twitter will say “There goes that hack Tomasky making everything racial again.” Right. Whereas the guy who wants a brown-shirt police force to go in and break up Latino families, no, he’s not making anything racial. And the party that’s passing law after law to see to it that voting is made as hard as it can be for black people, no, they’re not making anything racial either. Just me. I get it.)
It’s such scandalous behavior. But because it’s them, and it’s all anyone expects out of them, it’s not even scandalous anymore. Which brings us to the Gitmo situation. If anything this is even worse.
Let me ask you this, reader. Do you have the slightest idea where the nearest supermax prison is to your house? Of course you don’t. Oh, a few of you do—you live in a town where it’s a big employer, your cousin works there, like that. But I’d wager that 98 percent of Americans have no idea where the nearest supermax prison is. There appear to be around 50 (some are wholly supermax, some partly). I bet thousands of people drive past one every day without even knowing it.
And of the 2 percent who do know, do they have any idea who’s in there? How many murderers, rapists, drug kingpins, Bernie Madoffs? Of course they don’t. And the reason they don’t is that the prisoners inside these prisons have zero impact on their lives. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Mahmud Abuhalima, terrorists all, live in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Do the good people of Florence ever see them? They don’t even see each other. They spend 23 hours a day alone in a cell the size of a typical upstairs-hallway bathroom. And almost nobody ever escapes from these places. You know how your chances of being killed by a terrorist as an American are one in 3.5 million? Well, the odds of you being killed by a terrorist who escaped from a supermax prison have to be considerably longer than even that. Anyone in Florence, Colorado and environs who sits around worrying that one of these guys is going to come pounding on their screen door is a paranoid lunatic or an idiot.
And that’s what the Republicans want us to be, a nation of paranoid lunatics and idiots, because paranoid lunacy and idiocy tend to benefit the Republican Party at the polls. So this is what we get stuck with. We keep open this facility (Gitmo) that’s notorious around the world—the Arab world and the entire world—that gives America a horrible reputation and whose very existence provides rhetorical fodder for our foes, so we don’t run the “risk” of putting terrorists inside facilities they’ll never get out of and where their movement the rest of their lives will be limited to maybe four rooms.
The Republicans won’t pay any political price for this, because the mere word terrorism turns most Americans into quivering little poltroons. But we as a country pay a price when an argument that is so galactically far removed from objective reality carries the day. And we pay a price when a constitutional norm is flouted and no one even cares because everyone has long since stopped expecting anything more. It’s not easy making Trump look good, but this week, Washington Republicans have pulled it off.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 25, 2016
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 