The Republican establishment is stale and out of ideas

But I’ve learned to forgive myself because – I now realise – the Washington insiders I was speaking to were working to a script. Trump couldn’t win, we all thought, because he was doing everything wrong. Whereas Rubio was doing everything right. Conservatism, according to the script, is a stool that sits on three legs: neoconservative foreign policy, free market economics and social conservatism. Rubio pushed each of those themes, adding to them the attractive countenance of the son of Cuban immigrants. Put crudely, he brought to the table the one thing that the script said was missing from the Republican pitch – the ability to win Hispanics. If you had to design a conservative candidate from scratch, Rubio is exactly the man that you would draw. Although you might make him a little taller.

Advertisement

I got two things wrong about Rubio. First, he didn’t just follow the script, he was a prisoner of it. In the critical post-Iowa debate he infamously repeated the same line four times: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing.” He looked fake. Doubts rose. He spent far too much time away from the Senate and on the campaign trail – although, oddly, he spent his time unwisely and hardly visited New Hampshire enough. He’d played free and fancy with some credit cards when younger. He was wet on immigration. He wasn’t ready for the big time.

Second, we didn’t realise that many Republicans were tired of hearing from the same old script. Who, in hindsight, can blame them? Who wants neoconservatism when Iraq was such a disaster? Who trusts so-called social conservatives when they seemed to do nothing to stop gay marriage? And what value is free market purity if it means that jobs get shipped overseas or stolen by migrants?

Advertisement

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement