MSNBC
By Steve Benen
December 22, 2015
The
traditional model of campaigning says candidates should focus on their
strengths and downplay their areas of weakness. Karl Rove, however,
helped introduce a very
different kind of approach to GOP politics: shine a light on your
vulnerability, inoculate yourself on the issue, and leave your rival
with nothing.
It’s why, for example, we saw a draft-dodging Republican attack the military service of a Democratic war hero in 2004.
Marco
Rubio appears to be reading from the same playbook. The biggest hurdle
between the Florida senator and his party’s presidential nomination is
his co-authorship of
President Obama’s bipartisan immigration bill two years ago –
legislation that Republican base hates like poison. So, Rubio is going
after his primary rival, Ted Cruz, over the one issue Rubio would
seemingly prefer to ignore.
Writing in Salon the other day, Digby questioned the merits of Rubio’s strategy to deal with his principle problem.
Apparently
he’s decided that the best way to make people forget his immigration
apostasy, when he joined with Democrats on the notorious Gang of 8 to
hammer out a Comprehensive
Immigration Reform bill, is to draw as much attention to it as possible
by picking a losing fight with Ted Cruz. He seems to think that
aggressively accusing his rival of abandoning his conservative
principles in the same way he did will somehow make his own
betrayal go away.
All it’s accomplished is to make every conservative in the land think even less of him than they did before.
The
Washington Examiner’s Byron York wrote a brutal, matter-of-fact-style
piece yesterday, laying out the undisputed details of the 2013
immigration fight, and the role
Rubio and Cruz played during the ideological battle. Rubio desperately
wants voters to believe, as he put it on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on
Sunday, that “there isn’t that big a difference between [Cruz] and I on
how to approach immigration.” York’s piece makes
it unambiguously clear that the claim is a rather brazen lie: Rubio
partnered with Democrats in trying to pass the bill; Cruz partnered with
conservatives in trying to kill it. The dynamic really is that simple.
But
just as important on a tactical level is that the bogus claim has the
effect of reminding Republicans what it is about Rubio they dislike so
much.
Why isn’t the ol’ Rovian special working?
Part
of the problem is that it’s tougher to pull off in a primary, as
opposed to a general election, but just as important is the fact that
Rubio is asking people to believe
that Ted Cruz, even while trying to kill the bipartisan immigration
bill in the last Congress, wasn’t particularly conservative when it came
to immigration.
And
that, by any sensible measure, is simply impossible to believe. It’s
why Rubio appears to be making his problem worse, not better, by shining
a spotlight on his most
potent vulnerability.
What’s
more, even as much as the Republican establishment, like much of the
Beltway media, fawns over the Florida senator, Rubio has reopened wounds
he hoped were already
healed. The New York Times reported the other day:
Senator
Marco Rubio made a big bet on an immigration overhaul that failed – and
he has been running away from it since. Now his past is catching up
with him, stoking old
grievances from conservative rivals who are reopening one of the most
vulnerable episodes in his past.
The
anger toward Mr. Rubio on the right has only grown in recent days as he
has taken to aggressively questioning Senator Ted Cruz’s toughness on
illegal immigration,
a line of attack that some Republicans say they find disingenuous.
The
piece noted that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a fierce opponent of
immigration reform, recently said on a conservative radio show, “I think
Senator Rubio has to answer
for things that were in that bill…. This presidential election is going
to decide who runs the White House: the crowd that pushed this
legislation or the crowd that opposed it.”
Maybe Rubio should have picked the fight in July, at which point this would be old news, instead of waiting for December?
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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