Marco Rubio’s “Why?” Problem

 

“Why do you want to be President?”

It’s the famously simple question that utterly flummoxed Ted Kennedy in the lead-up to his 1980 challenge against incumbent President Jimmy Carter. If you’ve never seen the video, watch it now. After an uncomfortably long pause, Kennedy meanders around a number of talking points, desperately searching for an answer before finally drifting to a stop. It’s a gaffe so catastrophic that it happened two years before I was born, and it’s still a key point of reference in my understanding of politics. That’s pretty bad!

Take a look around at the 2016 contenders, and it’s pretty easy for the average voter to identify an underlying logic to each campaign. Donald Trump the perpetually winning mogul who wants to Make America Great Again. Ted Cruz is the unyielding champion of conservatism. Chris Christie knows how to be a strong executive, and won’t take any crap from liberals or Congress or ISIS or Putin. Hillary Clinton, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush are the seasoned veterans who bring a depth of experience and understanding to the job. Bernie Sanders wants to take on special interests, break up the banks, then take the pieces and flush them down the toilet so you can never put them back together, and make the bankers pay for college for everyone, and America’s fixed!

But why does Marco Rubio want to be President?

Why would a voter look at Marco Rubio and say, “That’s the guy who should lead the Free World?”

I’ll wait while you think about it…

Got it yet? No? Me neither. That’s a problem.

A visit to Rubio’s campaign website leads me to the discovery that he does actually have a slogan – the “New American Century.” It is not at all clear what that is supposed to mean.

In reality, the reason that Rubio is running is probably pretty straightforward. He’s a gifted and highly ambitious politician, and he thinks that there is an avenue to victory. He’s trying to be president because he thinks he could be, and if the possibility is there for you, how could you ever pass it up?

It’s such a self-evident logic that most people involved in politics never really ask. Of course he wants to be president. We all want to be president. Desperately.

When I talk to Rubio supporters, what excites them about the candidate is not his policy positions, which are mostly off-the-shelf Republican stock, or his broad vision for the country. It’s certainly not the experience the 45 year-old gained in the Florida State House and in one term in the U.S. Senate.

Instead, these supporters give Rubio credit for his many attributes. He’s young. He’s handsome. He’s well-spoken and has a certain charisma. Even if it may be slightly embellished, he and his family have a wonderful up-from-the-bootstraps immigrant story.

Most of all, his supporters fantasize about the contrast Rubio would present in a potential general election matchup with Hillary Clinton. What better way to counter the narrative that the Republican Party is the party of stodgy old white people than to nominate a young Hispanic? The optics alone would cast Republicans as the champions of a bright, young, diverse future, while Democrats would be trotting out a relic of the 1990s. As McKay Coppins chronicles in his excellent new book on the 2016 Republican contenders (go buy it now), George Will kicked off the Rubio excitement on Election Night 2012 before the corpse of the Romney/Ryan campaign had even had a chance to cool, saying, “If there’s a winner tonight, it’s the Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio because all eyes are now going to be turned to him as a man who might have a way to broaden the demographic appeal of this party.”

In other words, Rubio’s supporters view him the way a pro basketball scout views a high school prospect. They see all the tools and potential and project what could be. But is that how the voting population at large chooses a candidate?

When challenged on his youth and relative lack of experience, Rubio supporters will often point out that he has actually served more time in office, and in more leadership roles (Rubio was Speaker of the Florida State House), than then-Senator Barack Obama had in 2008. This is true, but ignores two things. First is that voters, especially Republican voters, are down on Obama and attribute many of his failings to his not having previous executive experience. While many voters either do not care about or would not notice the hypocrisy in supporting a “Republican Obama,” some undoubtedly view the current president as a cautionary tale and hold his tenure against Rubio.

Second, and more importantly, Rubio does not quite have the political skills Obama has. Rubio has charisma, certainly. But Obama has CHARISMA. Rubio is articulate, but Obama is a once-in-a-generation speechmaker. There is a difference.

Obama also made the critical connection between his biography and unique talents and what it would mean for the country and the voters. By the power of his personality and temperament, he was going to move us past the petty partisan divides that plagued the Clinton and Bush Administrations. He would unite a fractured country, heal the wounds between black and white, rich and poor, red and blue. We would take us to the heights of our better angels. “Hope and Change” was an idea that people could understand, and it met the mood and desires of a nation weary from two wars and a Great Recession.

