In reverse order—from least likely to most likely-- starting with Donald Trump, you'll never guess how this ends.
"The case for ***** is simple:
He is the most talented communicator in politics today. He is a visceral conservative who makes the case for limited government and American greatness better than anyone in the Republican field—better than anyone, anywhere. http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/stephen-f.-hayesA Herd of Elephants
Handicapping the 2016 GOP field
FEB 23, 2015, VOL. 20, NO. 23 • BY STEPHEN F. HAYES
It’s still two years before the next president takes the oath of office, but the contest that will determine who raises his right hand that day started in earnest last month for Republicans, with a grassroots gathering in Iowa and a meeting of high-dollar donors in California.
With that, it’s time for my highly anticipated ranking of the Republican primary field. Okay, okay—that might be a stretch. These are probably unanticipated rankings. But with the Iowa caucuses less than a year away Republicans across the country are already abuzz about the possibilities. The assessments below are based on dozens of conversations with grassroots conservatives in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina; with Republican officeholders at virtually every level of government; with national Republican strategists, fund-raisers, and operatives; with advisers and consultants to the emerging campaigns; and in several cases with the candidates themselves.
So in reverse order—from least likely to most likely—here’s a look at the prospective GOP nominees.
Donald Trump. Trump seems convinced that there is a groundswell of support for a Trump White House. And he seems confident, well, about pretty much everything. “Over the years I’ve participated in many battles and have really almost come out very, very victorious every single time,” he once said. “I’ve beaten many people and companies, and I’ve won many wars. I have fairly but intelligently earned many billions of dollars, which in a sense was both a scorecard and acknowledgment of my abilities.” Clown show.
Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin congressman and 2012 vice presidential nominee has taken himself out of the race. He still has a better chance of being the nominee than Donald Trump.
George Pataki/Bob Ehrlich. Former Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich lost to Martin O’Malley by 14 points in 2010, a very favorable year. Any thought that Maryland was simply unwinnable for a Republican was invalidated in 2014, when a relatively unknown GOP activist named Larry Hogan defeated heavily favored Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown 51-47. It’s unclear what George Pataki, another former governor, could possibly be thinking.
Lindsey Graham/John Bolton. If Lindsey Graham decides to run, he will do so largely to ensure that a hawkish, internationalist approach to national security issues remains part of the debate. The same is true for John Bolton. They are different kinds of hawks. Bolton is harder-edged and less taken with democracy promotion than Graham, a more eager soft-power interventionist. They differ on other issues, too (interrogation, immigration, and gay marriage, to name a few). Neither man will be the nominee, but if either one appears in debates next fall, his presence will be sure to boost the foreign policy content of the proceedings.
Carly Fiorina. The former Hewlett-Packard executive in 2010 lost her bid to serve as senator from California, an unfriendly state to Republicans even in a good year for the party. She’s highly intelligent and has a lot of money but little chance of catching a wave. This feels like a play to make sure (a) Republicans have a smart woman in the debates, and (b) Fiorina is considered for a top position in a future GOP administration.
Rick Santorum. The 2012 Iowa caucuses went to Santorum for two reasons: His social conservatism was attractive to like-minded voters, particularly in the northwest part of the state, and he wasn’t Mitt Romney. Santorum is still not Mitt Romney, but with several viable candidates in the field this time, that won’t take him nearly as far as it did in 2012. As a champion of social conservatism, Santorum will be competing with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for the same political space. If Santorum couldn’t win the nomination in 2012 with a very weak field, it’s hard to see how he wins in 2016.
Ben Carson. The accomplished neurosurgeon is wildly popular with the conservative grassroots. As Fred Barnes reported in these pages, Carson’s book outsold Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices by nearly 100,000 copies. He talks to voters like a normal person and emphasizes a kind of everyday common sense that is in short supply in Washington. But his main asset may also prove to be his main liability. A little political incorrectness can be refreshing, but only a little. Carson has said that living in the United States under Barack Obama is “very much like Nazi Germany.” No, it’s not. But when he was asked whether he stood by his assessment, Carson wouldn’t back down.
Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor consistently polls near the top of potential Republican candidates. He’s well known and has an easygoing, aw-shucks personality that makes him appealing. Huckabee showed in 2008 that he can be a very effective debater, and he is one of most entertaining and engaging speakers in politics today.
If he runs, Huckabee will emphasize middle-class economics. So will everyone else in the race, of course, but it’s a theme Huckabee has been hitting for years—the divide between “Wall Street and Main Street.” In an NBC News debate in October 2007, a full year before the economic crisis, Huckabee chastised his fellow Republicans for happy-talk about the economy under George W. Bush.
Voters are “going to hear Republicans on this stage talk about how great the economy is, and, frankly, when they hear that, they’re going to probably reach for the dial. I want to make sure people understand that for many people on this stage, the economy’s doing terrifically well, but for a lot of Americans it’s not doing so well. The people who handle the bags and make the beds at our hotels and serve the food, many of them are having to work two jobs, and that’s barely paying the rent.”
Huckabee doesn’t speak for long without dropping a corny cliché. “Voters want inspiration, not just information,” he told me last March. A successful candidate is someone who “plans your work and works your plan.” The problem with Mitt Romney in 2012: “Nobody cares how much you know unless they know how much you care.”
If he sounds a bit like someone hawking natural remedies for diabetes or who wants to warn you about “Seven Things That Activate Alzheimer’s in Your Brain,” it’s because he’s doing just that. Although he left his Fox News show to explore a presidential run, Huckabee is still sending out spammy emails to his political list to raise money. And, as Andrew Ferguson wrote in these pages last week, “Huckabee seems to want to cement his image in the public mind not as a successful governor of an unsuccessful state but as a preacher and a talk show host. It is a deadly combination.”
Bobby Jindal. The Louisiana governor has a well-deserved reputation as a policy wonk and an equally well-deserved reputation as an eager and ambitious politician who is relentlessly on message. Among the main questions for Jindal: Can he make Republican primary voters want to have the proverbial beer with him or will they mostly look to him as a guy who gives a great PowerPoint presentation on the complexities of Medicaid funding mechanisms? He’s surrounded himself with a first-rate team. If they can’t manufacture a Jindal surge, no one can.
Rand Paul. Rand Paul is probably the best organized candidate in the Republican field. He has a vast network of eager employees and volunteers in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada—the first four contests next year. He has quietly secured endorsements from more than a dozen Republicans in Congress, and he is aggressively pressuring others to commit to him now. His events draw large crowds that often look more like a campus diversity rally than a typical county Republican chicken dinner. He deserves—and receives—credit for his outreach to groups that seldom vote Republican. Media coverage of Paul as a prospective candidate is often filled with praise for this outreach, and so are Paul’s own speeches.
Time recently put Paul on its cover and declared him “the most interesting man in politics.” That alone is probably enough to get him generally positive media coverage. And the fact that many of his arguments reinforce media stereotypes of Republicans—that they’re arrogant in the conduct of foreign policy, that they’re closed-minded about minorities, that they’re priggish about morality—ensures that such favorable coverage will likely continue.
But as Paul learned recently with the dust-up over his comments on vaccines (he suggested a link between vaccines and “profound mental disorders”)—and might have learned a while back amid controversy over comments about the 1964 Civil Rights Act—thinking out loud as a presidential candidate is very different from debating with college buddies between bong hits. In both cases, Paul was forced to issue clarifications in which he claimed not to have said what he had plainly said. Beyond that, some of the very things that win Paul praise from the media put him at odds with Republican primary voters. Shortly before Russia began its annexation of Crimea, Paul scolded hawks for failing to show enough “respect” to Vladimir Putin. He has supported Obama policy on Iran and Cuba, and when he criticizes the president on national security, he usually does so from the left.
