“Emotions Are Too Raw, Resentments Too Deep”: Republicans Have A Serious Electability Problem — And Marco Rubio Is Not The Answer
Do Republicans want to win the presidential election next fall? Of course they do — but it’s curious that they’ve spent so little time debating not just which of their candidates is the most pure of heart and firm of spine, but which might actually have the best chance of winning the general election.
Contrast that with the Democratic race in 2004 or the Republican race in 2012. In both cases there was a long and detailed debate about electability, and voters ultimately coalesced around the candidate who seemed the best bet for the general election. After being pummeled as unpatriotic and terrorist-loving for years, Democrats in 2004 told themselves that a couple of draft-dodgers like Bush and Cheney could never pull that crap on a war hero like John Kerry, and that would neutralize their most glaring vulnerability. (It turned out they were wrong about that; in addition to the fraud of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a particular highlight was when delegates to the GOP convention showed up with Band-aids with purple hearts drawn on them on their faces, mocking the three Purple Hearts Kerry had been awarded in Vietnam).
Likewise, in 2012, Republicans debated intensely among themselves (see here or here) about whether Mitt Romney really was the only candidate who could win support from the middle, or whether they’d be better off going with a true believer like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich.
There were always dissenters, of course, and they felt vindicated by the final outcome, even if there’s no way to know whether a different candidate would have done better. But everyone makes the electability argument that serves their pre-existing beliefs. So conservatives now tell themselves a story in which Republicans lost in 2008 and 2012 because they failed to nominate a “true” conservative, and once they do so, millions of heretofore unseen voters will emerge bleary-eyed from their doomsday bunkers and home-schooling sessions to cast their ballots for the GOP. This is what Ted Cruz will tell you — and it’s notable that he may talk more about electability than anyone else, despite the fact that if he were the nominee, the party would probably suffer a defeat to rival Barry Goldwater’s.
Cruz has a passionate if finite following, but the candidates leading the Republican field — Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who between them are winning about half the Republican electorate — represent a kind of cri de coeur, an expression of disgust with everything the GOP has failed to do for its constituents during the Obama years. That either one would almost certainly lose, and badly, doesn’t seem to matter much to their supporters.
The Republican establishment, on the other hand — that loose collection of funders, strategists, apparatchiks, and officials — thinks long and hard about electability. At first they seemed to settle on Jeb Bush, who seemed like the kind of low-risk grownup who could plod his way to victory. Sure, the name could be a problem, but Bush was the right sort of fellow, a known quantity who could be relied on. And so they helped him raise a quick $100 million, in a fundraising blitzkrieg that was suppose to “shock and awe” other candidates right out of the race.
Yet somehow it didn’t work out, partly because he turned out to be a mediocre candidate, and partly because although the Republican base wants many things, Jeb does not appear to be among them. Depending on which poll average you like, he’s in either fourth of fifth place, sliding slowly down. His campaign just announced it’ll be cutting back on its spending to save money, which is never a good sign (the last candidate we heard was doing that was Rick Perry; a couple of weeks later he was out of the race).
So now, after saying to the base, “Jeb’s a guy who can get elected, what do you think?” and getting a resounding “No thanks” in reply, the establishment has turned its benevolent gaze on Marco Rubio. The billionaires love him, the strategists are talking him up, the press is on board, he’s young and fresh and new and Hispanic — what’s not to like? But so far, the voters aren’t quite convinced. Though Rubio has always scored highly in approval from Republicans, he seems like everyone’s second choice, and he hasn’t yet broken out of single digits. Most Democrats will tell you that though he has some liabilities, Rubio is the one they really fear, but that hasn’t earned him too much support (at least not yet) among Republican voters.
Perhaps the reason is that at the end of eight years suffering under a president from the other party, emotions are too raw and resentments too deep for that kind of pragmatic thinking. In that way, Republicans in 2016 are in a position similar to that of Democrats in 2008 at the end of George W. Bush’s two terms. I’m sure more than a few Republicans would like to find the candidate who can make them feel the way Barack Obama made Democrats feel then: inspired, energized, and full of hope that a new era was really dawning, one in which all their miseries would be washed away and they could show the world how great things could be if they were in charge.
