By Deroy Murdock
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
If current trends continue, Republican primary voters
will give themselves a warm “stick it to the man” feeling by defying Mitch
McConnell, the Bush family, and the greater GOP establishment and nominating
Donald Trump for president. They have endured years of policy disappointments
and ideological betrayals by Washington Republicans; it’s hard to blame them.
There’s just one problem: Once this fight-the-power
euphoria has ebbed, Trump would face the Democratic nominee, most likely
Hillary Clinton. Fairly or unfairly, she will pound the Manhattan real-estate
mogul as a mean, insensitive, sexist, and possibly racist multi-billionaire
“who doesn’t care about people like you.” Clinton, the Democrats, and their
butlers and maids in the old-guard media will tar Trump as Mitt Romney with
more money and less warmth.
Indeed, Clinton would smash Trump 50 percent to 40,
according to a December 14 NBC/Wall
Street Journal survey of 1,000 adults (margin of error: +/- 3.4 percent). A
December 16–17 Fox News survey of 1,013 registered voters finds Clinton
thumping Trump by 11 points – 49 percent to 38 (MOE: +/- 3.0 percent). A
December 22 Quinnipiac University poll found that 50 percent of 1,140
registered voters surveyed would be “embarrassed to have Donald Trump as
President.” Only 35 percent said this of Hillary Clinton. (MOE: +/- 2.9 percent).
With his coattails drenched in Crisco, Trump most likely
would see Republican senators, congressmen, state-level candidates, and even
local contenders slip down the general-election ticket and slide to defeat.
Memo to GOP primary voters: Breathe deep the gathering
doom.
Rather than engineer a Hillary Clinton landslide,
Republican voters should nominate a stalwart, quick-witted conservative whose
immigrant roots and modest means make him a far more elusive target for
Clinton’s slings and arrows.
In fact, Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) is the only GOP
contender who consistently defeats Hillary Clinton in head-to-head heats. In
the NBC/WSJ survey, he beats Clinton
48 percent to 45. The Fox poll put the attractive, savvy, severely well-spoken
Rubio at 45 percent and Clinton at 43. Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) loses to
Clinton in the NBC/WSJ match-up, 43
percent to 48, while he ties her at 45 points in Fox’s contest.
(As this article was being edited, a December 22–23
Rasmussen Survey emerged in which 37 percent of 1,000 likely voters said they
would support Clinton for president, and 36 percent would back Trump. While
this is a much better showing for Trump, he still comes out behind Clinton and
far from 50 percent, with 22 percent of respondents behind other candidates,
and 5 percent undecided – MOE: +/- 3 percent. Even in this survey, Trump
remains in a frightfully precarious position.)
Rubio’s humble roots and modest circumstances may be his
most powerful defense against Clinton. As the son of a bartender and hotel
maid, Rubio, who has lived check to check, speaks from an economic position
that is much more typical than Clinton’s. She and her husband, after all,
declared $140 million in income between 2007 and 2014. These funds have come
mainly from selling books and giving speeches, sometimes before organizations
that then scored federal favors while Hillary was secretary of state.
Unlike Trump, Rubio is vaccinated against the
class-warfare virus that Democrats routinely deploy to infect and kill
Republican presidential nominees. In fact, it would be hilarious for Hillary to
paint Rubio as a coal-hearted plutocrat. Her $25 million household income for
2014 puts her in the top 0.1 percent of tax filers.
Equally comical is the fact that some on the right
denounce Rubio as the GOP establishment’s Plan B, now that Jeb Bush has
fizzled. One Miami-based conservative activist dismisses Rubio as “white
Republican Obama.”
How absurd. Rubio is not Bob Dole with palm trees. And if
Rubio is a “moderate,” as Cruz claims, then John McCain is Ho Chi Minh.
How soon we forget: Marco Rubio was a tea-party pinup in
2010 and was endorsed by the devoutly anti-establishment Club for Growth. Far
from developing Potomac fever and growing a
RINO horn, Rubio has maintained a very impressive voting record. The
American Conservative Union gave Rubio a 96 rating (out of 100) for 2014 and 98
across his Senate career. Heritage Action handed Rubio a 94 last year and 91
lifetime. The equivalent Club for Growth numbers are 92 and 93.
Even better, these sparkling right-wing credentials do
not prevent Rubio from working and playing well enough with others to enact
necessary legislation.
• Rubio co-sponsored, with Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), the Hezbollah International Financing
Prevention Act of 2015. This new law limits the Iranian-backed terrorist
group’s access to global financial markets and punishes banks that serve this
band of anti-American, anti-Israeli killers. These radical Islamist murderers
denounced Rubio’s law as “a new crime by American institutions against our
people and nation.”