Nevermind that things didn’t work out that way, and that all kinds of metrics show that we’ll leave the Obama years even more partisan than we entered them. Just because the vision didn’t pan out the way we expected does not mean it was not real in the moment. Voting for Obama in 2008 (and to a much lesser extent in 2012) meant voting for optimism over cynicism and hope over fear. He gave voters reason to believe that putting him into the nation’s highest office would make the country, and their lives, better.

Contrast that with Rubio, who is offering… a nicer face on the Republican boilerplate positions? There’s simply no activating vision for voters to latch on to and to envision how this man will make their lives better.

It is possible, and perhaps likely, that Rubio’s blandness is calculated decision. Just don’t rock the boat and stand to the side while Jeb! makes good on the first half of his “lose the primary to win the general” pledge, wait out Christie and Kasich, neither of whom have no campaign infrastructure past New Hampshire, and then be the only palatable option available when the party establishment is freaking the freak out about the possibility of nominating Trump or Cruz. Then square off against an unpopular Hillary Clinton in the general, where, as we’ve established, Rubio has a natural contrast to his benefit.

There is a certain logic to being the last establishment guys standing. It’s this kind of thinking that has led to him continuing to be at the head of the pack of pundit “power polls,” often ahead of even Trump or Cruz, despite both outperforming him significantly in actual polls.

But that’s an insider strategy in what increasingly appears to be an outsider election. In an era of social media, viral videos, and diversified news outlets, being the champion of the donor class means less and less. In fact, with Washington as hated as it is at the moment, being the choice of “elite” could very well do more harm than good with the average voter.

In order to break through with these voters and actually win his primary and potentially the general election, Rubio will have to find a narrative that conveys not just that he is available as a fallback option, but that he is the right choice to lead the Republican Party and the country. He’ll need to show not just that he has some natural skills and an interesting story to tell, but that he will be able to put those tools and that biography to use for the betterment of the country. If he can do that, it is entirely possible that he could meet the lofty expectations set for him by the Beltway crowd who see in him such great potential. But time is running short, and there’s nothing to this point to indicate that such a message is coming.

The Unique Political Genius of Donald J. Trump

A few blocks away from the White House, in front of the historic Old Post Office Pavilion, there is a great big sign proclaiming “Coming 2016 – TRUMP.” The royal blue billboard is technically there to announce the planned opening of the Trump International Hotel, Washington, DC, a $200 million redevelopment of the historic landmark that its new proprietor has in his inimitable way promised to restore “to even well beyond its original grandeur.” But the political implication is about as subtle as, I dunno, tackling a professional wrestling magnate and then shaving his head.

It’s been nearly six full months since Donald John Trump descended, via escalator, from the upper floors of the Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name to greet a cheering throng of (allegedly) paid stand-ins and announce his campaign to become President of the United States. He spoke for 45+ minutes without prepared text or notes of any kind, wandering between self-congratulatory references to his successes and vast wealth, denunciations of America’s “stupid” political leaders, and red-meat policy calls. The speech would ultimately be remembered most for Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” The claim was the lead story for days on Spanish language television, and sparked protests and boycotts that resulted in Macy’s removing Trump-branded merchandise from its shelves and celebrity chef Jose Andres backing out of a deal to open a restaurant at Trump’s forthcoming DC hotel.

Trump’s wild announcement was met largely with derision from political pundits, who guffawed at his bombast and apparently shallow grasp of policy. They pointed out that two-thirds of Republicans polled before his announcement had an unfavorable view of Trump, and many “experts” were openly skeptical about whether he’d stay in the race long enough to file a financial disclosure form. After all, he’d pulled similar stunts before without ever seeing them through. Certainly, whatever chances he had of being taken seriously went out the window when he’d called Mexican immigrants racists.

I won’t go all Paul Harvey on you, but you already know the rest of the story. Within two weeks Trump was atop a 16-candidate Republican field, a perch he has yet to relinquish. In fact, his poll numbers have steadily increased despite myriad controversies. We’re now in the election year and less than a month away from the first official votes of the cycle being cast, and it is plainly clear: Donald Trump is the favorite to win the Republican nomination.