That Obama was not just a vessel for their feelings but also a shrewd politician capable of running a brilliant general election campaign was a stroke of luck. So far, Republicans haven’t found someone who can be both.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, October 16, 2015
“Our Current Distemper”: “Asymmetric Polarization” Emanating From The Radicalization Of The Republican Party
As we head towards what will probably be another fiscal crisis in December, perhaps managed by a caretaker Speaker of the House, coinciding with the frenzy of a presidential nominating contest in which nearly all Republicans are running against their own party’s leadership, it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves how we got to this juncture.
In pursuit of perspective, Bloomberg View‘s Francis Wilkinson interviews Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. As you may recall, Ornstein and Mann published a book in 2012 entitled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which broke from the usual “balanced” assessment of blame for the nation’s problems that prevails in the MSM and much of academia and pointed at the phenomenon of “asymmetric polarization” emanating from the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Now that the political dysfunction they analyzed has if anything intensified, have Ornstein and Mann changed their minds about any of this? No, as you can quickly see from the interview. But I’d point to a succinct quote from Mann that addresses the preconditions for recovery:
There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not “Washington” or “Congress” or “insiders” or politicians in general.
The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to change its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.
Remember how annoyed much of the punditocracy was on Tuesday night when Hillary Clinton listed “Republicans” as among the “enemies” she was proud of earning? That reflexive annoyance, not Clinton’s “partisanship,” is a big part of the problem.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 15, 2015
“Let’s Not Get Carried Away Here”: Get Ready For The Raw Lunacy Of The Media’s 2016 Debate Coverage
If you live in Washington, where herds of journalists and pundits lope across the landscape in search of political events to opine on, you’ve probably noticed a tingling in the air. Yes, Thursday night is the first primary debate of the 2016 election, when the answers to so many burning questions will come into focus.
So I want to plead with my fellow denizens of the media: Let’s not get carried away here.
I say that not because I don’t think this debate will matter, but because I fear it might matter too much. If history is any guide, a relatively small number of political junkies will actually watch the thing — after all, who in their right mind tunes into a primary debate 15 months before the election? The potential problem isn’t in what happens during the debate, but what happens after.
This debate has been the source of even more speculation than the first of previous elections, for one important reason: Not everyone gets to come. The Republican field currently contains a remarkable 17 contenders (more actually, if you count some people you’ve never heard of and who haven’t held elected office before but have declared themselves candidates). Since a debate with that many participants would barely give each of them a time to talk, Fox News decided to limit the number to 10.
By my count, there have been approximately three zillion articles and TV news stories on the question of which candidates will make the cut. And the presumption is always that if they don’t make it into that debate, then they’ll be forever consigned to second-tier status, ignored by the media as their campaigns sink even lower than they already are.
Which might well be true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s a product of choices that we in the media will make about who we pay attention to. There’s no law that says we have to ignore somebody because they didn’t appear in that first debate. (Fox will be airing a kind of consolation debate with the other seven, which is being referred to as the “kids’ table.” Unless one of them strips naked and performs a sword-swallowing act, don’t expect reporters to care much about what goes on there.)
Let’s look at the candidates who didn’t make the top-10 cutoff: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore. One sitting governor, one sitting senator, three former governors, one former senator, and a former corporate CEO. As a liberal, the thought of any of them becoming president might fill me with dread, but you can’t say they’re not a serious group. Nor can you say they’re any less qualified than the ones who did make the top 10. Is Perry, who was governor of the country’s second-largest state for 14 years, less of a real candidate than Ben Carson, a retired doctor who has never held public office? Is Jindal, who has been an executive branch official, a member of Congress, and a governor, less of a genuine contender than Mike Huckabee, who spends most of his time these days hawking biblical cancer cures?
Choosing the candidates who will be on the stage may have been a problem with no good solution, because any means of deciding between the guy at number 10 and the guy at number 11 would seem unfair. But that’s exactly why reporters shouldn’t assign any meaning at all to the lineup of this debate.
And they ought to take as measured an approach as possible to what actually occurs during the debate itself. Debate coverage is seldom all that enlightening, and it usually has the function of creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Journalists pick out one or two key moments (a screw-up, a particularly creative zinger) and say, “This is what will have an impact.” Then they proceed to replay and repeat those moments over and over, to the point where they’re all anyone remembers — and for most people, they’re all anyone ever saw. Then they say, “Candidate Smith couldn’t escape his debate gaffe when he picked his nose on camera” — and of course he couldn’t escape it, because you kept talking about it.
