MANCHESTER, N.H. — Sen. Marco Rubio’s Saturday night performance in the Republican presidential debate will be remembered for the fact that he repeated the same point over and over rather than for the underlying substance of the point he was trying to make. But the thing is, he was trying to make a tricky argument in the first place.
To recap, Rubio was asked to respond to attacks that he’s not ready to be president, because just like President Obama was when elected, he’s a first term senator.
In response, Rubio was trying to make the point that the problem with Obama wasn’t competence, but ideology. In other words, Obama was able to get things done — just the wrong things.
“Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world. That’s why he passed Obamacare and the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and the deal with Iran. It is a systematic effort to change America.”
A Republican Obama, in other words, would be a good thing if he could advance the conservative agenda as successfully as Obama advanced the liberal agenda.
The problem is that’s a much easier argument to make for those who follow politics closely than to the GOP electorate at large who think Obama is both ideologically wrong and incompetent.
Many voters, especially those already skeptical about Rubio, may hear him say “Obama knows exactly what he’s doing” over and over again and come away thinking he is pro-Obama.
Interestingly enough, Obama also found himself with a similar problem during the 2008 Democratic primary when he made the comment, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” His argument was that Reagan was a transformative president who fundamentally altered the direction of the country, and he wanted to do for liberalism what Reagan did for conservatism.
But this fired up liberals and provided fuel to his opponents. Obama came under fire from both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, who tried to portray him as failing to appreciate (from a liberal perspective) the awfulness of Reagan’s policies.
Even were it not for the fact that Rubio repeated it so many times, even as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie attacked him for repeating talking points, Rubio’s argument would be a hard one to make on a debate stage.
It’s the type of subtle argument perhaps best left to surrogates writing op-eds.
