“No Sense In Which That Description Is True”: Being Less Crazy Than Donald Trump Does Not Make Marco Rubio ‘Moderate’
Marco Rubio built his presidential campaign upon a strategy that has succeeded many times in the past, and (if betting markets are correct) stands a strong chance of succeeding again. He is running a campaign that is more or less optimized for the general election rather than the primary — a tactic that holds him back from viscerally channeling conservative anger, but which, by maximizing his electability, makes his nomination more attractive to party elites. But because Rubio has found himself principally challenged by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who are running campaigns based purely on gratifying Republican base instincts, his strategy has magnified the contrast to the point where Rubio’s principal ideological identifier is now “moderate.” The term has been employed everywhere — by Rubio’s rivals, by his friends, and by neutral reporters. There is no sense in which that description is true — not in relation to modern Republican politics, and perhaps not even in relation to his allegedly more extreme opponents.
Rubio burst onto the national scene in 2010 as a self-described “movement conservative” who managed to draw backing from important Establishment Republicans, like the Bush family, and tea party groups. On foreign policy, he has embraced full-scale neoconservatism, winning enthusiastic plaudits from figures in the right-wing intelligentsia, like William Kristol. While much of the Republican Party has recoiled from the excesses of the Bush administration’s wild-eyed response to the 9/11 attacks, Rubio has not. He was one of 32 senators to oppose the USA Freedom Act, which restrained the federal government’s ability to conduct surveillance. He was one of just 21 senators opposing a prohibition on torture, insisting, “I do not support telegraphing to the enemy what interrogation techniques we will or won’t use.” Indeed, Rubio now delights his audiences by promising to torture suspected terrorists, who will “get a one-way ticket to Guantánamo, where we’re going to find out everything they know.”
On social issues, Rubio has endorsed a complete ban on abortions, even in cases of rape and incest (a stance locating Rubio to the right of George W. Bush). He has promised to reverse executive orders protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination and to appoint justices who would reverse same-sex marriage. The centerpiece of Rubio’s domestic policy is a massive tax cut — more than three times the size of the Bush tax cut, and nearly half of which would go to the highest-earning 5 percent of taxpayers. By reducing federal revenue by more than a quarter, Rubio’s plan would dominate all facets of his domestic program, which is otherwise a mix of conventional Republican proposals to eliminate Obamacare, jack up defense spending, and protect retirement benefits for everybody 55 and up. Rubio has voted for the Paul Ryan budget (“by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed”). He has proposed to deregulate the financial system, thrilling Wall Street. (Richard Bove, author of Guardians of Prosperity: Why America Needs Big Banks, wrote a grateful op-ed headlined, “Thank you, Marco Rubio.”)
What, then, accounts for Rubio’s moderate image? One reason is the issues Rubio has chosen to emphasize. His conventionally conservative domestic policies would, if enacted, bring about an epochal shift in the role of government and the distribution of wealth in the American economy. (And given his party’s entrenched majorities in Congress, Rubio would be able to enact those policies.) But Rubio has not emphasized these ideas publicly. He has given far more attention to his plan to increase college affordability. As Rubio has said, “You’ll hear me spend a tremendous amount of time talking about higher-education reform.” This formulation perhaps gives away more than Rubio intends. Rubio’s higher-education reform plan, while largely innocuous, is also minuscule in scale — a third-tier throwaway line in a State of the Union speech. Its importance is trivial in comparison to his radical domestic-policy commitments. Rubio spends a tremendous amount of time talking about it because doing so allows him to position his platform as new and different from those of a generic Republican without any of the risk of actual heterodoxy.
A second reason is Rubio’s ill-fated 2013 attempt to shepherd bipartisan immigration reform through Congress. Because of the prominence of his role in that episode, which consumed a large share of his brief tenure in national politics, Rubio’s support for reform has disproportionately colored his public image. But his history provides no reason to believe the issue sits close to Rubio’s heart. As a Senate candidate in 2010, Rubio forcefully opposed any path to citizenship as “amnesty.” In the wake of the 2012 election, after the Republican Party wrote a post-mortem calling for the passage of immigration reform and efforts to reach out to young people and minorities, Rubio loyally reversed his position and led the pro-reform charge, and initially he drew support from important figures in the party. But when restrictionists revolted against the bill, Rubio abandoned his own proposal and has promised never to support comprehensive reform again. The fairest conclusion to draw from his two reversals is that Rubio does not hold especially strong beliefs on the issue at all, taking whichever position seems to be the most effective means of advancing traditional Republican policies (for which he has displayed consistent support). Republican donors naturally adore Rubio.
