“GOP Consultant For A Day”: The GOP’s Presidential Race Is One Of The Most Fascinating Political Brawls In Years
The value of free advice is measured by what you pay for it, and Republicans don’t usually ask me for mine.
Nonetheless, the GOP’s presidential race is one of the most fascinating political brawls in years. It’s about to hit full stride, and I can’t resist kibitzing. I know the leading candidates will take my guidance for what it’s worth.
Marco Rubio: You have three related problems. You’re trying to appeal to every wing of the party, which means that none regards you as one of its own. There is no state in the early going that you can consider an obvious bet. And, to put it charitably, you do not look like a person of conviction.
You were pro-immigration until you weren’t. You optimistically embraced the changing nature of our nation until you ran an ad about “all of us who feel out of place in our own country.” You left McCainville to enter Trumpland.
Your supporters see your weaknesses as your strengths: Yes, you might be well-positioned to pull all parts of the party together. But in appeasing everyone, you’re creating the impression, as an Iowa pastor told my Post colleagues Sean Sullivan and David Fahrenthold last month, that you’re a candidate “talking out of both sides of his mouth.”
If you lose, this will be the principal reason. You need to show some conviction, perhaps by taking at least one inconvenient stand. In primaries especially, winning requires you to decide whose votes you’ll write off. You won’t make it by remaining everyone’s second or third choice. Somebody’s got to trust you deeply.
Jeb Bush: For me, you’re the biggest surprise. I really thought you’d be a better candidate. When I saw you speak in early 2014, you were loose and confident, conveying a real sense of optimism about the country. I thought enough voters, even in a gloomy Republican Party, would find this appealing.
It hasn’t panned out that way. You made a lot of mistakes and seem unhappy in your work. Your name is a problem. Most liberals don’t realize how many conservatives view your brother as a big-government guy. Meanwhile, many in the so-called establishment wing worry that another Bush won’t win.
You at least found a purpose when you went after Donald Trump in last year’s final debate. The paradox: The only way you’ll have a chance of winning is to forget about winning. Relax. Run as the guy you said you’d be, the upbeat candidate of inclusion. Marry your attacks on Trump to a positive vision of a welcoming GOP. Be the candidate whom Republicans horrified by Trump and Ted Cruz can repair to with pride. It may not work. But it’s the only thing that can, and you might at least start enjoying the campaign.
John Kasich: I’ve always had a soft spot for you because, as governor, you supported the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare in Ohio. Alas, most people in your party don’t agree with me. Still, you sound best when you talk like a compassionate conservative because that’s the person you want to be. Why not go for it? If Jeb follows the strategy I just outlined for him, you guys might collide. But you have said your main worry is how St. Peter will judge you at the end. Run a campaign for him.
Ted Cruz and Chris Christie: Philosophically, you guys aren’t my cup of tea. But I have to admit: You’re running the campaigns I would run if I were you. Ted, you have the focus Marco doesn’t. You’re trying to pull together all the right-wing groups in the party, and they happen to constitute a huge part of it. Chris, you’re betting it all on New Hampshire. The right move. You’re campaigning up there as if you were running for governor. Also exactly right.
Ben Carson: Please go back to neurosurgery or inspirational speaking. You’re gifted at both.
Rand Paul: Stay in for a few more debates to make your libertarian case on foreign policy. You’re sparking a necessary discussion. But you know perfectly well you have to go back to Kentucky soon to protect your Senate seat.
Donald Trump: I have nothing useful to say, and you’d pay no attention anyway. But I do owe you a debt of gratitude. I have a book coming out in a couple of weeks called “Why the Right Went Wrong.” Because of you, people are especially interested in figuring this out. So, just this once: Thank you.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 3, 2016
“Marco Rubio Doesn’t Add Up”: Could He Burn Out Before He Ever Catches Fire?
Math was never my strongest subject, so maybe I’m just not crunching the numbers right.
But the more I stare at them, the less sense Marco Rubio makes.
Rubio as the front-runner, I mean. As the probable Republican nominee.
