Israel Matzav

Rubio campaign site has Stand with Israel page

The campaign site of Marco Rubio, who officially announced himself as a candidate for President on Monday, has a Stand with Israel page on his campaign site (Hat Tip: Sunlight).

He knows who his friends are.

It's kind of funny reading the Leftist media's critiques of Rubio. This is the New York Times (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Marco Rubio, who announced his bid for the presidency on Monday in a call to donors, has been called the “best communicator” in the Republican Party. Over and over and over again.

But he has little to show for it.

He enters the fray with surprisingly low support. Despite four years of national prominence, he has averaged 6 percent of the vote in primary polls over the last few months. That’s the same or worse than five candidates who are thought to have a much smaller chance of winning the nomination: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie. Mr. Rubio is acceptable to many but, so far, the first choice of few.

Mr. Rubio’s struggle to break through is a powerful reminder that winning a presidential primary is not just about skill as a politician. It’s about positioning, and Mr. Rubio, at the moment, is in a much worse position than many assessments of his political talent would suggest. In basketball terms, he’s boxed out.

His central problem is that Jeb Bush has found considerable support from the party’s mainstream conservative and moderate donors in the so-called invisible primary — the behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that often decides the nomination.

I don't think the country wants another Bush v. another Clinton. And ultimately, as the field thins, if Rubio ends up being the only conservative in the race, I think he will gain support. Then again, I would say the same thing about Ted Cruz. (You all should know by now that I am a big fan of both of them).

The New Republic is downright nasty to Rubio (Hat Tip: Memeorandum). 

If Rubio were both serious and talented enough to move his party away from its most inhibiting orthodoxy, in defiance of those donors, his candidacy would represent a watershed. His appeal to constituencies outside of the GOP base would be both sincere and persuasive.

But Rubio is not that politician. He is no likelier to succeed at persuading Republican supply-siders to reimagine their fiscal priorities than he was at persuading nativists to support a citizenship guarantee for unauthorized immigrants. In fact, nobody understands the obstacles facing Marco Rubio better than Marco Rubio. But rather than abandon his reformist pretensions, or advance them knowing he will ultimately lose, Rubio has chosen to claim the mantle of reform and surrender to the right simultaneously—to make promises to nontraditional voters he knows he can’t keep. My colleague Danny Vinik proposes that Rubio wants to "improve the lives of poor Americans" but he must "tailor [his] solutions to gain substantial support in the GOP, and those compromises would cause more harm to the poor." I think this makes Rubio the most disingenuous candidate in the field.

 But as we all know, campaigns are one thing and being in office is something else.

Nevertheless, political polling site fivethirtyeight.com, which also leans Left, calls Rubio the first serious Republican candidate to declare (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign, which officially kicks off Monday, has so far attracted paltry support from Republican voters, according to polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as nationally. He’s down near Chris Christie! Yet, when we talk about him in the FiveThirtyEight office, we usually put Rubio in the top tier, in front of everyone except Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, the two candidates at the top of the polls.

Why? Rubio is both electable and conservative, and in optimal proportions. He’s in a position to satisfy the GOP establishment, tea party-aligned voters and social conservatives. In fact, Rubio’s argument for the GOP nomination looks a lot like Walker’s, and Rubio is more of a direct threat to the Wisconsin governor than he is to fellow Floridian Bush.

To win a presidential nomination, you need to make it past the party actors (i.e., elected officials and highly dedicated partisans). You can have all the strong early poll numbers in the world (hello, Rudy Giuliani), and your candidacy can still fail if party bigwigs come out against you. Rubio has a real chance of surviving — or even winning — the invisible (or endorsement) primary.

Rubio doesn’t have the flaws the other two official GOP candidates have. He’s a hawk on foreign policy (with an 89 percent conservative foreign policy score in National Journal’s vote ratings), so he’ll be able to avoid the pitfalls of Rand Paul’s candidacy. And Rubio isn’t anywhere near as extreme as Ted Cruz and has not alienated his fellow senators, so we shouldn’t expect mainstream party members coming out of the woodwork to stop Rubio. But he’s a solid conservative; statistical ideological ratings put him right in line with the average Republican in the 113th Congress.

The analysis is fascinating. Read the whole thing.

But what I like best about Rubio is that he says flat out that he would reverse President Obama's foreign policy - a foreign policy of which Hillary Clinton was an architect (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Rubio also vowed to reverse course on Obama's recent diplomatic endeavors with Iran, with which the United States is working to finalize a nuclear pact, and Cuba, with which Obama has opened diplomatic relations.

"I think from a national-security perspective, this deal with Iran is an extremely dangerous one," Rubio said when asked what he would do on his first day as president. "I think the next president of the United States is going to have to deal with that on day number one."

Of the diplomatic opening with Cuba, Rubio said, "I would reverse every single one of the decisions that [Obama] made."

That's music to my ears. 

Labels: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Republican party, Republicans, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, US presidential campaign 2016

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:17 AM