While Rubio’s willingness to sponsor immigration reform tells us very little about his convictions, though, it reveals a great deal about his political strategy. Rubio is a political pragmatist. And pragmatism is the fundamental divide inside the GOP. While split on foreign policy between neo-conservatism and neo-isolationism, Republicans have near-unanimity on economic and social policy. A domestic Rubio presidency would look very much like a Cruz presidency or a Bush or a Walker presidency. Any Republican would sign the bills passed by Paul Ryan’s House and Mitch McConnell’s Senate.
What Republicans disagree about is how to handle a situation where the president does not sign those bills. Cruz’s response to whip up conservative suspicions that the Republican failure to enact its agenda over President Obama’s objections represents a secret betrayal. Trump’s response is to break the stalemate through unique force of personality. Both of them signal their solidarity with the base through demonstrations of anger and cultural resentment. But, while making themselves attractive to their base, Trump and Cruz harden a cultural polarization that seems to leave their party at a disadvantage in the general election. He avoids statements that make him appear ostentatiously deranged, like Cruz visually comparing Obama to a Nazi, or Trump … doing just about everything Trump has done. The third cause of Rubio’s moderate image is that he declines to indulge right-wing paranoia on such topics as whether Obama is a Marxist, or the looming threat of Sharia law in the United States, trading the opportunity to indicate solidarity with the base for general election viability. He husbands his potential electoral weakness for matters of policy, not symbolism.
Rubio’s value to the party is that he approaches its predicament realistically. He will reach out to Democratic-leaning constituencies with personal appeal without compromising on core agenda items Republicans care about. Everything Rubio says — his message of generational change, a “new American century,” his frequent invocations of his parents — ties into his youth and heritage as the son of immigrants. If Democrats attack his policies, he will change the subject to his biography. “If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck?” he boasted at a Republican debate. “I was raised paycheck to paycheck.” Rubio is the embodiment of the Republican donor class’s conviction that it needs to alter nothing more than its face.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, June 6, 2016
“Democracy Trumped”: Could Trump Actually Win The Election?
I’ve been having incessant conversations with friends, family, and colleagues about politics, and they all boil down to the same question. Could Donald Trump be our next president?
Here is an amalgam of the conversation. See which side you’re on:
—I think Trump might actually win.
—You mean the Republican nomination?
—No, I mean the election.
—Get serious. For starters, the Republican leaders would never allow that. They’d be much better off with Rubio-Kasich or Kasich-Rubio.
—Maybe they would. But there are no smoke-filled rooms anymore. Leaders don’t make these decisions. Primary voters do, and they love Trump. The more outrageous he is and the less connected to facts, the more his support grows.
—Yeah, but he’s a media phenomenon. He is such an egomaniac that he hasn’t even bothered to build an organization. He has no ground game. That’s why Cruz has pulled ahead on Iowa.
—Iowa is a special case because it’s a caucus state. In a society where people are increasingly disconnected from politics, Trump can motivate people just as a media candidate. If he needs an organization to get out his vote, he can buy one.
—He’s already peaked.
—Maybe, but under the new Republican rules that were put in place in 2014, all of the primaries after March 15 are winner-take-all. He only needs to come in first and he gets all of the state’s delegates, even if he has 25 percent of the vote and, say, the runner-up has 22 percent. The Republicans did this to get an early nominee. They didn’t foresee Trump.
—It’s still unlikely that he will get 50 percent of the delegates. If he gets less than 50 percent and it’s a brokered convention, all of the others will unite to prevent Trump from being the nominee.
—Think again. Trump may be a fool and a demagogue when it comes to actual policy, but one thing he’s good at is making deals. Suppose he comes into the convention with 45 percent of the delegates. All he has to do is offer the vice-presidential nomination to someone who controls at least 5 percent of the delegates, and he’s over the top. Can you imagine all of the other candidates, who really hate each other, somehow uniting to block Trump?
—Even if by some miracle he’s nominated, he can’t win. He has just alienated too many groups—women, blacks, Muslims, immigrants.
—That depends. If we have a few more terrorist incidents, or if some more skeletons come out of Hillary’s closet, all bets are off.
—Mainstream Republicans will vote for Hillary in droves.
—Yes, such as they are. But Hillary is not producing much enthusiasm, whereas Trump’s base is really fired up.
—But imagine the debates. This is complicated stuff. Hillary is so much better informed on the issues. He just makes it up.
—Right, but that doesn’t seem to hurt him. She is hawkish for a Democrat, but there is no way she will be tougher than Trump. And the fact that this is very complicated stuff and Hillary really understands the complexity—that doesn’t necessarily play to her advantage. A lot of voters want simple. And there is one more element.
—What’s that?
