Portsmouth, N.H.
For all the hype surrounding him, a Marco Rubio rally is completely different from the mega-rallies of Trump and Sanders or even the smaller, yet richly-produced, Clinton affairs. Thursday’s rally, for instance, was held in a dingy banquet hall just off the U.S. 1 Bypass in Portsmouth. At eight o’clock in the morning about 150 people packed into the small room, which looked like most of the bare-bones, early campaign events you see every four years in New Hampshire. Except for one thing: the candidate.
Rubio waded into the crowd at the center of the room with a microphone and prefaced his stump speech with a two-minute story about ordering pizza to his hotel room for his kids the night before and people don’t just laugh—you can always count on political audiences for polite laughter—but the story was legitimately funny. Rubio then stood in the middle of the room with a microphone and delivered his stump speech like a freight train.
He’s tweaked the opening over the last few weeks to absorb some Trumpism. “There’s something seriously wrong in America,” he now says. “Something is wrong and you can feel it in your lives. You see it in the news. You go out every day and you sense it.” He doesn’t actually say “we lose to everybody,” but the message is there just the same.
The rest of the speech builds toward optimism—Rubio’s “new American century”—and along the way he hits the usual elements: politicians don’t create jobs, people do; he cares about Social Security and Medicare because his mom is on Social Security and Medicare; he’ll unite and grow the party. Everyone has heard this a million times before. Even so, some quick observations:
1.) He’s genuinely gracious about Bernie Sanders. “He’s actually a good guy,” Rubio says of Sanders. “I’ve worked with him on a VA issue. We don’t agree on anything but we agreed on that and we were able to work together and he’s a nice guy. But he’s a socialist. I don’t want a socialist country. There are literally like 45 countries you could move to if you wanted to live in a socialist country.” (Again, he’s funny.)
2.) He’s less gracious about Hillary Clinton. A few months ago Rubio settled on the formulation that “Hillary Clinton is disqualified to be president.”
The first time you hear this phrase, it’s weird. It sounds like a mistake—like it should be “is not qualified” to be president. But the second and third time it sounds a little interesting. By the hundredth time—and if Rubio is the nominee, everyone in America will hear this a hundred times—it’s genius. It isn’t an opinion; it’s a statement. It lays down a marker and encapsulates all of the critiques of Clinton—the dishonesty, the triangulation, the dynastic elements, Benghazi, the secret email server, the shady foundation, the $675,000 Goldman-Sachs speeches—without saying any of them.
And because the phrasing is weird, you’ll remember it. Co-stan-za.
3.) Rubio knows a lot. In his interview on Conversations, Paul Begala tells a story to illuminate the depth and breadth of Bill Clinton’s policy knowledge circa 1992:
Rubio isn’t quite as wonky; but he’s close. During the Q&A, he’s asked by a doctor about the future of medicine. Rubio starts by talking about the decline in physician legacies—how the children of doctors no longer become doctors—then moves to talk about the decline of specialists; then moves to explain how the dwindling number of specialists create access problems; and then concludes by explaining his reform plan. During the course of the morning he talks like this—fluidly and lucidly—about GMO foods, farming, mandatory-minimum sentences, criminal forfeiture, and vaccinations.
4.) It’s actually not true that “everyone has heard Rubio’s speech a million times before.”
People who follow politics for a living may have heard it a bunch. Normal people—political professionals call them “voters”—have not. Post-Iowa it’s become fashionable to push back against the idea of Rubio’s momentum and to make fun of his Iowa third-place “victory” speech. But most of the voting public has had very little exposure to Rubio. They are coming to him fresh. If anything, the conventional wisdom may be underestimating Rubio’s potential at this point simply because he’s been so good a candidate for so long.
There are several theories of electoral politics, that elections are determined by macro-events; or campaign mechanics; or ideological ebbs and flows. Some of these theories are determinist; some are contingent. The truth is that, at the presidential level, every election is different and each is governed by some combination of the above.
Some people believe that the candidates themselves matter; that apart from the dialectics of history or the economy or their voting records, that a bad candidate can be repellent and a great candidate can create a bond with voters that transcends pretty much everything else.
If you subscribe to this theory then in 2020, after Marco Rubio has won his second term by a landslide, you’ll laugh at how anyone ever thought Donald Trump might have won the Republican nomination.
