By Eliana Johnson
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
One subplot of the Republican presidential-nomination
battle has been an increasingly vicious and personal contest between two
first-term senators, both of Cuban descent and separated by just a few months
in age.
Florida senator Marco Rubio (44) and Texas senator Ted
Cruz (45) are both men of superhuman ambition who have put their personal
advancement over virtually everything else, including, many would argue,
loyalty, wealth, and family. Both were at least thinking about running for
president from the time they arrived in the Senate. Their talent and their
years-long focus on reaching the White House are reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s,
and it’s entirely possible that the only thing standing between each and it,
aside from another Clinton, is the other.
“You interview hundreds of candidates and a few stand
out, and Rubio and Cruz stood out,” says Chris Chocola, the former president of
the Club for Growth, the free-market group that endorsed both Rubio and Cruz in
their Senate primaries. “They knew what they believed, they knew why they
believed it, and they could articulate those beliefs.”
Their ascent to the top tier of the presidential field,
where they have been trading barbs, is, for conservatives, a mark of
astonishing success. Cruz is now viewed as the most conservative viable
candidate, while Rubio is widely considered the most viable establishment
choice (although he still has major competition from Chris Christie, among
others). Yet this is a simplistic and somewhat misleading way to look at a prospective
match-up between the two. Rubio was born of the tea-party movement and, during
his Senate race, drove the liberal Charlie Crist out of the Republican party.
That he is now considered a part of the Washington establishment says a lot
about the transformation of the Republican party in the Obama era. “It’s a
tremendous testament to what conservatives have been able to achieve,” says
Mike Needham, the CEO of Heritage Action for America, a leading
conservative-activist group.
Despite their obvious similarities, Rubio and Cruz have
taken different routes to the top that reflect vastly different beliefs about
what the GOP needs to do to win presidential elections again and vastly
different aspirations for its future.
Rubio kept his head down when he arrived in Washington
and used his time to develop a wide-ranging policy platform intended to draw
new voters into the Republican tent — essential work, in his judgment, if
Republicans are to capture the White House again. His failed push for
comprehensive immigration reform was a move to the center, an attempt to
attract to the GOP those who had never before voted Republican, and it earned
him the lasting distrust of the party’s base.
Cruz saw a different path that few had yet glimpsed and
that many still don’t. From early on, according to a top Senate staffer, he
“saw the 2016 election as just a larger-scale version of these insurgent Senate
tea-party campaigns,” and he used his platform in the Senate to position himself
aggressively against Washington and the White House. The apex of his Senate
career so far has been the 2013 government shutdown, a reflection of his belief
that Republicans need only energize their most enthusiastic supporters to win
at the ballot box. If Rubio thought he could unite the party by bringing
together its conservative and moderate factions with a host of innovative
policies, Cruz has sought to unite it by stamping out the remnants of the
Republican establishment entirely.
Though Rubio and Cruz were elected just two years apart —
Rubio in 2010, Cruz in 2012 — they arrived to very different atmospheres in
Washington, D.C. Rubio was elected as a part of the tea-party backlash that
took the country by storm in 2010. At the time, it was virtually unheard of for
sitting senators to be defeated in primary elections, though House members had
been in previous cycles. Rubio’s election was a reflection of the first wave of
grassroots outrage; Washington was still adjusting.
Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 brought a genuine sea of change.
“I think many Republicans were not shocked that we lost in 2008,” says Dan
Senor, who served as an adviser to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. But, he says,
many conservatives “couldn’t make their peace with the 2012 loss.”
Senor refers to the “psychological aftershocks within the
base of the party” that caused an all-out revolt. Republican voters began
blaming the leaders of their own party — rather than Democrats and the president
— for the election loss and for the country’s greater ills.
Rubio was considered a possible running mate for Romney
in 2012 and served as a key surrogate for him on the campaign trail. Cruz was
elected to the Senate the day Romney lost, and when he arrived in Washington,
the party’s base was in open revolt against its leadership. When he was sworn
into office in January 2013, he understood both that the mood of the
conservative grassroots was one of hostility to Washington and that the start
of an open nomination contest was just two years off.