According to odds makers and prediction markets, he’s the best bet. According to many commentators, too.
But Iowa’s less than a month away, and in two recent polls of Republican voters there, he’s a distant third, far behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
So he’s killing it in New Hampshire, right?
Wrong. A survey from two weeks ago had him second to Trump there, but another, just days earlier, put him in third place — after Trump and Cruz, again. Chris Christie’s inching up on him, the reasons for which were abundantly clear in a comparison of Christie’s freewheeling campaign style and Rubio’s hyper-controlled one by The Times’s Michael Barbaro.
And as of Thursday, the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls in South Carolina showed Rubio to be more than six points behind Cruz and 21 behind Trump among that state’s Republicans. There’s no inkling of a surge, and it’s not as if pro-Rubio forces have been holding off on advertising that will turn the tide. Plenty of ads have already run.
In fact the rap on Rubio is that he counts too much on them and spends too little time on the trail. The largest newspaper in New Hampshire took aim at the infrequency of his appearances there in an editorial with the headline: “Marco? Marco? Where’s Rubio?”
And when he missed a Senate vote last month, a spokesman for Cruz tweeted that it was because “he had 1 event in a row in Iowa — a record-setting breakneck pace for Marco.”
Rubio can’t claim a singularly formidable campaign organization, with a remarkably robust platoon of ground troops. His fund-raising hasn’t been exceptional.
His promise seems to lie instead in his biography as the son of hard-working Cuban immigrants, in his good looks, in the polish of his oratory, in the nimbleness with which he debates.
And in this: Reasonable people can’t stomach the thought of Trump or Cruz as the nominee. We can’t accept what that would say about America, or what that could mean for it. Rubio is the flawed, rickety lifeboat we cling to, the amulet we clutch. He’ll prevail because he must. The alternative is simply too perverse (Trump) or too cruel (Cruz).
But so much about him and the contention that he’s poised for victory is puzzling.
Because this is his first national campaign, reporters (and opponents) are digging into his past more vigorously than ever, and it’s unclear how much fodder it holds and how much defense he’ll have to play.
Just last week, The Washington Post reported that in 2002, when he was the majority whip in the Florida House of Representatives, he used statehouse stationery to write a letter in support of a real estate license for his sister’s husband, who had served 12 years in federal prison for distributing $15 million worth of cocaine.
Rubio, 44, is only now coming into focus.
He’s frequently been called the Republican Obama — because he’s young, a trailblazing minority and a serious presidential contender while still a first-term senator.
But a prominent G.O.P. strategist told me that Rubio reminds him more of another Democratic president.
“He’s the Republican Bill Clinton,” the strategist said, referring to the slickness with which Rubio shifts shapes and the confidence with which he straddles ideological divides.
He’s a conservative crusader, happy to carry the banner of the Tea Party. He’s a coolheaded pragmatist, ready to do the bidding of Wall Street donors.
“Rubio is triangulating,” Eleanor Clift wrote recently, choosing a Clintonian verb to describe his fuzzy, evolving positions.
He pushed for a comprehensive immigration-reform bill, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, until he suddenly stepped away from it. He has said that he opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest, but he has also said that he’d back less extreme regulations if they were the only attainable ones.
“Rubio’s inclusiveness can invite caricature,” Evan Osnos observed in The New Yorker in late November. “He considers himself a Catholic, but he attends two churches — an evangelical Protestant service on Saturdays and a Roman Catholic Mass on Sundays.”
By dint of his heritage, he’s supposed to represent a much-needed Republican bridge to Latinos. But many of his positions impede that, and several recent polls raise doubts about the strength of his appeal to Latino voters.
There’s no theme in his campaign more incessantly trumpeted than a generational one. Declaiming that Hillary Clinton, 68, is yesterday, he presents himself as tomorrow, an ambassador for young voters who’ll presumably bring more of them, too, to the Republican camp.
But in a Washington Post/ABC News poll in late November, his support was more than twice as strong among Republican voters 65 and older as among those under 50.