This is a fact I’ve been proclaiming for months, and that mainstream media outlets have belatedly been coming around to in recent weeks. While I’d like to claim that being ahead of the curve on this makes me some kind of savant, the reality is that it comes from a simple premise: listen to what people are telling you. Republican voters have been telling pollsters for months that they favor Trump, represented by his top-of-the-pack polling percentages, his complete flip in favorability from two-thirds unfavorable to two-thirds favorable, and his status as the candidate most likely to address the major challenges (the economy, ISIS, etc.) facing the country (and actually, a deeper dive into the numbers appears to suggest that Trump’s total support is underrepresented by current polling, and that he may be a stronger favorite than anyone realizes). Really, the only reason to have doubted at any point since this summer that Trump could win is that you started with the assumption that, come on, it’s Donald Trump. He can’t possibly win, can he?

Well, he can, and he very well might. So in attempt to get a jump on the headlines of three months from now wondering how the hell it happened, I would like to offer my collected takes on the underlying reasons for Trump’s ascension. Much ink has already been spilled about Trump and particular aspects of his appeal – He’s an outsider! People without college degrees love him! – but I find many of them to be myopic, focusing on a single statistic or talking point rather than the larger picture of what is an actual political phenomenon. Herein I will try to explain the political genius of The Donald.

Donald Trump is the Alpha Male

Sometimes it is best not to overthink things. It’s very easy to get lost in an abyss of data and policy proposals and biography and electoral strategy, all while missing the basic, guttural truth. Of course people want to elect a president who matches their values and ideology, but at a fundamental level what they are being asked to do is to pick a leader.

Take a look at the Republican debate stage(s) and it is pretty clear to see that Trump is the most charismatic guy in the race. By his sheer presence and force of personality, he dominates any room he is in. He also dictates the agenda – in the news media universe, he is the sun and all the other candidates are planets rotating in his orbit, reacting to his every quip and tweet. He is in complete command of this race.

That matters, a lot. People want to be led. They expect to be led. And if you can’t take the lead on a Republican debate stage, how can you possibly be the Leader of the Free World?

Former ESPN writer Bill Simmons often asks a question in his columns: “Who is driving the car?” It’s a question about primacy – if a group of guys is going out for the night, who is the one who takes the keys and runs the show? Simmons typically uses it to describe an innate trait necessary in a winning quarterback or basketball player, the guy who in crunch time steps forward and says, “I got this.”

It is a metaphor I think is especially apt here. In the Republican field, it is obvious that Trump is driving the car (or at least ordering his chauffeur where to take everyone). This is a core, intangible trait that can’t be taught or implemented by political operatives into a strategy, and it hits voters at a level they will always understand far better than any ten-point policy plan.

Trump = Success  

One reason so many people cast the idea of a Trump candidacy as ridiculous is that he is fundamentally a ridiculous person. He is a walking, talking caricature of extravagance and bombast. Everything he does is “YUGE!” He always has the biggest, the best, the most luxurious. He always wins. Just ask him.

It’s all very easy to mock, but his relentless self-promotion has paid off. To the vast majority of the American public, the Trump brand is synonymous with wealth and success, and has been for a generation. He is the guy who is so good at making deals that he literally wrote the book on it. He is the name behind the biggest, most impressive towers of New York and high-end resorts around the world. His brand adorns a clothing line that actual rich people would never be caught dead in, but which is sold to mid-level businessmen with the unspoken promise of piggybacking off his glamour and unleashing their inner mogul. He’s the boss from whom celebrities line up to seek validation of their business acumen and, when they inevitably fail to meet his exacting standards, he summarily dismisses them with his brusque and actually trademarked “YOU’RE FIRED!”

While the country’s net economic trends are positive, many people are not sharing in the gains. They feel left behind. Trump has a brand that rose during the peak boom times of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and to a lesser extent George W. Bush. He’s a reminder of a certain global status that Americans once felt, but many don’t anymore. Most (largely correctly) blame Washington for the perceived diminishment of American greatness. Who better, then, to restore that swagger than the guy who always wins? Why not bring in the master turnaround artist to do to politicians what he’s done to so many failing properties (just ask him)? If what you really want to do is tell the politicians “YOU’RE FIRED,” why not send in the guy who trademarked it?

