Two of the 2016 Republican presidential field’s most accomplished speakers, Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., skipped the big Lincoln Day dinner in Des Moines, Iowa over the weekend. But the dinner, which featured 11 candidates addressing the crowd for a strictly-enforced ten minutes each, saw the emergence of another star speaker in the GOP ranks.
Since making a good impression on Iowans at a similar event in January, Carly Fiorina has honed her stump speech to a fine edge. Starting with her own secretary-to-CEO success story, she touches a lot of bases — Hillary Clinton, American exceptionalism, business regulation, taxes, the size of government, the nature of leadership, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Israel, Iran and more. She delivers the message with an intensity that almost forces people to listen.
That’s what Fiorina did in Iowa Saturday night. And even though one might think it an amateur mistake to go over the ten-minute limit, as Fiorina did, and to be stopped by rising music and a cut microphone (those were the rules), it didn’t appear to hurt Fiorina. When she was cut off — Fiorina was the only candidate who went over — “the crowd groaned,” according to Iowa Republican blogger Craig Robinson. They wanted to hear more.
Another takeaway from the night, viewed through the magic of C-SPAN, is that Republican audiences like Lindsey Graham more than hard-core conservative activists do. The South Carolina senator was well received at a GOP cattle-call in New Hampshire recently, and he was well received again in Des Moines. He tells a lot of jokes, which helps. And his I’ll-be-tougher-on-terrorism-than-anybody approach pleases national security-minded listeners. But in Iowa Saturday, Graham also made an impassioned defense of government safety-net programs that stood out among Republican speakers.
He was born in a small town in South Carolina, Graham told the crowd. Neither of his parents finished high school. The family owned a liquor store, a restaurant, and a pool room. “When I was 21, my mom was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease,” Graham said. “Six months later, she passed, and the bills wiped us out, because we were under-insured, so I don’t need a lecture from a Democrat about health care. Fifteen months later, my dad died. I’m 22, my sister is 14. My world came to an end — upside down.”
“If it wasn’t for family, friends, and faith I wouldn’t be standing here today,” Graham continued. “If it wasn’t for Social Security survivor benefits, we couldn’t have paid the bills. If it wasn’t for college loans and Pell grants, my sister would never have went to college. I’m a proud Republican, but we’re all one car wreck away from needing somebody’s help.”
Jeb Bush was at the dinner, too, and made a solid but somewhat perfunctory speech. As he has in so many appearances, Bush started out by mentioning that he is proud to be George H.W. Bush’s son — “George and Barbara’s boy” — and George W. Bush’s brother: “I’m proud of that, too,” Bush said. “Whether people don’t like that or not, they’re just going to have to get used to it.”
That seemed a clear reference to the controversies of the last few days, in which Bush struggled to answer the if-you-knew-then question about the Iraq war. Bush’s remarks pointed to a tension between the way Bush usually discusses his family — I love them, but I’m my own man — and his admission that he doesn’t want to criticize anything Bushes have done in the White House. “I’m not going to go out of my way to say that, you know, my brother did this wrong or my dad did this wrong,” Bush said last week in Arizona. “It’s just not gonna happen. I have a hard time with that. I love my family a lot.” Look for Bush’s reluctance to criticize Bush presidents to be tested mightily in the future.
Finally, one of the Republicans who wasn’t at the Iowa dinner, Marco Rubio, also got caught up in the Iraq question, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” But what was perhaps more remarkable about Rubio’s appearance was his response to what should have been a softball question. Host Chris Wallace noted that Rubio is “running for president on a platform of generational change” and played a brief clip in which Rubio said, “Too many leaders and their ideas are stuck in the 20th century.” So the question: “Senator, what are your 21st century ideas?”
Rubio didn’t have a sharp, concise answer. He talked a bit about foreign policy, about taxes, about education, but never really made a convincing I’m-the-new-generation case for his candidacy. If that’s going to be a big theme of his campaign, he’ll have to do better.