And he’s at sharp odds with millennials on a range of issues. Most of them favor same-sex marriage; he doesn’t. Most are wary of government surveillance; he’s one of its fiercest proponents. Unlike him, they want marijuana legalized. Unlike him, they want decisive government action against climate change.
And they’re not swayed by unwrinkled skin and a relatively full head of dark hair. Just ask wizened, white-tufted Bernie Sanders, 74, whose campaign is the one most clearly buoyed by young voters.
So what does Rubio offer them?
He communicates a message — a gleam — of hope. He’s a smoother salesman and more talented politician than most of his Republican rivals. That’s why I still buy the argument that he’s the one to watch, especially given his party’s long history of selecting less provocative candidates over firebrands.
I still nod at the notion that if he merely finishes ahead of Christie, Jeb Bush and other candidates who are vying for mainstream Republicans in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, they’ll fade, their supporters will flock to him and he’ll be lifted above Cruz and even above Trump, who could implode at any moment anyway.
But over the last three decades, no Republican or Democrat — with the exception of Bill Clinton — lost both Iowa and New Hampshire and survived that crisis in momentum to win the nomination. If that’s Rubio’s path, it’s an unusual one.
In an unusual year, yes. But as the wait for his candidacy to heat up lengthens, I wonder: Could he burn out before he ever catches fire?
By: Mark Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January2, 2015
“It’s Part Of The Culture”: Carson’s Implosion Is A Reflection Of The Con Artistry That Has Overtaken The GOP
Ben Carson’s presidential campaign is imploding. One could argue that that’s the result of a candidate in freefall: things always get ugly when a campaign is losing ground in the polls, and staff shakeups are inevitable. But the way that Carson’s campaign has imploded is yet another window into the way the GOP has allowed itself to be run into the ground by charlatans of all kinds.
To begin with, as a politician Ben Carson himself is something of a fraud. By all accounts an eminently successful neurosurgeon, Carson parlayed his story of success into a grander overarching narrative that every person of color could overcome structural racism by sheer dint of hard work and determination, plus an abiding faith in God. His story became mythologized, played out on stage and on film as an example of the model minority.
But Carson, like many successful specialists, is not exactly well-rounded in his knowledge of life and the world. He drew the wrong political conclusions from his rise in the medical field, and grew to believe in his own hype–not just that he had a knack for neurosurgery, but that he was a genius in all respects and specially guided by the hand of God. Without even a political science undergraduate’s knowledge of either domestic or foreign policy, Carson decided that he was qualified to be President of the United States–and that his utter lack of policy ken or experience would be unimportant, irrelevant and undiscovered. And if he failed as a presidential candidate? There would always be a right-wing media circuit and book tour available.
In typical fashion for such a candidate, he allowed close friends and confidants to dominate his campaign instead of people who actually knew what they were doing. In particular, he trusted key decisions to Armstrong Williams, a media maven, radio jockey and advertising executive who has rather transparently been using the Carson campaign as his own vehicle for professional advancement. That in turn led to comically bad candidate preparation and campaign decision-making, with the direct result that Carson’s staff is engaged in a mass exodus.
But this shouldn’t surprise anyone. The libertarian-conservative ethic of “get rich any way you can” combined with a stubborn dismissal of objective fact makes political conservatism especially ripe for con artistry. It is no accident that Richard Viguerie was able to conduct his mail fundraising scams on the backs of GOP voters. It’s no accident that the tea party has been home to one grifter after another making a quick buck. American conservatism is the home of quack televangelists and secular Ayn Rand-spouting hucksters alike. Fox News itself is a long con perpetrated on fearful, older white Americans with the goal of making Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes rich while keeping Republican politicians in power. Donald Trump is merely the latest in a long line of egomaniacal scammers willing to play the same group of people for fools.
It should shock no one, then, that GOP presidential campaigns themselves are being waged by con artists, and themselves fall victim to media-hungry carnival barkers. It’s part of the culture.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 2, 2015
“Just Being A Strong Conservative Doesn’t Help The Party”: Cruz And Rubio Engage In Battle For Nevada Mormons
Deep divisions among Nevada Republicans over a $1 billion tax increase pushed by the state’s Republican governor are helping to shape the battle between Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas to win this state’s presidential caucuses — the first nominating contest in the West.
Rubio’s backers are eagerly eyeing Nevada as they look for an early-voting state the candidate could win. Although Rubio is widely seen as one of the leading contenders for the GOP nomination, the early primary states mostly look unpromising for him.
Cruz, by contrast, leads the polls in Iowa, which holds the first contest of the season on Feb. 1, and is well-positioned in several other conservative states that hold early contests.
With the stakes high here, the two freshman senators are vying to gain the support of a key voting bloc within the state’s GOP — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who mostly lined up behind fellow Mormon Mitt Romney in the last two election cycles.
Mormons make up only about 4 percent of the state’s population, but their influence in Nevada’s Republican caucuses is much greater. In 2008 and 2012, members of the church accounted for nearly a quarter of Republican caucusgoers, entrance polls showed.
Both Cruz and Rubio — who attended an LDS church in Las Vegas in his youth — have enlisted politically prominent members of the church, and now the fault line on taxes that split the state’s Republicans this spring and summer has come to the forefront.
Rubio’s side includes prominent backers of the tax increase, aimed at expanding the state’s budget for schools, which Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval pushed through the GOP-controlled Legislature in May and June. The tax hike, the largest in state history, was strongly opposed by a large portion of the Republicans in the Legislature.
Also among Rubio’s backers is Bruce Woodbury, a Mormon and former Clark County commissioner who is so admired in southern Nevada that the I-215 beltway around Las Vegas is named after him.
Four years ago, Woodbury appeared in radio advertisements urging supporters to vote for Romney. He plans a similar effort this cycle for Rubio, working alongside the campaign’s state director, Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison — another prominent Mormon — to build support ahead of the Feb. 23 caucuses.
“An essential factor is winning the election in November,” Woodbury said after a recent Rubio rally in a hotel ballroom a short drive from the Las Vegas Strip. “He has all the essentials: a powerful life story, he’s moderate — he can appeal to all segments of the electorate.”
His son, Boulder City Mayor Rod Woodbury, and two City Council members — all church members — also back Rubio.
Among the leaders of the opposition to the tax increase was Assemblyman Ira Hansen, a Republican who represents Sparks, just east of Reno. Hansen, also a Mormon church member, is now part of Cruz’s state leadership team.
“You see it at the national level and here: Cruz folks are much more conservative than Rubio’s,” said Hansen. “When it comes to social issues, when it comes to tax increases, if you’re a conservative — a true conservative — then Ted Cruz is your candidate.
“I think that Mormons and just Republicans in general want a true conservative who will stand for conservative values in Washington, D.C.,” he said.
Hansen says Rubio’s past support of bipartisan immigration reform, which included a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, is also a negative for him in the state’s caucuses. It’s an issue on which Cruz has repeatedly assailed Rubio, saying that the Florida senator supports “amnesty” for those who have violated immigration laws.
Rubio’s campaign has two field offices in the state — one in Las Vegas, the other in Reno — and nearly a dozen paid staffers. The Cruz campaign has a similar infrastructure.
Cruz has enlisted Paul Workman, a former bishop in the Mormon church and a member of Romney’s 2012 Nevada finance committee, who says his job is to make sure LDS members know about Cruz’s record as a conservative.
Cruz “talks about his faith with confidence and how it guides him,” Workman said. “There’s a real openness to other faiths that he has. It appeals to me and I’m sure other Mormons as well.”
At a recent religious round table in Las Vegas hosted by the Cruz campaign, Workman spoke with evangelical Christian pastor Rafael Cruz, the Texas senator’s father. The two talked about Mormon doctrine — of salvation, atonement and family — and how to appeal to LDS voters. Workman says he was impressed by the elder Cruz’s knowledge of Mormonism, which he says will help bolster the senator’s LDS support.
Rubio supporters, however, say Cruz’s brand of staunch conservatism will not help the party win in November.
