By Mona Charen
Friday, March 6, 2015
It has become conventional wisdom that Republicans are
blessed with a talented crowd of potential candidates this cycle. Fine. But
here’s my case for why only one of them is likely to win the general election.
Forget the triumphalism that followed 2014. It will do
the GOP exactly as much good in 2016 as the party’s remarkable success in 2010
did it in 2012. The off-year electorate is different.
Republicans begin the race for 270 Electoral College
votes at a structural disadvantage. California, New York, Illinois, and other
large Democratic states deliver reliable EC votes. In the past six presidential
races, Republicans have averaged just 211 electoral votes, while Democrats
averaged 327. And the swing states — Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina,
and Virginia — all are seeing increases in minority voters and decreases in
white voters.
As Republican pollster Whit Ayers explained in the Wall
Street Journal, ”Groups that form of core of GOP support – older whites,
blue-collar whites, married people, and rural residents – are declining as a
proportion of the electorate. Groups that lean Democratic – minorities, young
people, and single women – are growing.”
Additionally, the GOP, while highly respected on dealing
with terrorism and related matters, is viewed skeptically on whether it “cares
about the middle class.” A Pew poll found that 60 percent of Americans ascribe
this trait to the Democrats, while only 43 percent do to the Republicans.
Jeb Bush was an excellent, conservative governor. He can
raise money. He speaks Spanish and is married to a Hispanic woman. What we
cannot measure is how much Bush fatigue would plague him. We know that his ties
to wealthy donors and his elite pedigree play into the most damaging
stereotypes about Republicans. I’m not saying that it’s fair, or that his
policies wouldn’t help the middle class, but it would be foolish to overlook
the perception of privilege. Further, assuming Hillary Clinton is the
Democratic nominee, running another Bush vitiates the argument that Republicans
are the party of reform and the future.
Scott Walker is the Republican no one dislikes. His strengths
are well known. But he is weak on foreign policy, which is nearly certain to
play a much larger role in 2016 than it did in 2008 or 2012. His fumbling of
some simple questions raises worries that he’s not tuned to the pitch necessary
to solo with the big orchestra.
Marco Rubio doesn’t make those kinds of errors. He’s been
on the national stage for four years, during which time he has distinguished
himself not only as the most inspirational speaker in the Republican party but
also as a serious policy innovator. With Senator Mike Lee, another Tea Party
senator, he has just proposed a sweeping tax reform that would ease the lot of
middle-class families while also promoting growth. He has proposed other
reforms that are both substantively solid and politically shrewd — like
forbidding the taxpayer bailouts of insurance companies (the so-called risk
corridors) that are embedded in Obamacare. He understands the corrupting
effects of government expansion, warning that too much government leads to “the
inequality between those who can afford to influence government and those who
can’t.”
Rubio has read broadly and thought deeply about the
problems America confronts in the 21st century. He was widely criticized for
signing onto an immigration reform that some caricatured as “amnesty” in 2012,
but he has since shifted his emphasis to border security first. Many are
unaware that, though he is young (the same age John F. Kennedy was in 1960), he
is not inexperienced, having served as speaker of the Florida House before
being elected to the U.S. Senate.
The urge to stoop to identity politics makes some
conservatives (including this one) gag. But Rubio is the very best kind of
immigrant success story — the son of a bartender and a maid who says he can
never repay what America has done for him. His family’s Cuban heritage (he is
fluent in Spanish) has made him especially sensitive to the thugs and tyrants
of the world, including those in Tehran. His foreign policy would be
assertively Reaganite.
Rubio has one more huge advantage as a candidate —
likeability. He has a sense of humor and can be self-deprecating. The
conservative message he carries is wrapped in sincerity, uplift, and warmth,
not scowls and censure. He has precisely the combination of qualities that the
Republican party and the country need right now.
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