But Paul’s biggest problem may be that he’s not yet a very good candidate. In late January, he appeared onstage at a Koch brothers seminar in California alongside Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The format of the panel discussion, moderated by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, allowed candidates to respond to one another and to give longer answers than a typical TV interview or debate. Paul bombed. His answers—sometimes short and snide, sometimes long and incoherent—were met with widespread disapproval from the audience. And the response to a speech he gave was even worse. Paul wandered around the stage in jeans and blazer as he spoke about—well, it was hard to tell.
Paul inherits many of his father’s backers and, with his determined effort to appear less crazy than his father, will expand on that base of support. In a contest with the number of candidates potentially reaching double digits, Paul will be a player. And his combination of fundraising ability and vanity ensures that he’ll probably remain in the field for a long time.
The biggest question: Will he consider an independent bid for the White House when he loses the Republican nomination?
Chris Christie. It wasn’t too long ago that Chris Christie was considered a top candidate—maybe the frontrunner—for the 2016 nomination. In November 2013, with Republicans still smarting from the Obama reelection, Christie was reelected in blue New Jersey with more than 60 percent of the vote, winning every county but Essex and Hudson. Executives at the major news networks liked Christie, who seemed to take as much joy in poking Republicans in the eye as he did Democrats. He famously hugged Barack Obama shortly before the 2012 elections and then, in the fight over emergency funding for Hurricane Sandy, repeatedly blasted Republicans in Washington for their spending concerns. He didn’t necessarily love journalists but he seemed to thrive on the attention they lavished on him. It wasn’t hard to imagine Christie running for the Republican nomination on the McCain model, winning praise from the media for taking on Republicans even as he asked Republicans for their support.
But the so-called Bridgegate controversy ended that. The mainstream media treated the story as if it were a national scandal, with regular updates on network newscasts and morning shows and saturation-coverage in national newspapers. (For an instructive look at media priorities, compare the excessive national media coverage of Christie’s “Bridgegate” and the negligible coverage of the Obama administration’s IRS scandal.) While the coverage overplayed Christie’s culpability, it nonetheless did real damage to one of his main selling points: electability. Christie is now better known than most of his rivals and thought of less favorably than all of them.
It’s hard enough for a strong conservative to get a second look in a Republican primary (ask Rick Perry), but it’ll be even harder for the man perceived as the most moderate in the field. Ask a group of conservative activists about him and among the first things you’ll hear is complaints about “the hug.” That’s usually followed by a litany of policy complaints, including Christie’s decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. It’s not just that Christie expanded Medicaid, but that he did so not long after scolding Washington politicians, including Republicans, for being afraid to tackle big problems. In that speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Christie portrayed himself as a brave truthteller, willing to talk about reforming entitlements when others won’t. “If we’re not honest about these things,” he thundered, “we’re on the path to ruin.” Medicaid in particular, he said, is “not only bankrupting the federal government, it’s bankrupting every state government.”
Still, Christie remains popular with some donors, and his style could be very effective in debates, especially if he’s willing to be the guy who launches the toughest attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
John Kasich. On paper, Ohio governor John Kasich is a first-tier candidate. He’s got a strong record as a budget hawk in a time of record deficits. He has D.C. experience but he’s not “of Washington.” He’s well known to Fox News viewers from his days hosting a popular weekend show. He can claim that he straightened out Ohio’s finances and brightened its economic outlook. And, crucially, he decisively won reelection last year in what is arguably the most important presidential swing state, with nearly double the votes of his Democrat opponent. And yet Kasich will be something of a long shot if he runs.
Why? On key issues for many GOP primary voters, he’s on the unpopular side: He favors citizenship for undocumented immigrants, Common Core, and he is a passionate defender of Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Rhetorically, his self-assurance can slip into cockiness. His default stance often seems to be defensiveness. He answers even routine questions as if he’s being attacked. As a consequence, Kasich comes across as “holier than thou.”
