Marco Polo Rubio 2016

What the Rubio campaign needed everyone to forget was that — to anyone who doesn’t live off political news, to anyone not inured to the blocked toilet that is Florida politics — Marco Rubio sounded like either a moron or a crook.

All that might have been enough to overlook if there had been any ideas behind Rubiomentum. But Rubio was a Reagan Republican in the same way that all other Republicans are Reagan Republicans: 95 percent of what he believes hasn’t been updated since 1981. As to the remaining five percent, any time something new came out of his mouth, half the journalists covering him wanted to run around to the side of the stage to catch a glimpse of the puppeteer from the Heritage Foundation with an arm shoulder-deep up his ass…

His announcement that his campaign was over could not have been more fitting for what his campaign represented: A passionate delivery of an old idea everyone had already memorized, delivered instead as news. A few people listening had red eyes, as some internal mechanism in Rubio yanked down a lever to the Emotionally Uplifting Twaddle setting.

“I ask the American people: Do not give in to the fear. Do not give in to the frustration,” he said. “We can disagree about public policy, we can disagree about it vibrantly, passionately. But we are a hopeful people, and we have every right to be hopeful.”…

It was a masterpiece of bullshit, combining the Rubio experience’s two true and constant outcomes: a text any follower could have reasonably assembled from the greatest hits, and one whose philosophical aspirations were invalidated by the person voicing them. Rubio’s rhetoric never tried to soar higher than when it was being undermined by everything else he campaigned on…

I love campaigns that are so disloyal that the Post Mortem is fully written an hour after the concession https://t.co/4tZZXHFA9Q

— Wyeth Ruthven (@wyethwire) March 16, 2016

From the Politico article:

… Rubio’s strategy was always an inside straight—overly reliant on a candidate’s ability to dominate free national media in order to outperform, outwit and eventually outlast a wide field of rivals. It was sketched out by an inner circle of advisers who believed they could eschew the very fundamentals of presidential campaigning because they had a candidate who transcended.

That’s exactly what happened in 2016; it just turned out Rubio wasn’t the one transcending…

…[W]hile other campaigns touted “shock and awe” fundraising networks and precise, psychographic analytics and voter targeting operations, Rubio’s tight-knit group of mostly 40-something bros believed wholeheartedly that they didn’t need a specific early-state win. They didn’t need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn’t need a ground game. They didn’t need to be the immediate front-runner. All they needed was Marco.

Their confidence bordered on arrogance. Sure, his closest advisers—campaign manager Terry Sullivan and media strategists Todd Harris and Heath Thompson—were right that their candidate was likable. He began the race as the second choice of many Republican primary voters. They just never figured out how to make voters embrace him as their first…

The campaign spared no expense in setting up events to be television-friendly. There were invariably press risers, tidy backdrops and television lighting to portray Rubio, quite literally, in the best imaginable light.

But one of the things Sullivan seemed least interested in was field offices. The campaign would force volunteers and supporters to pay for their own yard signs, posters and bumper stickers…

It’s not that Rubio’s team didn’t know the data science that powered Obama’s two campaigns or that studies showed that door knocks and personal phone calls are among the most effective means to get out the vote. It’s that they’re expensive and time-consuming. And Rubio’s team thought they had figured out a better way: targeting exactly their voters with pinpoint precision online, on TV and in the mail.

“It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win,” said one Rubio supporter very familiar with the campaign’s planning. “Were they just fucking lazy or arrogant?”

“Marco is convinced, and perhaps rightly so, that he has the skills to convince anyone,” said Dan Gelber, who served for eight years in the Florida Legislature with Rubio, including two as the Democratic counterpart when Rubio was GOP speaker. “He really believes that if you give him an audience, he can turn them to his way of thinking.”…

Marco Rubio has until May 6th to change his mind about running for Senate reelection. In this environment would anyone be shocked if he did?

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) March 17, 2016

Jonathan Chait, in NYMag — “The End of Marco Rubio’s Campaign Is a Dodged Bullet for America”:

… Rubio could only go so far because only Trump has found a way to break all the norms of American politics at no political cost to himself. Rubio ran a different strategy not for moral reasons but because he thought it would work. His plan was to fashion himself as the frontman for the Republican donor class. Rubio’s proposition to party insiders was that he could spare them from any serious reconsideration of party dogma — except, perhaps, on immigration reform, the one issue where Republican moneymen were happy to move to the center anyway. In place of substantive moderation, Rubio would use his modest upbringing and winning personality (and Rubio truly is likable) to sell old Republican wine in a new bottle. Rubio’s insider strategy conveyed many benefits on his campaign. He raised plenty of money, and overwhelmingly outspent Trump in Florida and elsewhere. Republican insiders showered him with understanding, supplying friendly spin to the media that allowed Rubio to portray a long series of defeats as proto-victories.

It was not only calculation, though, that shaped Rubio’s candidacy. His life has been defined by a fascination with wealth, bordering on worship. Rubio once told a roomful of rich businessmen that the inspiration for his politics came from driving around as a young boy and gawking at the homes of the rich. As a young politician he read Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s paean to the superiority of the rich, twice. He attached himself to wealthy patrons and moved between politics and lobbying throughout his career, seamlessly blending public service with moneymaking.

His willingness to eloquently champion the interests of the donor class enabled Rubio’s rapid ascent and defined his governing philosophy. In Florida, he proposed cutting property taxes, which fall on landowners, and replacing the revenue with higher sales taxes, which fall most heavily on the poor. His domestic agenda was defined by a tax cut twice the size of the one George W. Bush enacted. Like Bush, Rubio’s tax cut tacked on some small-change tax credits for low-income families, but the bulk of the money went to the top, with 40 percent of the cost of his plan accruing to the richest one percent. He wanted to deregulate the financial industry and eliminate Obamacare — which he repeatedly voted to eliminate without the necessity of a replacement. He refused to accept the legitimacy of climate science, even as his home city is literally disappearing slowly beneath his feet. One of the very few areas where Rubio claimed to stake out untraditional ground was in higher education — but even here, his policy turned out to be deregulating for-profit colleges, one of the shadiest of which had generously funded him…

Rubio’s conservative admirers bitterly observed that liberals mocked him because they deemed him a potent nominee. This was not wrong. Despite his inability to out-Trump Trump, who has captured his party’s id, Rubio has maintained high levels of favorability with moderate voters, especially Latinos. His substantive extremism would have proven a liability in a general-election campaign, but it was entirely plausible to believe that Rubio could have smuggled his right-wing policies past the electorate by running on cheerful slogans and a winning smile. The potential to do so is why Rubio may well find himself atop his party’s ticket in a future election. In the meantime, his failure is a bullet dodged.