—Trump is already the most populist of the Republican candidates, and the most appealing to working-class voters. He doesn’t hate government the way the others do. You can count on him to move left after he is nominated, posing as the defender of Social Security and Medicare, and demanding higher taxes on the rich. Hillary, long allied with Wall Street, is less than an ideal opponent. She may take some Republican votes, but he may take more Democratic ones.
—That’s sobering. Do you happen to know the rules for emigrating to Canada?
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, December 29, 2015
“Hillary Got The Debate Of Her Dreams”: Showed That She’s Well Armed For Any GOP Fight
If Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley could control the circumstances and terms of Saturday’s debate, the third of the Democratic primary, it would have been a very different evening. It’s easy to imagine an ideal Sanders debate: a focus on how inequality is destroying the middle class and why Sanders, unlike Clinton, is willing to stand-up to corporate plutocrats and Wall Street. Martin O’Malley’s perfect debate would be one where his expertise in progressive wonkery could shine, and he would emerge as a sleek, plausible alternative. But world events, the unfolding strangeness of the Republican field, and the sensation-loving mindset of the media all conspired to create a debate that allowed Hillary Clinton to dominate, highlighting the areas where she has the most experience and is most comfortable discussing. Unfortunately for both of Clinton’s rivals, the actual debate felt almost scripted to allow her to present her most persuasive self, the confident and experienced master of a broadly supported centrist foreign policy.
The foreign policy focus of the first half of the debate—the part that will get the highest ratings and linger longest in the memory—happened partially by happenstance. No one could have predicted that the attacks on Paris and San Bernardino would have happened when they did, and cast such a large shadow. But there’s also the fact that the Democratic debates aren’t taking place in a political vacuum: to a large degree the Democrats have let the Republicans set the terms of political argument, and are mainly counterpunching to the GOP. This is in large part because of the outsized personality of Donald Trump and the greater number of debates on the Republican side (combined with much more virulent language) simply dominate political discourse. Finally, the media itself plays a part, since questions about terrorism and war are much more attention grabbing than issues like inequality, taxation, and tuition.
Sanders was more comfortable talking about foreign policy than in the second debate, but he still suffers in part from a disconnect between his realist critique of Hillary’s foreign policy and his general profile as an idealistic socialist. Sanders’s approach to national security is fundamentally a nationalist and realist one. It’s the sort of argument one hears from the likes of George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Strange as it may seem, Sanders’s major critique of Hillary came across as almost conservative: that her advocacy of regime change leads to destabilization. Sanders kept reminding the audience that (unlike Clinton) he voted against the Iraq war, which he blamed for the chaos now engulfing the Middle East. “I voted against the war in Iraq because I thought unilateral military action would not produce the results that were necessary and would lead to the kind of unraveling and instability that we saw in the Middle East,” Sanders said. The problem for Sanders is that this critique doesn’t fit neatly with his calls for a democratic socialism in America. After all, if democracy is the answer to America’s problems, isn’t it also something we should wish for the Syrians?
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, spoke in more traditional centrist liberal terms, advocating policies very similar to those already being carried out by President Obama, but with more vigor. In a tweet, Matt Bai of Yahoo News drew a sharp distinction between Sanders and Clinton: “Important exchange here: is the real enemy of world order repressive states, or is it the stateless threats they create? The answer matters.”
Clinton’s advantage is that the answer she provides—a dual focus on spreading liberty and counter-terrorism—is the one that has broad-based centrist appeal. Moreover, her years as Secretary of State give her a confidence in speaking of these matters that her rivals lack. As for Martin O’Malley, his wonkish attempts to interject himself into the debate—as in his suggestion that USAID be raised to a cabinet-level agency—merely made him look more desperate and out of place.
One striking fact about the argument between Sanders and Clinton was that both candidates were much more substantial and informed than the discussions of the same issues in recent Republican debates which have amounted to little more than competitive chest-thumping. The Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use national security and fears of terrorism to win back the White House next November. Perhaps one other advantage of tonight’s debate for Hillary Clinton is that it showed that she’s well armed for that fight.
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, December 19, 2015
“It’s Hogwash, But People Never Seem To Learn”: The Outsider Delusion And The Fallacy Of ‘Getting Things Done’
As you will read in a hundred news stories over the next few weeks, the outsider’s moment in the presidential campaign has arrived. This is going to be the prevailing narrative of the 2016 race, until a new one comes along. It’s perfectly accurate (for now, anyway), but we should ask just what voters are seeking when they gravitate to outsiders, and what they’re likely to get.