Kasich justified his decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare by suggesting that those with a different approach are un-Christian. “When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he’s going to ask you what you did for the poor.” Suggesting that morality is gauged by a willingness to spend other people’s money is a perfect way to anger conservatives, and he’s done so regularly. It’s compassionate conservatism with an added layer of condescension. When asked about Kasich’s claim, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who did not expand Medicaid, had a sharp response. “My reading of the Bible finds plenty of reminders that it’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them fish if they’re able. . . . Caring for the poor isn’t the same as taking money from the federal government to lock more people into Medicaid.”
Walker himself may present the biggest obstacle to Kasich. If Republican primary voters want a reform-minded governor from the Midwest, Walker is likely to be the first choice.
Rick Perry. Rick Perry’s biggest challenge in 2016 is Rick Perry in 2012. Perry charged into that race as a successful governor who would present the biggest challenge to Mitt Romney. He left it amidst stories of harsh infighting between his top advisers and as a punchline for late-night comedians. The mere mention of Perry’s name at a gathering of Republicans today elicits laughter and shouts of “oops.” It’s hard to recover from that.
But Perry is trying and making some headway. Ask grassroots conservatives in Iowa and New Hampshire which potential candidate has worked hardest over the last year to build relationships and set himself up for the contest next year and you hear Perry’s name as often as any other. He is a good retail politician and a strong fundraiser. Good enough to replace the memories of 2012? That’s the question.
Mike Pence. Like John Kasich, Pence left a position of prominence among Republicans in the House of Representatives for the governor’s mansion of his home state. But unlike Kasich, Pence didn’t replace a Democrat. He took the job from popular and successful Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. So Pence didn’t have the clean-up job that Kasich (or Walker) had upon taking office. Pence’s charge was to build on the reforms Daniels had implemented, and he’s done that, moving quickly to cut taxes and expand school choice.
Pence is a movement conservative and a talented communicator. He’s an old-school, Reagan-style conservative—hawkish on national security, unwavering on issues of importance to social conservatives, and a consistent economic conservative. If he runs, he will have an opportunity to appeal to grassroots conservatives without scaring establishment and big-money Republicans.
The early betting was that Pence would seek the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association. When he didn’t, many Washington Republicans took his decision as a sign that he would run. Sources with ties to three rival campaigns say they expect Pence will pass on the race. Pence won’t make a decision until after the state’s legislative session adjourns in April.
Ted Cruz. The junior senator from Texas doesn’t have many friends in Washington. He’s hated by Democrats and loathed by many Republicans, too. These are reasons to believe he will outperform expectations as a presidential candidate. In just two years, Cruz has managed to position himself as the loudest and most unrelenting opponent of the Washington political establishment. The conventional wisdom is that this inability to play well with others makes his presidential ambitions almost delusional. In reality, Cruz is in a pretty good place, with approval of Congress at 16 percent and faith in public institutions lower than post-Watergate lows.
Cruz will be the most conservative candidate in the field. He knows what he believes and why he believes it. And he’s smart. His challenge will be to show that his antagonism is directed at Washington and not a character trait. He will need to be smart without seeming pleased by his own intelligence. He’ll need to talk to voters without appearing to lecture them—and he’ll need to do a lot of listening.
Cruz gave a solid speech at the recent GOP gathering in Iowa. But several attendees complained that he blew in like a political celebrity, with an outsized entourage and little time to spend with voters. In some cases, the same voters who nodded in approval with Cruz’s call for a new order in Washington were shaking their heads at his unapproachability in Des Moines.
Still, few names generate more enthusiasm among the conservative grassroots than Ted Cruz. That’s a huge advantage if he can capitalize on it.
Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush has made clear that he will run an unorthodox campaign, deploying social media in innovative ways. He is making public volumes of email from his tenure as Florida governor. He is telling people that his campaign will reimagine the traditional roles of advisers and staff—even of the candidate himself. And he has said that he wants to win in the primaries by running as a general election candidate.