***
‘Frankly, I’ve found the more reviled you are in
Washington, the more they appreciate you in places like Waco, and Dallas, and
San Antonio,” Cruz writes in the opening chapter of his 2015 memoir. And, he
might have added, in Des Moines and Reno, Concord, and Charleston.
Cruz came to Washington to make enemies of his fellow
senators, and friends — fans — among the conservative grassroots. Much of the
fury that fueled the Tea Party was directed at the Bush administration, whose
bailouts of the nation’s big banks had been too much even for the president’s
allies in Congress to abide. (Such establishment fixtures as Paul Ryan and Eric
Cantor opposed it.)
Cruz was able to harness the agitation that had built
over the perceived failures of the Bush administration, Romney’s loss, and
Barack Obama’s unconstrained progressive governance to create a new narrative:
The battle playing out in Washington, he says, is not between Republicans and
Democrats but between the elites and everybody else; not between liberals and
conservatives, but between the “Washington cartel” and the American people.
Hear him on the campaign trail, on the Senate floor, or,
presumably, muttering in his sleep, and Cruz is relentlessly on message. “What
Ted talks about is framing the narrative, and whoever can frame the narrative
wins the day,” says Brian Baker, a Republican political operative and longtime
Cruz friend.
That sort of rhetoric — Washington versus the people —
appealed to the portion of the party that is moved more by demonstrations of
defiance than by detailed policy proposals. Which suits Cruz’s natural
interests. “The big difference between the two of them,” says one Republican
policy maven, “is that Rubio is just policy-minded. Cruz knows a lot, he just
doesn’t think of policy in the way that Rubio does.”
A top Republican strategist familiar with Cruz’s thinking
says he has no real interest in policy: “He likes to talk about political strategy
and the finer points of constitutional debates — everything is a
constitutional-purity debate for him.”
Cruz has used the Senate as a platform for his message,
displaying willpower in the face of criticism in ways that have electrified the
Republican base. There was no greater example of that than the 2013 government
shutdown, which took place less than a year after he was sworn into office.
A Republican aide sympathetic to Cruz’s position on the
2013 confrontation says that Cruz genuinely did not anticipate a shutdown.
Rather, the expectation was that the effort, according to the aide, “could
create some leverage for negotiators to get some sort of symbolic victory where
some of the [Obamacare] mandates would be defunded.”
In the wake of the shutdown, according to one Republican
operative, Cruz admitted privately that his strategy had backfired. It was a
rare admission, a concession that there was such a thing as overreach in his
attempts to invite the scorn of GOP leaders and ignite the passions of the
Republican base.
Of course, the shutdown still benefited Cruz politically.
The media and his colleagues heaped derision upon him, but he wouldn’t have had
it any other way. The shutdown made him the face of the anti-establishment.
But that comes with a price. “The establishment is a real
thing,” says the Republican operative, and if Cruz succeeds in winning the
nomination, the Republican senators he has gained so much popularity deriding
will be “knifing him in the back the whole time.” The broader implication is
that, while the tactics that have endeared Cruz to his supporters may help him
win the nomination, they may also put him, and his party, at a disadvantage in
a general-election match-up against Hillary Clinton.
***
Rubio made a deliberate attempt to avoid the limelight
when he arrived on Capitol Hill in January 2011. He turned down hundreds of
interview requests and declined an invitation to speak at the Conservative
Political Action Conference the month after he was sworn in. Instead, according
to an aide, he spent his time reading policy papers and boning up on national
issues. He also began to receive a daily intelligence briefing.
“If I want to be a real serious policymaker, I need to be
informed,” he told the Gainesville Sun
at the time. “I can’t just read off talking points. I need to know what I’m
talking about.”