The Media’s Best Friend

Trump’s greatest achievement to this point has been his ability to dominate polls without spending any particular money on ads (as I write this, he has just released his first, which will begin airing this week) or doing any of the grind-it-out-on-the ground campaign work that his competitors have had to slog through. Instead, he has largely campaigned by phone calls and tweets from his Manhattan high rise, with periodic rallies for which he drops in for an hour or two to speak to packed arenas before quickly hopping back in his jet to fly home. It’s a remarkable and unconventional strategy that has worked because he so completely understands two things: the needs of the news media and the id of the Republican electorate.

Trump’s competitors have been grumbling for months about the all of the “earned” media attention he receives and does not have to pay for. They resent the fact that news outlets chase ratings by having The Donald on constantly for interviews or running his rallies live or simply having their yakking heads debate his latest comments for hours on end. The logic goes something like this: if they talked about (insert candidate) that much, he/she’d be way ahead of where Trump is right now!

It’s a statement that completely misses the genius of Trump and, by contrast, the failures of the campaigns themselves. While Trump’s coverage is obviously amped up by his celebrity status, what sustains it is that he continues to make news. TV stations want to interview him because he’ll almost always say something interesting. They cover his rallies because he is not giving the same stock speech over and over and over again. They talk about his latest take because he has one.

Contrast that with the other campaigns, which work to so tightly control their own coverage and narrative that the candidate never seems to utter a word that wasn’t pre-scripted or poll-tested. These campaigns are explicitly designed not to make news. When every interview answer comes out of a box and every speech is exactly the same, just what is there to cover?

It is certainly not as though news show bookers are studiously avoiding the other candidates because they don’t have enough time to fill. Those candidates are simply unwilling to make the trade-off that Trump has – he’ll keep feeding the content beast as long as you’ll keep covering him.

The Great Communicator

Trump’s aggressively unscripted shtick has also taken him incredibly far with voters, who delight in the fact that he sounds like anything but a politician. The lack of polish gives him an aura of being a straight shooter, even when he is flipping positions or flat out making things up. Think about that: simply by bucking conventional political style, Trump has afforded himself a level of trust that the other candidates can’t match even when what he’s saying is total bullshit. His style also allows him to get away with the kinds of gaffes, exaggerations, and policy flubs that would sink other campaigns. After all, he’s just “speaking his mind.”

Ironically, despite wandering and digressing through interviews and speeches, Trump is far better at getting his key messages across than any of his more polished competitors. I don’t get outside the Beltway as much as I’d care to, but every time I do, I invariably get to talking with people about Trump, and I’m always struck by the degree to which they recite his key talking points. Even people who don’t (or won’t say that they do) support him will tell me that he’s a “straight shooter,” that he “can’t be bought by special interests,” that he “knows how to make deals.” Ask these same people about Marco Rubio and, after a moment or two, they’ll say he “seems nice” or he “seemed good at the debate.” But they can’t tell you word one about why he wants to be president or why they’d support him, other than he’s not Hillary (her vast unpopularity will have to wait for another blog entry).

This is further credit to Trump’s brand building abilities. He may not be the polished orator the Rubio is, or the, ahem, master debater that Ted Cruz is, but he gets his point across and knows how to cut a slogan. He wants to Make America Great Again. After all, it’s on his hat.

Understanding the “Make America Great Again” phrase is instructive to grasping Trump’s appeal. It cuts to the core of what a large segment of the population feels about America’s fading global hegemony, and about the sense of personal stagnation many feel about being left behind in the modern global economy. It’s a promise to restore glory days in a country where an increasingly large percentage of people feel that our best days are behind us. The best campaigns can condense a core message into a bumper sticker – “Hope and Change,” “It’s the Economy, Stupid” – and Trump has captured the angst and desires of his supporters into a simply elegant four word phrase.

The “Bully” Pulpit

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out the savagely excellent way in which Trump uses social media. His Twitter and Instagram feeds are conformity-busting masterpieces, used primarily to brutalize opponents who can’t match his ability to talk smack. Dubbed (by himself?) to be the “Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters,” Trump uses his accounts to reinforce all of his key traits. He uses his unique ability to cut a to-the-point slogan against his opponents (“low energy” Jeb Bush, “pathological” Ben Carson) and critics (numerous “failing” newspapers and media outlets), further cementing his alpha male status and giving the media a constant stream of new material to cover. Probably the only person who could provide the superlatives grand enough to describe Trump’s command of social media is Trump himself.

