“Don’t Believe The Hype”: The Rubio Phenomenon Is An Advertisement For Republican Denial
Let’s just say it: Marco Rubio is the Wes Clark of 2013. Only with many fewer accomplishments.
It pains me to say this because I’m an admirer of Gen. Wesley Clark. I think he would have made a good president. He was an extremely accomplished career military officer. He was also a West Point valedictorian and Rhodes Scholar, so you might say a Democrat’s vision of what a warrior-scholar should be.
But there’s a difference between a person’s innate qualities and accomplishments and the reason they become the person of the moment or get seized upon for some special role by a political party. And there’s no question Democrats seized on Clark in 2003/2004 because his credentials as a retired 4 star general and a combat vet promised to serve as a heat shield to protect them from charges of weakness in an era in which an aggressive national security posture was the sine qua non of national elections.
Nor was Clark the only example. Finding the retired General or combat vet to carry the Democratic banner was a thing for a couple decades — and for obvious reasons: the public consistently rated Republicans better on national security issues.
But nominating a general doesn’t solve the political problem. Ask President Kerry. And neither will nominating Marco Rubio or putting him at the party’s helm.
We hear today that not only is he young and ‘on social media’, he also “knows who Tupac is.” And of course this week he will deliver the Republican response to the President’s State of the Union address.
Supporters can note that if Rubio ran for president in 2016 his time on the national stage would be precisely the same as Barack Obama’s was in 2008. And they’d be right. But Rubio isn’t a rising political star. The mechanics are different. It’s more like the party’s lack of traction with youth and minority voters is creating a vast zone of negative pressure, sucking him up to the heights of the party structure in Washington.
The Rubio phenomenon is more than anything an advertisement for Republican denial. Saying he’s happening because he can identify a rapper who’s been dead for going on 20 years just brings it to the level of self-parody.
So is Rubio the new face of the GOP? Doubtful. He’s for immigration reform. But the only Republicans currently holding power in Washington say they’re against it. So his big sell immediately puts him at odds with the heart of his party.
This doesn’t mean Rubio will crash and burn or fall short of his party’s high hopes for him. As I noted a few days ago, sometimes a politician can be hoisted to the heights for reasons that have little to do with who they really are but end up having a level of innate political skill that they can grab that opportunity and ride it to the top. So it’s possible. But very doubtful. The Wes Clark boomlet is a much better predictor.
By: Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, February 10, 2013
“Suicide Conservatives”: The GOP, A Party That Can’t Rally Around A Unified Vision Of What It Wants To Be When It Grows Up
There used to be a political truism: Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line.
That’s no longer true. Not in this moment. Democrats have learned to fall in love and fall in line. Republicans are just falling apart.
Last week, the opening salvos were launched in a very public and very nasty civil war between establishment Republicans and Tea Party supporters when it was reported that Karl Rove was backing a new group, the Conservative Victory Project, to counter the Tea Party’s selection of loopy congressional candidates who lose in general elections.
The Tea Party was having none of it. It sees Rove’s group as a brazen attack on the Tea Party movement, which it is. Rove sees winning as a practical matter. The Tea Party counts victory in layers of philosophical purity.
Politico reported this week that an unnamed “senior Republican operative” said that one of the party’s biggest problems was “ ‘suicide conservatives, who would rather lose elections than win seats with moderates.’ ”
Democrats could be the ultimate beneficiaries of this tiff. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2014, 20 are held by Democrats. Seven of those 20 are in states that President Obama lost in the last presidential election. Republicans would have to pick up only a handful of seats to take control of the chamber.
But some in the Tea Party are threatening that if their candidate is defeated in the primaries by a candidate backed by Rove’s group, they might still run the Tea Party candidate in the general election. That would virtually guarantee a Democratic victory.
Sal Russo, a Tea Party strategist, told Politico: “We discourage our people from supporting third-party candidates by saying ‘that’s a big mistake. We shouldn’t do that.’ ” He added: “But if the position [Rove’s allies] take is rule or ruin — well, two can play that game. And if we get pushed, we’re not going to be able to keep the lid on that.”
The skirmish speaks to a broader problem: a party that has lost its way and can’t rally around a unified, coherent vision of what it wants to be when it grows up.
The traditional Republican message doesn’t work. Rhetorically, the G.O.P. is the party of calamity. The sky is always falling. Everything is broken. Freedoms are eroding. Tomorrow is dimmer than today.