If Cruz maintained his position as an opponent of the
Republican establishment, Rubio moved to fill the space between the Tea Party
and the leadership of his party. In mid January 2011, he spent four days in
Afghanistan and Pakistan with Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader,
who would eventually use his influence to help appoint Rubio to the
foreign-relations and intelligence committees. Those posts would in turn help
Rubio establish the credentials to become one of the party’s leading spokesmen
on foreign policy.
The McConnell trip wasn’t the only symbolic step Rubio
made during his first few weeks in office. Despite strong entreaties from the
Senate’s new tea-party caucus, he declined to join the group after expressing
concern about politicians’ co-opting the movement. Cruz allies, several in
interviews for this piece, still criticize Rubio for hiring a K Street
lobbyist, Cesar Conda, as his chief of staff. Another lobbyist, Sally Canfield,
who had come to Rubio from the pharmaceutical industry, became his policy
director.
Rubio has spent his Senate tenure working with
reform-conservative (“reformocon”) wonks to craft an array of conservative
policy proposals, most of which haven’t made headlines. They have served as an
effective platform on which to run for president. Reformocons, and Rubio, have
urged Republicans to move away from the solutions they offered to the problems
of the previous generation — high income taxes, urban crime — and toward
addressing today’s problems, from stagnant wages to the rising cost of higher education.
Rubio, says Yuval Levin, the editor of the reformocon
policy journal National Affairs and a
contributing editor of National Review, “had a habit of getting us policy-type
people in his office to talk even when he wasn’t working on a bill, which is
rare.” Indeed, many of his legislative proposals have been plucked directly
from the major reformocon publications — his tax-reform bill from a 2010 piece
in National Affairs, proposals on
reforming higher education from the reformocon cri de coeur book Room to Grow, and a welfare-reform
policy from a piece in National Review.
On immigration reform, Rubio saw an issue on which good
policy would also make good politics after the party suffered a loss in 2012
partly attributed to Mitt Romney’s poor showing among Hispanics. His allies say
he always knew the issue would be a tough sell fraught with bitterness and
controversy on both sides. But he was making a political calculation to appeal
to moderates in his own party and across the aisle. Rubio’s positions on
immigration have been wobbly: During his tenure in the Florida legislature, he
voted to grant illegal immigrants free tuition and resisted Republican efforts
to enforce immigration laws more aggressively; running to the right of Charlie
Crist in his Senate primary, he became an immigration hawk; and in 2013, he
supported a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally.
It was a colossal political miscalculation by a man who,
despite his boyish demeanor, has proved himself a skilled infighter in situations
in which many believed him to be outmatched, including the current
Republican-nomination contest against his onetime mentor Jeb Bush.
All along, the Gang of Eight bill that Rubio backed had
existed uneasily alongside the White House’s push for immigration reform, and
Rubio continues to battle the perception that he became a pawn in a game
ultimately controlled by New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer and his
allies in the White House. A Republican supporter of the immigration overhaul
says it became clear at a certain point in the negotiations that the White
House was essentially running the show, and he remains puzzled why Rubio
seemingly couldn’t figure that out. “I think Republican primary voters are
asking themselves that every day,” he says.
If the shutdown was Cruz’s moment of overreach in his
attempt to become the figurehead of the Republican grassroots, immigration
reform was Rubio’s own overextension in an effort to position himself as a new
sort of Republican capable of uniting conservatives and moderates. But whereas
the shutdown endeared Cruz to his base, Rubio’s misjudgment on immigration
seemed to threaten his national viability, angering both the Republican
grassroots and the establishment, when he abandoned the effort and ultimately
reversed his position. At the time of the collapse of the Gang of Eight bill,
many were writing Rubio’s political obituary. “I thought Rubio was done. I
thought, He’ll never recover from this,” says one Republican strategist. Time
will tell whether the immigration issue costs Rubio the nomination or merely
remains a problem he must contend with. If the former, it may be that the
candidate who has until now polled most strongly in general-election match-ups
against Hillary Clinton was his own biggest obstacle to winning the nomination
and confronting her.
