RUTHFULLY YOURS

As much as I despise John Kasich’s notion that the president is some sort of national father, there is some historical precedent for the idea: Consider the nature of the monument they built to George Washington. Some people demand that a president not only share their values but act as a vessel of them, serving as a kind of moral mascot for the country or even a personification of it.

Not me. I just want to know what I can use him for.

Which brings us to Senator Marco Rubio. Some conservatives, including some whose opinions I respect, simply cannot forgive Rubio for his attempt to forge a bipartisan immigration deal with the so-called Gang of Eight. To be sure, the Gang of Eight bill was a bad one: Bad enough that Rubio later said if an identical bill were brought up in the future, he’d vote against it. But it isn’t just the bill: Some conservatives are mad that Rubio would attempt to cooperate with Democrats at all, that he’d be in the same room with Chuck Schumer. These are the conservatives who need their candidate to personify something, rather than to be of use.

I think Rubio could prove very useful.

Rubio was of course wildly wrong in that immigration debate, and he was pretty sneaky, too, as Mark Krikorian has argued. But if your worry is that President Rubio is going to sign an amnesty bill in March of 2017, you should worry about something else: Barring some dramatic and unforeseeable development, there’s going to be a Republican House next year, it’s going to be a conservative one backed up by a lot of conservatives in the Senate, and our hypothetical President Rubio is never going to sign that amnesty bill because Congress isn’t ever going to send it to him, even if he were so inclined – which I don’t think he is.

How did Rubio get it so wrong on immigration? Or, more precisely, why? You have to understand the job he was interviewing for – which wasn’t president.

Despite his “does not compute” glitch Saturday night (which will likely dog him for the rest of his career, like Rick Perry’s “oops” and Dan Quayle’s “you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment), Marco Rubio is still a live contender for the nomination. So it remains important to explain why I think his immigration record disqualifies him from being the 2016 nominee.

Many conservatives who admire Rubio’s genuine political talent agree that his shilling for Chuck Schumer’s Gang of Eight bill was bad. But they offer two reasons that this should not be an impediment to his being the Republican presidential nominee. First, they say, Rubio has learned his lesson and, second, he’s quite solid on many other issues. Both parts of this defense warrant examination: Has Rubio truly changed his spots on immigration? And is immigration simply one issue among many, so that Rubio’s deviation there is outweighed by his fidelity on others?

As to the first question: There’s every reason to suspect Rubio is merely an election-year immigration hawk. A devastating 14-page indictment of Rubio’s immigration record, prepared by Eagle Forum (html and pdf), lays out his duplicity in painful detail. Early in his career, anti-borders groups were delighted with Rubio’s conduct in the Florida legislature; the head of one of them, NALEO, said, “He, as speaker, kept many of those [immigration-control bills] from coming up to a vote. We were very proud of his work as speaker of the House.”

Then, when Rubio ran for the Senate, he turned into a hawk. As CNN’s greatest-hits clip at last month’s debate showed, Rubio said the following, among other things, during his 2010 campaign: “Earned path to citizenship is basically code for amnesty, it’s what they call it. . . . It is unfair to people who have legally entered this country to create an alternative pathway for individuals who entered illegally and knowingly did so.” This hawkishness on immigration was an important reason for his upset victory over Charlie Crist.

Donald Trump doesn’t know what he thinks about health care. He has been a periodic advocate of a United Kingdom–style monopoly system and a periodic critic of such monopolies. He says that we should repeal the so-called Affordable Care Act and replace it with . . . something. Something “terrific.”

Well.

When asked by New Hampshire debate moderator Mary Katharine Ham whether his flirtations with single-payer leave him closer to Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders than to mainstream Republicans, Trump gave a hilariously incoherent answer based in one part on banalities and one part on lies — which is the Trump magic formula. He said that he was the only candidate on stage free to explore all the policy options because he is self-funded and therefore not beholden to special interests. Trump is in fact mainly funded by donors, like the other candidates, but he persists in this lie, brazenly. He also claimed that the insurance companies are “getting rich on Obamacare,” which would be news to United, Cigna, Aetna, and others who have taken a bath on their ACA offerings. (They might have thought they were going to get rich — it’s nice to have a federal law mandating the purchase of your product — but, having gone to bed with the devil, they are waking up with a burning sensation.) Trump also promises a system that would not leave Americans “dying on the street.”