So by all means, let’s report on this debate, as we will on the others that will be coming up later. Let’s analyze what happened there, and try to determine what was interesting or revealing or edifying — I certainly will. But let’s try to keep it in perspective. There’s lots of time left, many other debates to come, and plenty of opportunities for these many candidates to rise and fall — so long as we let them.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 6, 2015
“It’s Not His Politics That Worries Me”: Donald Trump And The Decline Of American Character–A Cautionary Tale
There is no disputing that Donald Trump is having a significant impact on the 2016 presidential sweepstakes—something that many Americans apparently view as a great step forward on the American political scene.
Indeed, to a portion of the electorate, Trump’s current political success is a positive development that represents the rise of a candidate willing to “tell it like it is”—despite the fact that so much of what Mr. Trump tells us is the precise opposite of telling it like it is.
To other Americans, Mr. Trump’s political rise is little more than a sideshow extravaganza—good for making your favorite news broadcast more entertaining but, ultimately, devoid of substance and doomed to failure.
To me, the rise of Donald Trump is an American tragedy serving as a cautionary tale of what we are becoming as a society and the need to rediscover true American values before they are gone forever.
I don’t offer this viewpoint because of my disagreement with The Donald on his politics.
In truth, I really don’t know what Mr. Trump’s politics are—given the extraordinary disparity between his professed liberal politics of just a few years ago and his hard line approach to political issues of today. Trump 1.0 favored a path to citizenship for illegals and a universal health care system. Trump 2.0 takes a far more conservative approach towards immigration and is critical of anything and everything done by the Obama Administration.
Yet, it is not his politics that worries me. It is his character and how Americans are responding to it that I find so disturbing in terms of the very character of the nation.
If you think character doesn’t matter, I would remind you that being the American President is all about character—and character is often best judged by how successfully we take to heart the lessons passed down from parent to child over many generations.
It is certainly true that Trump has succeeded in fulfilling one of the character traits parents work to instill in their children—the drive to be successful.
While I fear that Trump is taking the lazy way out in his presidential campaign, as demonstrated by his refusal to prepare in favor of just “winging” it in his speeches and the policy pronouncements he has provided, his great success in business could not have happened without the willingness to work hard to accomplish great success. This is a trait that would cause most any American parent to glow with pride.
Certainly, it didn’t hurt that Mr. Trump was provided a running, head start by his own father, a successful real estate developer in his own right who turned his business over to his son. Still, you don’t take a successful business and turn it into a mega-empire without a lot of hard work.
But this is where behavior that would make your parents proud comes to an end.
Can you imagine what your mother would say to you were you to grow up to become an obnoxious braggart who constantly rises to remind anyone who will listen that you are very, very rich? Can you imagine what your father would say if you took it upon yourself to constantly intone on your own remarkable greatness and how anyone who disagrees with you is unworthy of respect or worse?
And can you imagine what your parents and grandparents would think of a society where this borderline psychotic self-aggrandizement is actually appreciated and cheered by the populace?
Many of us were taught that if you have nothing nice to say about someone then you should just say nothing at all.
Of course, I realize that this is a rule that doesn’t apply in the world of politics, particularly when it becomes necessary to respond to a charge or an attack from an opposing politician. Yet, even in the brutal world of politics there have long been rules of engagement when doing battle—and The Donald appears more than willing to happily break them all.
Personal attacks on character are nothing new in American politics. However, it is our tradition that when a presidential candidate has something awful to say about another presidential candidate, it is left to a surrogate to do the dirty work. This has always been the case because of the importance that somebody seeking the presidency be viewed as too principled, too decent and, yes, having far too much character to descend into the gutter.
When John Adams, in the first contested presidential battle in our nation’s history, wanted to take a serious character shot at his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, Adams did not take on the job himself as that would have been in exceedingly bad taste and represent conduct unbefitting a president. Instead, he had his surrogate, Alexander Hamilton, write an article in the Gazette of the United States accusing Jefferson of having an affair with one of his slaves. This was a very big deal at that point in history and likely played a role in Jefferson’s defeat.
When John Quincy Adams was campaigning against Andrew Jackson in the 1828 race for the White House, he did not stand up and accuse Jackson’s mother of being a prostitute and Jackson’s wife of being an adulteress. Instead he left it to the Coffin Handbills distributed by supporters of John Quincy to do the dirty work. Why? Because presidential candidates must show the character necessary to run the nation and getting directly involved with such base attacks would not do.