Bush’s early entry and aggressive pitch to contributors (he’s asking for big bucks and often a pledge of donor exclusivity) were intended to scare off or intimidate would-be challengers. There’s no doubt it played a major role in Mitt Romney’s decision not to run, despite his eagerness to mount a third bid. And Bush certainly impressed the shapers of conventional wisdom in the political media—who immediately bestowed upon him the designation “frontrunner.” Bush may end up the nominee, but he’s far from the shoo-in that money Republicans (and the reporters who listen to them) seem to believe.
Many movement conservatives are hostile to the idea of another Bush in the White House. They still remember George H. W. Bush’s broken “no new taxes” pledge and the orgy of spending that ended George W. Bush’s administration (the culmination of years of profligacy). They blame the last Bush administration for giving us the Obama administration. They focus on the two issues where Jeb Bush is at odds with the party base—immigration and Common Core—and they talk about Jeb as if he will fill the Mitt Romney/establishment moderate slot in the 2016 Republican primary.
Some of this is unfair. Jeb is the most conservative of the three Bushes. As Florida governor, he pushed aggressively for conservative reforms and wasn’t afraid to challenge moderate Republicans in the legislature and the business community. He calls himself a conservative because he regards himself as a conservative, not because consultants tell him it’s what voters want to hear, and he usually describes his conservatism without unnecessary qualifiers like “compassionate” or “severe.”
The skepticism between Jeb Bush and the GOP base is mutual. If conservatives are wary of a Bush candidacy, it’s at least in part because he has made them so. Conservatives focus on Bush’s views on Common Core and immigration because Bush focuses on them. There’s no doubt he pushes as hard as he does because he believes deeply that he’s right. But after emphasizing issues on which he differs from many Republicans, Bush shouldn’t be surprised that many Republicans regard him as something of a renegade.
The challenge for Bush is not primarily that he has these differences with the GOP base, it’s that he sometimes talks about these differences in a tone that suggests those who disagree are either backward or bigoted. During an RNC fundraiser in Ohio last summer, Bush participated in a discussion with contributors. One donor asked Bush about the Common Core “curriculum.” According to several sources in the room, Bush angrily chastised the questioner for his failure to understand the issue and noted that Common Core isn’t a curriculum but a set of standards. His tone was harsh enough that it caused more than one attendee to conclude that Bush wasn’t running for president.
Bush has said that it’s important for a candidate to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles”—a comment that many took as a declaration that he will not pander to conservatives in order to win the Republican nomination. There’s a delicate balance between refusing to pander (positive) and showing disdain for the base (counterproductive).
In February 2014, as he was touring a schoolhouse near Miami, Bush was asked whether he would run for president. Among the most important questions he would have to answer, Bush said, was: “Can I do this joyfully?”
For the final two: It’s a coin toss. If I were betting on the likely GOP nominee today, I’d put the same amount on Walker and Rubio (with a chunk on Jeb, too).
Scott Walker. If Scott Walker’s early success has surprised some Washington-based political reporters, it didn’t surprise many in the conservative grassroots or those familiar with his political career in Wisconsin. The question was never whether Walker would be a first-tier candidate, it was how quickly he would become one and whether he could remain there once he did. With Walker at or near the top of polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire, we have an answer to the first question, and the answer to the second may well determine whether Walker is the nominee.
Walker’s case is a simple one: I fight on behalf of conservative principles and I win. This is true electorally and substantively. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the 47-year-old governor has run in more elections than any other candidate in the field, and he’s won more than any other candidate in the field.
Walker served in the state assembly before he was rather improbably elected Milwaukee county executive in 2002. Milwaukee is a heavily Democratic county, but Walker ran as the man who would clean up after a worse-than-Hollywood pension scandal that featured, among other things, officeholders secretly voting themselves huge raises in the middle of the night. As county executive, Walker implemented a series of cost-cutting measures designed to bring the local government to heel. Democrats and their backers in the public sector unions fought Walker’s every move. He was reelected anyway.