Trump likes to talk about “deals,” and to tout his purported expertise as a dealmaker. To the extent that he has communicated anything that deserves to be called an idea on the issue of health care, it is in joining in with Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Rodham Clinton, et al., in calling for government negotiation with pharmaceutical companies over prescription-drug prices. Trump promises to apply the business acumen he has brought to the casino racket and his reality-television enterprise to negotiate better deals on pharmaceuticals.

What happened to Marco Rubio — the vaunted debater — at Saturday night’s debate (massacre)? Was he unmasked by that “bull in a New Jersey China shop” Chris Christie?

Hard to say, but I am with a huge standing room only crowd at McKelvie Intermediate School (yes, same place as Bush yesterday, but a lot more people) in affluent Bedford, NH, waiting for Marco and trying to find out. But unlike Jeb, Marco will be speaking from a thrust stage in the middle of the folks, which I think is smart because it’s more personal.

Rubio is still hanging in with a solid second place to Trump in the polls, but talk on the ground was he was poised to pull an upset here. Now, having been savaged by the pundits, he doesn’t look so good.

What happened? No question Marco tends to repeat himself. All candidates do, but he did so last night excessively in a way that is/was way too pre-planned.

But what I think was going on was what we call in Spanish an “ataque de nervios.” Rubio simply got too tense under attack and went to his default position — reciting. He has to learn to deal with that. He also may have had a case of potential “frontrunneritis.” Too much, too soon.

In a September 2007 congressional inquiry about the ongoing surge in Iraq, then Senator Hillary Clinton all but called Gen. David Petraeus a liar. After Petraeus gave a cautiously optimistic—and prescient—appraisal of the growing quiet in Iraq, Clinton curtly dismissed him with the literary term “suspension of disbelief,” which describes the creation of a fantasy world.

Clinton sarcastically rebutted Petraeus’s quite accurate data with the curt dismissal, “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

But Iraq was no make-believe place. Petraeus went on to quiet Iraq and it stayed that way until President Obama, with eyes on the 2012 election, yanked all peacekeepers out in December 2011—with the full support of Hillary Clinton.

In ironic fashion, Hillary’s own vocabulary best describes her conduct. A “willing suspension of disbelief” most aptly sums up Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 primary campaign, which so far seems more disastrous than her 2008 disastrous campaign.

This time around, she is again blowing a huge lead in the polls, but not to an inexperienced, charismatic young African-American trailblazer. Instead she is neck and neck with a white 74-year-old socialist from Vermont who wants to make college free and up taxes to a 90% rate.

Saturday night’s Republican debate could have made all the difference for any one of the candidates. Instead, it didn’t make any difference at all, not for any of them. The men at the top of the polls didn’t stand out, so nothing’s changed there. Yet the men at the bottom all stood out – all of them did about as well as they could have hoped – and each turned in his best performance to date. This means that none of them gained an advantage over his fellow low-polling contenders.

This means that the status quo will not be rocked, and the New Hampshire primary will turn out about the way the polls predicted.

The media, in the immediate aftermath of the debate, didn’t think so – but they are wrong.

The big “headline” from the debate was the media’s assumption that people would care about Marco Rubio’s repetition of the point he was trying to make – but they won’t care, because it is irrelevant to the voting public. It’s the kind of debating point that the media likes to jump on, but voters tend to ignore. As my wife said, “when you’re trying to make a point and nobody seems to be listening, you repeat yourself.” In other words, “it was no big deal.”

But in tracking the news coverage after the debate, ABC, Politico, Fox and others were almost identical in their comments – even similar in their examples from the past of why it would matter.

One commentator compared Rubio’s repetition moment to the Reagan-Carter Debate moment when the Great Communicator said, “there you go again.” That was a decisive moment, but only because the two men were in a head-to-head battle for the Presidency, and this was the only debate between the President and his rival. However, in New Hampshire, it was a “debate” among seven men, each trying to score points.

Another commentator compared the repetition to that moment in the vice presidential debate in 1988 when Dan Quayle struggled to explain what a man as young and inexperienced as he was would do if he suddenly became President. In frustration, he eventually cited JFK, to which Democrat Lloyd Benston said, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Everyone agreed that Benston won the debate – but lost the election. However, once again, this was the final head-to-head debate between two men running for the same office, rather than seven men trying to stand out from the crowd.