It remains the case in the modern era to leave it to a surrogate to do the dirty work for those who wish to be the leader of the nation—and with good reason. How a president’s character is viewed plays a serious role in that individual’s ability to succeed in the job, both at home and abroad.
When it comes to letting the nation know how amazing a candidate is and how lucky the country is that a particular candidate would bless us with his or her service to the nation, your parents would quickly remind you that it is best to allow other people to sing your praises rather than to sing your own in symphonic measures.
This is the great tragedy of Donald Trump. For all I know, Trump might have the talent to excel in the job. But there is no way that I would bet on his success given the megalomania that exudes from every pore of his body.
Does anyone remember when the key knock on Obama was that he was arrogant? Yet, many who lodged that charged are the very people who support Trump’s behavior, despite it taking arrogance to a new and previously unseen level.
The willingness of many to now accept such behavior is, in my estimation, a great tragedy in the current state of the nation. When so many would take a positive view of character deficiencies that would once not only disqualify one who seeks to lead the nation but further disqualify that individual from meriting an invitation to cocktail party, we’ve got a serious problem.
Think about it. It used to be that nobody likes a braggart and a bore—now, a significant percentage of the public wants one to be the president.
Is this really what and who we want to be?
I sincerely hope not.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, July 24, 2015
“They Just Want Somebody To Fall In Love With”: Republican Voters Do Not Give A Flying Comb-Over About Who Is Electable
The parlor game for 2016 campaign observers is based on a straightforward question: “If Donald Trump’s support is eventually going to fall, what will be the cause?”
The “if” poses its own challenge, but even if we accept the premise, it’s not unreasonable to wonder what will cause Trump’s lead in the polls to evaporate. Some Republicans assume this is a fleeting fad that cannot be sustained . Others believe the GOP’s primary contest won’t really begin in earnest until after the debates begin and TV ads start airing, making Trump’s early surge irrelevant. Still others assume the former reality-show host will eventually say something so outrageous that he’ll effectively commit political suicide.
But the point that brings comfort to many in the political establishment is the issue of electability – Trump would face extremely long odds as a general-election candidate, and Republican primary voters, desperate for a win, will start thinking strategically in 2016.
Or will they? As Rachel noted on the show last night, the latest NBC News/Marist poll asked Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire for their 2016 preferences, but they also asked a question that was arguably more interesting:
“Which is more important to you: a Republican nominee for president who shares your position on most issues, or a Republican nominee for president who has the best chance of winning the White House?”
The results weren’t even close. In New Hampshire, 67% of GOP voters want a candidate they agree with, while only 29% are principally concerned with electability. In Iowa, the results were practically identical.
This isn’t about Trump, per se. This is about what we’re learning about Republican voters themselves.
With the NBC poll in mind, Rachel’s take on the state of the race rings true:
“He’s the only top-tier Republican candidate who loses by double digits. not only to Hillary Clinton, but also to Bernie Sanders. But Republican voters want him anyway. And that ends up not being an interesting thing about Donald Trump. It’s an interesting thing about Republican voters. They keep picking him, and they know he would lose, but they like him anyway. They know he’s going to lose, and they don’t care. They love this guy.
“So, all this beltway analysis that says that Donald Trump’s star is going to fall, because all of the ways in which he is not electable, right, there’s the reason all that punditry, and all that beltway common wisdom keeps getting proven wrong with each new passing day and each new poll showing Donald Trump on top, because Republican voters do not give a flying comb-over about who is electable. They just want somebody to fall in love with, and they have fallen in love with him.”
Remember, we’ve seen this before in the recent past. Republicans could have won a Senate race in Delaware, but they wanted a candidate who made them happy (Christie O’Donnell), not a candidate who would win (Mike Castle). They could have won a Senate race in Indiana, but they wanted an ideologically satisfying candidate (Richard Mourdock), not a candidate with broad appeal (Richard Lugar).
Sure, this may change. Trump’s role in the race has been unpredictable thus far, so no one can say with confidence what the race will look like in early 2016.
But the GOP base has been told repeatedly – by party leaders, by conservative media, even by Republican candidates – that compromise is wrong. Concessions of any kind are offensive.
It’s a little late in the game for the same party to tell these same voters not to support the unelectable guy at the top of the polls.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 31, 2015
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