We must now fear Marco Rubio: The GOP’s best bet is sneaky, slippery and deceptively dangerous
Marco Rubio is boring, but look out. He could slide into the White House like George W. Bush did in 2000
Topics: aol_on, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Republican Primary, Elections News, News, Politics News
All things considered, Marco Rubio probably won Wednesday’s CNBC Republican debate, mostly because Jeb Bush failed so spectacularly. But that doesn’t mean that Republicans are singing his name from the mountaintop. Joe Scarborough spent much of Thursday morning grousing about Rubio’s answer to a question about his personal finance. The National Review declared that Rubio was the winner, but in flat language that shows a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Most conservative media was more interested in pushing the tired “liberal media” conspiracy theory than they were in celebrating Rubio’s solid, if uninspiring performance.
Rubio is bland and the polls of Republican voters show it. He’s been slowly building up his numbers, but he’s still lurking under 10 percent in national polls. Republican voters, if they think about this debate at all, will likely focus on the quickly forming myth that the CNBC moderators were out to get the candidates, and not on Rubio’s performance. Actual liberal media, such as the New Republic, tends to see Rubio as an empty suit, a bunch of glib mannerisms covering for the fact that he’s an incurious person with little interest in actual policy or issues. His unwillingness to show up for votes only reinforces this narrative. Marco Rubio doesn’t inspire much passion in anyone, it seems. Conservatives are bored by him, but so are liberals.
This is why he’s dangerous.
A lot of pundits are casting around for politicians to compare Rubio to—names like John Edwards (for empty suitness) or Barack Obama (for being young and non-white) come up—but the politician he actually evokes the most is Jeb Bush’s brother, George W. Bush. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post doesn’t mention W. Bush, but consider his very convincing description of Rubio’s strengths as a politician.
“Rubio knows how to feed the angry preoccupations of many GOP base voters while simultaneously coming across as hopeful and optimistic,” he writes. “Last night, Rubio, in what appeared to be an appeal to the deep resentment of many of these voters, skillfully converted legitimate questions about his personal financial management into evidence of Democratic and elite media contempt for his relatively humble upbringing, which he proceeded to explain he had overcome through hard work. Rubio’s narrative is both laden with legitimate resentment and inspiring!”
Playing to angry conservatives while simultaneously coming across as a nice, if bland guy to more mainstream crowds? That sounds exactly like the formula that Bush employed against Al Gore in the 2000 campaign. While Rubio avoids the now-loaded term “compassionate conservatism”, his pitch, that he supports conservative policies because he thinks they help working class people, hits exactly the same note.
If Rubio wins, there’s a strong chance that the 2016 election will be a redux of the 2000 campaign: A dim but affable-seeming Republican who comes across as kind of harmless against a smarty-pants Democrat that the media can’t help but portray as high-strung. That combination not only leads to a rather boring campaign, with debates between the nerd and the aw-shucks guy putting everyone to sleep, but it suppresses voter turnout.