Walker gained national prominence in 2011, his first year as governor, during the fight over his budget reforms and the subsequent attempt by unions and Democrats to recall him. His reforms passed, and he wiped out a $3.6 billion biennial deficit. The 2012 recall failed, and last year Walker was elected to a second term as governor. Immediately after his recall victory, Walker publicly urged Mitt Romney to change strategy, from his cautious attempt to win a referendum on Barack Obama to a bold, reform-minded insurgent’s campaign to change the country. Romney largely rejected Walker’s advice. But Walker, who received a four-minute standing ovation at the 2012 Republican convention before he started his speech, was clearly onto something.
Walker has moved quickly to start his presidential bid. He put in place an experienced team to run his exploring-in-name-only effort, including former RNC political director Rick Wiley and veteran GOP strategist Ed Goeas. Last week, Wiley supervised the opening of an Iowa office for Walker’s presidential PAC. Goeas, meanwhile, quietly started making the rounds on Capitol Hill, seeking to open lines of communication between conservatives in Congress and Walker. “I was just doing due diligence,” Goeas told The Weekly Standard.
Walker will run a positive campaign, sticking closely to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment forbidding attacks on fellow Republicans. In part, that’s because Walker has had good relationships with several other competitors. He consulted Jeb Bush regularly for advice on politics and governance and developed a friendship with Chris Christie. (Walker’s wife, Tonette, a sharp political observer in her own right, became friends with Christie’s wife, Mary Pat.)
Walker faces two main challenges: maintaining support from conservatives as he details his views on issues and presenting himself as a steady hand on foreign policy and national security matters. Republican primary voters know Walker primarily for his fight against the unions. On other issues, voters assume Walker will be with them. He’s a full-spectrum conservative, so in most instances these voters will be right. But the details will matter. Walker opted not to mount a big fight on gay marriage, disappointing some evangelicals. He’s for a middle path on immigration reform, something that won’t satisfy either hardcore restrictionists or open-borders libertarians.
On national security, Walker faces the dilemma of any governor running for president. He spends his days and nights focused on Wisconsin-specific domestic policy issues and consequently won’t know the details of, say, the make-up of ISIS or tensions with Russia in the same way that a senator on the Intelligence Committee might. He’s studying—Walker met recently with Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and will be seeing General Jack Keane for briefings in March—but he’s got a state to run.
Walker’s instincts are hawkish. In a recent interview on ABC’s This Week, Martha Raddatz pushed Walker on the proper U.S. response to ISIS. When he said it has to be more “aggressive,” she pushed back, asking how he could say that a campaign of some 2,000 airstrikes wasn’t aggressive. Walker didn’t back down, but he didn’t dispute her very questionable claim. (The United States and its allies conducted 10,000 airstrikes in Kosovo over just 78 days, so, no, 2,000 over six months isn’t actually an “aggressive” campaign.) Walker said that America would have to consider ground troops in Syria if ISIS continued to develop as a threat. It is not only a defensible answer; it’s the right one. But Walker was short on details, and reporters will soon begin to demand them.
Marco Rubio. The conventional wisdom about a Rubio for president campaign has swung wildly over the past two months. In the weeks after the 2014 midterms, commentators mused about a Rubio bid as if it were a sure thing. But when Jeb Bush made clear that he was likely to run, the peddlers of conventional wisdom were sure Rubio wouldn’t challenge his mentor. Last week, Rubio hired well-regarded New Hampshire political strategist Jim Merrill, and the commentariat quickly concluded that he was in. Interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, Rubio said: “I wouldn’t be running against Jeb Bush. If I ran, I would run because I believe I’m the right person for the right time in our country’s history.” The reality is that very few people know if Rubio will run, but unless something changes his thinking, he is far more likely to run than not. His wife is supportive, his team is prepared, and a decision is imminent.
As for Walker, the case for Rubio is simple:
He is the most talented communicator in politics today. He is a visceral conservative who makes the case for limited government and American greatness better than anyone in the Republican field—better than anyone, anywhere. And he has used his short time in Congress to make himself a leading Republican voice on national security and foreign policy, serving on both the Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees.