Heidi Wixom, a mother of six, lives a few blocks from a Mormon church in her eastside Las Vegas neighborhood. After rallying behind Romney in the last two elections, she remained torn for much of the summer and fall about which candidate to back. Electability in November was vital in her decision to support Rubio, she said.
“Just being a strong conservative doesn’t help the party,” she said. “You have to have shown you can work alongside Democrats; even if right now that doesn’t seem ideal, it will pay off in the general election.”
By: Kurtis Lee, The National Memo, January 2, 2015
“Wilier Than Trump Could Ever Dream Of Being”: Trump Should Think Twice About Picking On Bill Clinton
Donald Trump might be picking the wrong schoolyard fight.
His modus operandi is to bully. And it’s proved to be an ideal strategy for tying his Republican rivals in knots. But now he’s trying it on someone whose powers of political legerdemain are legendary: Bill Clinton.
The 69-year-old former president is wilier than Trump could ever dream of being. This is the man who hung the 1995-96 government shutdown around the neck of his chief political adversary, House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A formidable huckster in his own right, Gingrich was the It Boy of conservatism and the leader of an ascendant “Republican Revolution,” but after losing his budget showdown with Clinton, his career went into permanent eclipse.
Gingrich’s oafish understudies then mounted an ill-advised impeachment campaign against Clinton, which only burnished the president’s credentials as a victim of partisan fanaticism.
Trump, by contrast, is a cad whose vulgarity and brutishness are given cover by the fact that those very qualities are cheered by a large portion of the Republican base. He’s making the P.T. Barnum bet on the Republican electorate, and so far it’s paying off.
In recent days, Trump has pounced on Hillary Clinton’s husband, in particular his record of cheating, as a new stratagem to upend her campaign. On Twitter, he asserted: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”
But this only underscores another difference between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump: The former president’s record on so-called women’s issues is stellar. He appointed the first women to become U.S. attorney general and secretary of state, added Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court and signed the Violence Against Women Act, along with other measures that benefited women.
That’s the lesson of the Clinton White House. Slick Willie was capable of being unfaithful to his wife — in ways that disgusted women and men everywhere — and yet he also acted with foresight and responsibility in formulating policies that women care deeply about. “Compartmentalizing” is the word pundits used to describe this seeming paradox. But in fact it’s a common enough trait in political figures: Their public service is distinct from their private lives.
It is highly doubtful that Trump has the same ability. His almost cartoonish narcissism results in everything becoming personal. Challenge him in the most tentative way and he’s your enemy. And if you happen to be a woman, get ready for the most juvenile of sexist taunts.
Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly learned that lesson on live TV. During the first Republican presidential primary debate, she pressed Trump on comments he had made about women in the past, among other issues. He responded over the next several days with a peevish onslaught that culminated in a crude suggestion that Kelly had been menstruating.
Every savvy and ambitious woman in America knows that scenario. Tick off a powerful man and wait for the backlash. The more out-gunned the man is intellectually, the viler the putdown you can expect.
References to women’s menstrual cycles or their use of a toilet — all part of Trump’s charm offensive — are not the way to win female votes, Republican or Democratic. Women are more than half of the population and they vote in higher percentages than men. Our vote matters. And it’s not just the stereotypical issues that move women; we care about education, equal pay and health care policy.
If Trump hopes to pull himself out of the verbal gutter and address female voters, he’s going to have to start talking real policy. But that brings up a third key difference between him and the Clintons.
Bill and Hillary have long, long records of formulating, enacting and defending policies. They’re not records of unqualified success or popularity, to be sure. But there is not a policy area in American government in which they have not taken a leading role at the highest level.
Trump, when he has attempted even the roughest outline of a policy, has proved to be a charlatan. He’d like to claim that Hillary Clinton is using her gender to sell herself, but she doesn’t have to. Her chops dwarf those of anyone the Republican Party can stand against her. That is what she will run on.
If the GOP chooses Trump as the nominee, the general election will be a referendum on him — not on Hillary, as Republican strategists might wish it to be.
So let him tear into Bill and Hillary in any way he likes. The smart money, as always, is on the Clintons.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, December 30, 2015
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