First, the latest numbers. A new Marist/NBC News poll of Iowa and New Hampshire shows Donald Trump holding a healthy lead in both states, with Ben Carson coming in a strong second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire; Carson’s rise is not quite as entertaining as the Trump campaign, but it’s nearly as significant. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has cut into Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and moved ahead of her in New Hampshire, where the race between the two has been closer for some time now. And a new Economist/YouGov poll shows Trump moving even farther ahead nationally, with his support at 36 percent, followed by Carson at 11 percent.
Most reporters have decided, based not just on poll numbers but also on their conversations with voters and the evidence they gather on the trail, that the state of the race can be explained by the American people’s dissatisfaction with “politics as usual.” Fed up with Washington’s gridlock and its inability to solve big problems, voters turn to outsiders who promise to do things like “shake up the system” and “change the way Washington does business.” These candidates supposedly possess fresh ideas and new perspectives that can turn everything around.
It’s hogwash. But people never seem to learn.
On the Democratic side, you can at least make a reasonable case for Bernie Sanders’ brand of outsiderism. Sanders is no political neophyte — he has held public office for most of the past 35 years, which gives him an insider’s understanding of how the system works. And his argument is a focused one, centered on the influence of big money and how it helps produce and sustain inequality. While tackling that problem is extremely difficult, one could at least imagine a President Sanders making some progress on it.
On the Republican side though, the two leading outsiders, Trump and Carson, have nothing so specific in mind. They argue that they’ll get things done, Trump through the force of his will, and Carson because he is untainted by politics. Ask either one of them about a specific policy issue, and it quickly becomes clear that when it comes to the issues a president deals with, they’re utter ignoramuses, which is perhaps understandable, if less than reassuring. I’m sure Marco Rubio doesn’t know much about brain surgery, which Carson knows a great deal about, but he’s not running for Brain Surgeon in Chief.
If you’re a voter attracted to these outsiders, you’d do well to ask yourself: What, precisely, will an outsider do as president that an insider wouldn’t? Would they pursue a fundamentally different set of policies? Not likely — the policies they’ll pursue will by and large be those of their party. Ben Carson may be a political newcomer, but the policy positions he takes are essentially the same as those of the other Republicans. And any Republican will appoint most of the same people to the thousands of executive branch positions. When it’s out of power, each party maintains what is essentially an executive branch in exile, spread among Washington think tanks and advocacy organizations, waiting to move back into government. It isn’t as though the outsider candidate can fill these positions from somewhere else.
And when it comes to things like government gridlock, you have to ask the question again: What is the outsider candidate going to do differently? Outsiders talk about things like “shaking up the system” and “changing the way Washington does business,” but they seldom get too specific about what those things might mean in practice. What would a shaken-up system look like? For instance, would it mean that Congress would swiftly and efficiently pass a bunch of bills instead of being consumed by bickering?
If that’s your idea of what the system ought to produce, then electing an outsider president isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is to give one party control of Congress and the White House, preferably with at least 60 votes in the Senate to overcome filibusters. Then you’ll see the system work.
President Obama had that for a time in his first term, and Congress was extremely productive, passing a large economic stimulus, financial reform, health-care reform and a bunch of other stuff you’ve probably forgotten about by now. If you don’t remember that period as one in which the system worked the way it’s supposed to, it’s probably because you didn’t like the particular things Washington accomplished. The real problem you had wasn’t with how smoothly the system operated, but with the substance of what it produced. In fact, Republicans often complain that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed down our throats” — in other words, they think the legislation wasn’t mired in gridlock for long enough (the fact that on Planet Earth it actually passed after more than a year of hearings, debates and negotiations isn’t really the point).
Plenty of voters say they want to get beyond partisanship and just find someone who’ll “get things done,” but that’s not what they really want. Everyone has an agenda. They want some things to get done, but not others. No conservative looked at Obama’s first two years and said, “I don’t like his policies, but I do admire the fact that he’s getting things done, so I’d like him to keep going in the same direction.” When George W. Bush tried and failed to privatize Social Security, no liberal said, “I’m disappointed that he wasn’t able to get things done.”
It’s perfectly understandable that Republicans are attracted to outsiders at this particular moment in history. As I’ve noted before, the real source of discontent among GOP voters with their party’s leaders is less about the rift between the establishment and the tea party than it is about the belief that the party’s leaders are ineffectual. They keep promising their constituents that they’ll destroy Barack Obama, repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut government down to size, but they never deliver. So when someone like Trump comes along and says he’ll sweep aside every problem and make all their dreams come true, it’s quite compelling, no matter how removed it is from reality.
But the truth is that voters of any persuasion don’t want to shake up the system when it isn’t getting things done; they want to shake it up when it isn’t doing the particular things they want. Washington may not be working, but what we really care about is whether it’s working for us.
By:Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 7, 2015
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