***
Cruz has never been subtle about his path to the
Republican nomination. He and his strategists have long said that they won’t
try to win over moderates and that the tendency of previous Republican
standard-bearers to woo independents in the general election has demoralized
the base, decreased Republican turnout, and ensured their defeat.
Cruz’s advisers cite recent examples to make their case:
Both John Kerry in 2004 and Mitt Romney in 2012 won independent voters and
still lost, while George W. Bush’s reelection-year focus on turning out the
conservative base delivered him the popular-vote victory that had eluded him in
2000.
Cruz’s campaign model is not that of the Republican
moderates; rather, they are taking a page from the playbook of a liberal
Democrat. “We have the ability to do what Obama did in ’08 and ’12, which is to
expand the base,” says a longtime Cruz friend. “And we think our base — you
can’t take it for granted, and you can grow it significantly.” As Cruz himself
told the New York Times, “the
campaign that we are consciously emulating is Barack Obama’s 2008 primary
campaign against Hillary Clinton.”
The Cruz campaign is built on the premise that he can
consolidate the Right and that doing so is sufficient to win a general
election. There is no doubt that he has made progress in uniting the base.
Social conservatives, led by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, have
coalesced around Cruz, whose chief rivals in that camp — former Texas governor
Rick Perry, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal —
have dropped out of the race already.
Cruz has money (nearly $14 million on hand at the
beginning of October, and much more stashed away in a cluster of super PACs)
and momentum, and he has invested heavily in fieldwork. In Iowa, New Hampshire,
South Carolina, and Nevada, his team boasts volunteer county chairmen in all
171 counties. It has volunteer coordinators in all 163 congressional districts
in the first 24 nominating states. He has focused particular attention on the
first-ever “SEC primary” (nicknamed after the regional football conference) on
March 1, which includes several southern states flush with Evangelicals who have
never before had the opportunity to influence the nomination process.
But some question whether his is a winning
general-election strategy. “His argument is, not only do you just need
Republicans to win the general, but you just need half of Republicans,” says a
Republican strategist familiar with Cruz’s thinking. “It’s not terribly
controversial to say we need not just Republicans, but some non-Republicans,
too.”
Rubio’s theory is that a conservative can unite the
Right, but that the nominee can and must attract the party’s moderates, and
ultimately some Democrats, to the conservative cause. Meanwhile, it has come as
a surprise to many that it is Rubio, rather than Walker, Jindal, or Perry — or
Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum — who is evidently emerging as Cruz’s chief
impediment to unifying the party’s right flank.
Rubio’s advisers insist they are not ceding an inch to
Cruz when it comes to chasing conservative voters, even as Rubio has become a
leading establishment candidate, earning the support of top party donors,
including hedge-fund billionaires Paul Singer, Cliff Asness, and Ken Griffin.
“We are running in the conservative lane,” says a top Rubio adviser.
While establishment candidates in the past have had to
drag the conservative base along with them, Rubio’s team looks at it the other
way around. “The winner of this race,” says the Rubio adviser, “is going to be
somebody in the conservative lane that has the ability to take voters, whether
they are establishment or center-right, in some cases holding their noses,” and
win their support. “Nobody other than Marco has the ability to do that,” he
says.
Of course, the Cruz forces see it differently, and
center-right candidates, including Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, have been
hitting Rubio. And a significant obstacle to the emergence of this race is
Donald Trump, who continues to lead national polls. Should it fully
materialize, though, a Cruz–Rubio showdown would be epic for the Right. “If it
comes down to a Cruz–Rubio race, it’s a huge win for the conservative
movement,” says Wesley Goodman, the former executive director of the
Conservative Action Project, an umbrella organization for conservative-activist
groups and a candidate for state representative in Ohio. “I think most people
will be with Cruz but secretly jumping up and down with excitement” about
having Rubio as a backup.
The two candidates represent starkly different options
for Republican voters about the party’s approach to politics, to policy, and to
winning elections. Ultimately, a battle between them is a struggle over what
sort of conservative, both temperamentally and ideologically, is a better
standard-bearer for the Republican party now and in the future.
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