• Rubio torpedoed Obama’s planned bailout of his
health-insurance cronies who lose money on the Obamacare exchanges. So far,
this has saved taxpayers some $2.5 billion and prevented insurers from
socializing their Obamacare losses. Consequently, mega-insurers
UnitedHealthCare and Cigna have fallen out of love with Obamacare and may flee
Obama’s blessed exchanges as soon as 2017. Rubio’s low-key amendment to the
2014 omnibus federal spending bill looks like the thumbtack that slowly will
give Obamacare a flat tire.
Cruz “forced a shutdown over it,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin
recalled. “Every GOP presidential candidate vows to repeal it. But only Sen.
Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) can claim to have done something tangible to hobble, maybe
permanently, Obamacare.”
• In light of the Department of Veteran Affairs’
appalling and deadly neglect of those who have worn America’s uniform, Rubio
sponsored, shepherded, and ultimately passed legislation to make it easier for
the VA secretary to fire incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats whose sloth
actually has killed sick veterans as they awaited medical care. Before Rubio’s
measure was signed into law, he had to overcome Bernie Sanders’s objections on
the Senate floor. The Vermont socialist tried in vain to sink Rubio’s proposal
and, thus, protect the job security of VA workers.
• Rubio and Democrats Robert Menendez of New Jersey and
Bill Nelson of Florida were original sponsors of the Venezuela Defense of Human
Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014. Enacted that December, this law condemns
and tightens sanctions on Nicolás Maduro’s Castroite tyranny.
Ted Cruz is also a Tea Party/Club for Growth–approved
hero with sky-high conservative scores that should cheer those groups. (ACU:
100 for 2014, 100 lifetime; Heritage Action: 100 and 98; Club for Growth: 92
and 96.) Alas, Cruz’s go-it-alone style has limited his effectiveness as a
lawmaker who can pass legislation. Cruz’s Senate website cites just one piece
of legislation that he has guided into law: a 2014 statute that would bar entry
visas to U.N. ambassadors who have committed espionage or terrorism against the
United States or threaten U.S. national security.
Also telling: Among those who work closely with both of
these men, three Republican senators have endorsed Rubio – Montana’s Steve
Daines, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, and Idaho’s James Risch. In contrast, none of
Cruz’s Senate colleagues recommends him for president.
Rubio has raised suspicions for initially co-sponsoring
comprehensive immigration reform, nicknamed “amnesty.” However, Rubio abandoned
the bill once it metastasized into a 1,198-page monstrosity.
“We must begin by acknowledging that, considering our
recent experience with massive pieces of legislation, achieving comprehensive
reform of anything in a single bill is simply not realistic,” Rubio wrote in
his book American Dreams. Instead, Rubio
now calls for a “sequential and piecemeal” approach “with a series of bills
that build upon one another until ultimately we have put in place the kind of
immigration system our nation needs.”
Rubio lately has highlighted a Cruz-sponsored amendment that
would have given illegal immigrants legal status although not placed them on a path to citizenship.
Cruz said at a May 2013 Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing, “If the objective is to pass commonsense immigration reform that
secures the borders, that improves legal immigration, and that allows those
here illegally to come out of the shadows, then we should look for areas of
bipartisan agreement and compromise to come together.” He echoed this sentiment
the next month when, on the Senate floor, he advocated “finding a middle ground
that would fix the problem and also allow for those 11 million people who are
here illegally a legal status with citizenship off the table. I believe that is
the compromise that can pass.”
While he opposes amnesty, Cruz clearly has favored making
illegal aliens legal and introduced legislation to do just that. Between the
respective, black-and-white poles of “Citizenship – Now!” and “Amnesty –
Never!” Cruz occupies a cozy gray area.
On another key issue, Rubio’s tax plan cuts
personal-income-tax rates, although the top bracket should be lower than 35
percent. If elected, Rubio should cut rates as deeply as possible and abandon
his proposal for costly per-child tax credits and other pro-family social
engineering. Rubio should remember his plan’s highly limited appeal to
America’s roughly 70 million childless adults. He also is intelligent enough to
understand the supply-side fundamentals at play here. Presumably a President
Rubio could be persuaded to push his plan even further. His corporate-tax cut
(from 35 percent to 25) and his tax rates on capital gains, dividends, and
death – 0 percent – are steps in the right direction.
Conversely, Rubio’s support for sugar subsidies is
inexcusable. Never mind his status as a senator from Florida. The sooner Rubio
jettisons this destructive statist boondoggle, the better.
Rubio can and should make these modest improvements to
his platform. He is a conservative leader on virtually everything else. Not
insignificantly, he represents an uber-swing state with 29 Electoral College
votes. Reliably Republican Texas almost certainly will deliver its 38 Electoral
votes to the GOP nominee, whether or not his name is Ted Cruz.
Marco Rubio is the man to send Hillary back to Chappaqua
and stick a fork in the Clintons – once and for all. That result should give
furious Republicans an even stronger headrush than watching Donald Trump
stampede through the GOP establishment’s china shop – en route to a running of
the Republican bulls, right into the electoral abattoir.
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