In Republicans’ world, we must tighten our belts until we crush our spines. We must take a road to prosperity that runs through the desert of austerity. We must cut to grow. Republicans are the last guardians against bad governance.
But how can they sell this message to a public that has rejected it in the last two presidential elections?
Some say keep the terms but soften the tone.
A raft of Republicans, many of them possible contenders in 2016, have been trying this approach.
Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, speaking at a Republican National Committee meeting last month, chastised his party for being “the stupid party” that’s “in love with zeros,” even as he insisted, “I am not one of those who believe we should moderate, equivocate, or otherwise abandon our principles.”
Jindal’s plan, like that of many other Republicans, boils down to two words: talk differently.
Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio, seem to want to go further. They understand that the party must behave differently. He is among a group of senators who recently put forward a comprehensive immigration proposal that would offer a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country.
This is a position Democrats have advocated, and it’s a position that Republicans have to accept if they want Hispanic support — and a chance of winning a presidential election.
The Tea Party crowd did not seem pleased with that plan. Glenn Beck, the self-described “rodeo clown” of the right, said:
“You’ve got John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and now Marco Rubio joining them because Marco Rubio just has to win elections. I’m done. I’m done. Learn the Constitution. Somebody has to keep a remnant of the Constitution alive.”
For Beck’s wing of the party, moderation is surrender, and surrender is death. It seems to want to go further out on a limb that’s getting ever more narrow. For that crowd, being a Tea Party supporter is more a religion than a political philosophy. They believe so deeply and fervently in it that they see no need for either message massage or actual compromise.
While most Democrats and Independents want politicians to compromise, Republicans don’t, according to a January report by the Pew Research Center. The zealots have a chokehold on that party, and they’re sucking the life — and common sense — out of it.
For this brand of Republican, there is victory in self-righteous defeat.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 8, 2013
“Lipstick On A Pig”: A New GOP, Or Just A Cosmetic Touchup?
Maybe the party is finally over.
Meaning not simply the Grand Old Party, but more specifically the bacchanal of the bizarre and carnival of crazy to which it has lately devolved. So obvious has this devolution become that even Republican stalwarts have been heard to decry the parody of a party the GOP has become.
Except now we see signs suggesting maybe a corner has been turned. There was, for example, that surprising bipartisan consensus on immigration reform, which one would have thought about as likely as a Ted Nugent concert on the White House lawn. And Politico reports that Karl Rove has started a Super PAC whose mission is to keep the more … ahem, colorful candidates from winning Republican primaries. Politico also quotes what it calls a high-profile strategist who said party leaders are now trying to “marginalize the cranks, haters and bigots” they until recently portrayed as courageous truth tellers.
There’s more. Fox “News,” for many years the communications arm of the GOP, just ditched two of its fieriest firebrands: Dick Morris and Sarah Palin, who, like Linus in the pumpkin patch, kept assuring true believers of the Great Pumpkin of a Mitt Romney victory. This comes as Fox, though it still has numbers CNN would kill for, sees its ratings fall to a 12-year low among a key demographic. A new Public Policy Polling survey finds trust in Fox at the lowest level in the short (four years) history of the survey.
Then there is Bobby Jindal. The Louisiana governor, widely considered a rising star of the GOP, has, since the election, been preaching with evangelistic zeal that Republicans must “stop being the stupid party,” which could be a reference to Herman Cain, presumably still poring over a map looking for “U-beki-beki-beki-becki-stan-stan;” or to Michele Bachmann, perhaps still searching out terrorists in the office of the Secretary of State. Or to any of a series of GOP candidates who made statements on rape so spectacularly ignorant they would stun even the men in those dusty places where wives are bought like cattle.
So yes, signs are plentiful that something is afoot among the Republicans. But what does it mean?
One might hope it signifies the party’s decision to abandon its alternate universe, offer reasonable alternatives to those voters not convinced that any one party or ideology has all the answers. One might hope it means an orderly retreat from the hard edge of coded racism, gay bashing, Mexican electrocuting, anti-intellectualism and fact avoidance that has been passed off as wisdom in recent years. One might hope it means a return of grownups, pragmatism, reason — and reasonableness.
One might hope.
But one might be well advised to gird that hope with wariness, given that this is the same party whose leaders, as reported on PBS’ Frontline, held a meeting in 2009 and chose obstructionism as a political strategy. Note that, even while repeating his “stupid party” admonition at a GOP meeting in Charlotte last month, Jindal assured his audience this did not mean rethinking or even moderating the party’s hardcore — and frankly, out-of-touch — stands on issues such as abortion and marriage equality.