No Accountability for the Unelected

Something else that Trump quickly figured out and played to his advantage is that he is unelected and therefore unaccountable for anything he says. This freedom allows him to always take the staunchest, hardest-line positions on issues, appealing to the id of the Republican electorate. For example, deporting 11 million Hispanics or banning Muslims from entering the country are profoundly impractical and questionably constitutional policy solutions. Building a wall on the southern border and making Mexico pay for it is basically absurd. But Trump can plant his flag on these issues because he’s never been forced to cast a public vote, and isn’t (yet) responsible for actually governing. He can always outflank the opposition, forcing the traditional politicians to hedge and qualify while he makes a bold stand. This further cements his strength and credibility while undermining his opponents as weak and ineffectual. It’s not especially intellectually honest or noble, but it is incredibly savvy and consistently puts him in position to be the aggressive champion of the causes that most agitate Republican voters.

Donald Trump is Never Wrong. Ever.

“Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations.” The phrase is allegedly the mantra of CIA spies, though it probably originated with political operative Roger Stone. Regardless of where it comes from, nobody has internalized the message quite like Trump. Despite making more than his fair share of offensive statements and whoppers, Trump never concedes that he is wrong, he never qualifies his statements (and in fact usually doubles and triples down on them), and he never, ever apologizes. Instead, he bombards accusers with insults and counter-accusations, and uses any sliver of truth as proof of his righteousness. His unwillingness to bend to political convention and walk back his “gaffes” actually helps ensure that he never truly makes one. By never conceding or allowing for doubt, Trump never gives opponents an opening for a free attack. As long as he never acknowledges that there is truth to what is said against him, every criticism can be cast as political. And, as noted above, by not being a typical politician, Trump has created an image for himself as the most honest man in the race. In a face-off with dishonest politicians or an unpopular press, he gets more than his share of the benefit of the doubt. As with some of his policy positions, this is not necessarily an intellectually honest or noble approach, but it is enormously effective.

The Downfall of Trump?

So now that I’ve talked at length about what a political genius I think Trump is, the obvious question is: will he actually win? My position on this has been consistent for months – if forced to pick the one Republican candidate who is most likely to win the nomination, there really is no choice other than Trump. To do so is to ignore months and months of data.

But if I was forced to pick Trump vs. the field, I’ve always thought the field was the safer bet, though Trump’s continued dominance is making it a tougher and tougher call. Initially, I expected that Trump would hit a ceiling of support in the high-20s and once the field narrowed, he’d be crowded out by a more consensus candidate. This is more or less the belief that is propelling the Rubio, Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich campaigns at the moment.

Yet over time, Trump continued to grow gradually, to the point that he now commands somewhere in the range of 35-40% nationally. Secondary poll numbers for him are even stronger, suggesting that 50+% of likely Republican voters believe he is the best candidate to manage the economy, defeat ISIS, and perhaps most importantly, win in a general election. That suggests that his ceiling is much higher than I originally thought, and that this election is essentially his to lose.

Of course, he could still easily lose. The great consolidation could still happen, though the poll numbers don’t suggest that voters are set to fall in line with an establishment Republican candidate. Trump could do something so outrageous that he turns off voters, though if he hasn’t done that yet I don’t know how he possibly could.

The most likely scenario for a Trump downfall is that the large number of non-traditional voters backing his bid don’t show up, causing him to significantly underperform his poll numbers. If that occurs in a handful of early states, it is easy to see how the Trump narrative could quickly unravel. If he doesn’t win, he’s (obviously) no longer the guy who always wins. If he’s in second (or third or fourth) he loses alpha male status. If he’s not ahead, his sniping at competitors goes from bullying and derisive to petulant and desperate. Trump is not set up to endure failure, and losses could set him up for a vicious and rapid downward cycle.

If someone can get ahead of Trump, the path is there for a quick and inglorious downfall. But can anyone do it? The next few months should be enormously interesting and entertaining.