At the Koch Forum where Rand Paul bombed, Rubio stood out. On the panel discussion with Paul and Cruz, Rubio was, at turns, funny and thoughtful. His quick wit elicited laughter from the audience several times over the 90-minute conversation. The second half of the discussion focused on national security, and Rubio took the opportunity to demonstrate his fluency on the subject matter, offering detailed analyses of the country’s problems and solutions that made clear he’d spent a considerable amount of time on them.
Rubio’s best moment came the following day, however, when he addressed the group about the promise of America. Rubio spoke for 30 minutes without notes and captivated the crowd with stories of his grandfather and his parents. Rubio’s speeches often convey a sense of humility and wonder that he’s risen to a place where he might influence the direction of the American experiment in self-governance. Rubio manages to tell convincingly the kinds of only-in-America stories that might come off as hackneyed and manipulative from other politicians. Maybe that’s because they’re often personal for him. Maybe he’s just a better story-teller than most. Whatever the explanation, Rubio can drown skepticism about America’s future with reminders about the country’s past and, in the process, give goosebumps to a cynic.
When I sat in on Rubio’s debate-prep sessions for a profile I wrote in 2010, I was blown away by his ability to think on his feet. Rubio routinely came up with memorable one-liners that other candidates would pay consultants thousands of dollars to imagine. He wasn’t as conversant on foreign policy back then, but he spoke with great authority on the issues that he had worked on at the state level.
Because of their youth, their speaking ability, and their similar career paths, Rubio frequently draws comparisons to Obama. If this was once a compliment, that’s no longer the case. Team Rubio pushes back hard against the parallels. Obama was a nonentity in the Illinois state senate, they argue, avoiding controversial issues by voting present and devoting considerable time to boosting his future prospects. Rubio, by contrast, held leadership posts for eight of his eight and a half years in the legislature, including stints as majority whip and majority leader before becoming speaker of the Florida house at the age of 35. He spent his time advancing the agenda of the legislature’s Republicans and Governor Jeb Bush.
Like Bush, Rubio was a proponent of comprehensive immigration reform and worked toward a solution as part of the Gang of Eight in the Senate. Rubio said at the time that he thought it better to participate in those negotiations and attempt to shape the outcome than to sit it out and risk a bad law. It’s an issue that has made a segment of the Republican base suspicious of his conservative bona fides.
Another potential obstacle for Rubio is his friendship with former Rep. David Rivera. Rubio and Rivera co-owned a house in Tallahassee while they served in the legislature and have been friends for years. Rivera is a shady figure whose fundraising and campaign practices have gotten him in legal trouble over the years. If Rubio runs, his opponents will doubtless seek to highlight their friendship and link Rubio with Rivera’s misdeeds.
The conventional wisdom suggests Rubio will have trouble raising money with Jeb Bush in the race. Perhaps. But Rubio won the straw poll of attendees at the Koch seminar in January, and he’s been a strong fundraiser over his time in the Senate.
The 2016 GOP field has strengths and weaknesses, good candidates and bad ones. And maybe Donald Trump. The recent history of presidential contests suggests Republicans will have a hard time winning the White House. The demography-is-destiny crowd will tell you it’ll be nearly impossible.
But Barack Obama’s attempt to make big government popular again has resulted instead in greater skepticism of government. And if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, she’ll have to answer a very difficult question: What does the party of government do when fewer and fewer people believe in government?
And how will Clinton explain her role in an administration that saw American overreach as a greater threat than radical Islam or Russian aggression or Iranian nuclear weapons? The world is a mess, and it’s abundantly clear that so-called smart power has left America weaker and at greater risk than at any time in recent memory. That’s not just the view of Republicans or administration critics, but of top administration officials themselves. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says the “world is exploding all over.” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says: “Looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.”
These issues will matter. And so will the candidates who discuss them. I like Republican chances.