No, he explained, he’s talking about changing the packaging — not what’s in it. Putting lipstick on the proverbial pig, in other words.
That will inevitably disappoint those longing for a new GOP. One hopes the party’s soul searching eventually leads it to understand the need for evolution. It should not — and does not need to — become simply a pale imitation of the other party. But it also should not — and better not — settle for being simply a prettied-up version of the extremist outlier it has become.
Because you know what you call a pig with lipstick on? A pig with lipstick on.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, February 10, 2013
“Yep, It’s A Problem”: Chris Christie Is A Bit Of A Hothead
We all know Chris Christie is a bit of a hothead. I mean, it’s a bit like saying a hothead is a bit of a hothead. It’s not observation but truism. Republicans love him or loved him for it. And Democrats started to too because his blow ups don’t all follow ideology. There was this time back in 2011 when he flipped out at a reporter for questioning whether a Muslim-American judge he’d appointed to the bench might be a security risk or sympathetic to al Qaeda.
Then there was Sandy. Republicans were irate; Dems cheered. What it all really comes down to is that in addition to being a very big man Christie is clearly a big-hearted man. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s necessarily a great guy in every respect. But he doesn’t do artifice well. He has his emotions on his sleeve. And on his lapel and his pants and his hat if he’s wearing one. He’s just all out there in the 24/7 run of performance art called being Chris Christie.
But this calling the “hack” doctor thing strikes me as a big deal. Not in the sense of the fate of the republic being at stake but in the sense of Christie’s future above the rank of governor.
Here’s what TPM Reader JL just wrote in …
Christie never had the remotest shot at the nomination. At least not after Sandy. But he had a shot at making some noise. Not anymore I suspect. And I say that as something of a fan.The thing is that to take CC seriously as a prez candidate you have to believe that his anger is an asset that he deploys deliberately and skillfully. Which often appears to be the case. But if it starts to look like the anger controls him rather than the other way around, his appeal really plummets.
I suspect the ill advised phone call was a pretty big deal. If I were he, I’d be working overtime on damage control.
This strikes me as exactly right. Calling this women up and berating her over the phone is the sign of someone whose anger has the better of him and lacks impulse control.
Governors don’t have armies or security services. So if they’re a bit nuts or reckless it’s not that big a deal. People evaluate presidents very, very differently.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, February 8, 2013
“Waiting For The Reckoning”: Inside The Republican Civil War
TPM Reader JB (a former GOP staffer if I remember right) doesn’t think either side of the current GOP struggle has reckoned with the first decade of this century …
I don’t think I rely on analysis dripping with the smugness and self-satisfaction your correspondent NS displays.
Instead, let’s eschew the pop psychology jargon and look at the public record. Both the Tea Party types and the big GOP donors represented by Karl Rove were fully on board with just about everything the Bush administration said or did. For all their zeal now, the only major policy issue on which Republicans now aligned with the Tea Party ever clashed with Bush was immigration reform — for which Bush himself, remember, didn’t actually fight that hard.
Neither side in this putative civil war has been willing to reckon honestly with the consequences of the Bush administration for the country (substantively) or the Republican Party (politically). Both do their best to present their views to the public as if the last Republican President had never existed. This has left both groups of activists somewhat unmoored; in politics, you talk ideology and principles when you can’t brag about accomplishments, because voters are a lot better at relating the latter to their own lives.
Since neither the Tea Party types or the big donors and the campaign operatives working for them are thinking of repudiating a Republican administration that lost two wars and wrecked the economy, they are left to air their differences on issues no one besides campaign junkies cares about. The self-styled conservatives complain that Rove and his people say mean things about them; the moneybags wing is dedicated to recruiting candidates who will avoid gaffes. Big deal.
Republicans in the 1930s and Democrats in the 1980s both resisted strongly the idea that their respective parties had earned defeat at the polls. In each case, several election cycles (and epochal world events) were required to restore the fortunes of the party that had earned the kind of defeat the Republicans suffered last fall — when a black incumbent Democratic President whose first term had coincided with the worst recession in 80 years nonetheless won reelection easily. It’s because neither the Tea Party nor the moneybags faction will face the real reason for that debacle that they are facing off against one another now.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, February 8, 2013
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