April 22, 2013

WaPo: "Marco Rubio, Salesman"

It's a commonplace that modern political journalism focuses too much on personalities and horse race analysis rather than on the real world impact of proposed policies. Less widely noticed is that political journalism is increasingly turning into "marketing campaign criticism," with reporters obsessing over how seamless are attempts to manipulate voters, with the more sheen the better. 

For example, from the Washington Post:
Marco Rubio, salesman 
Posted by Sean Sullivan on April 22, 2013 at 10:41 am

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has embarked on a high-risk, high-reward mission. His goal? Convince conservatives to support the bipartisan immigration reform measure he and his “Gang of Eight” colleagues have drafted. The success or failure of his effort will go a long way toward determining both whether reform passes, and where Rubio fits into the conservative movement going forward. 
As last week showed, Rubio has his work cut out for him. 
Since signing off two weeks ago on the bill that offers a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants, bolsters border security and creates a new guest-worker program, Rubio has been taking to the airwaves to defend the measure against detractors on the political right, who have complained the bill offers “amnesty” and is being jammed through by liberal Democrats. 
On Thursday, Rubio launched a Web site designed to dispel myths about the bill and took his case to a crucial medium in the conservative sphere, talk radio.
“I don’t understand why we’re doing something that the Democrats are salivating over,” declared conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh on his Thursday show, adding: “I’m having trouble seeing how this benefits Republicans.” 
Rubio responded that the imperative for action is twofold. The current immigration system is broken, he contended, and the nation’s laws are not enforced. “So, for those two reasons alone, we have to do something,” said the senator. 
Limbaugh, who in a January interview with Rubio seemed warmer to reform, pressed him about securing the border and questioned whether it was politically wise to clear a path for new Hispanic voters, whom data show tend to align more closely with the Democratic Party. And in interviews with four other conservative talkers, Rubio failed to win over the hosts. 
He’s also had to push back against claims in the conservative blogosphere that the bill would give immigrants with work visas free cell phones, and deal with protests from tea party activists. 
Rubio’s most crucial task, Republican strategists say, is to win the arguments on border security and the path to citizenship.

“I think the biggest challenge, and what will ultimately decide this issue, is convincing conservatives that real border security is going to be a part of any package and that there are strong accountability measures and enforcement mechanisms,” said Florida Republican strategist Tim Baker. 
Added Rick Wilson, another Florida-based GOP strategist: “If he successfully explains border security — the provisions of which are really quite remarkable — and the steepness of the path to citizenship, I think he can sway conservative audiences.” 
Rubio appeared well aware of his biggest challenges, addressing conservatives directly during a “Gang of Eight” press conference last week. 
“Let me close with one final point to my fellow Americans who share my commitment to limited government and free enterprise, who helped elect me in 2010,” Rubio said. “I would just remind them, America is a nation of immigrants.” To those worried about “amnesty,” Rubio offered a counterargument: “Leaving things the way they are, that’s the real amnesty.” ...
If Rubio fails to win sufficient GOP support and the bill dies, it will be a blow to the political standing of the politician viewed widely as one of the GOP’s best options for the 2016 presidential race. On the other hand, if he succeeds, then his stock in the party is likely to soar to even greater heights. 
Politically, having Rubio on the “Gang of Eight” helps both Democrats and Republicans. For Democrats who have long clamored for reform, having a stamp of approval from one of the country’s most prominent conservatives — who is Hispanic, no less — is a huge plus. And for Rubio, taking part in the effort is an opportunity to be the most prominent Republican to take on an issue many see as a necessity in order to repair GOP’s relations with the Hispanic community. 
“Marco is uniquely situated to do this and he and his team have obviously prepared,” said Florida Republican strategist Ana Navarro, an early supporter of Rubio in his 2010 Senate campaign. “They understand that if misperceptions about this bill are created early and stick, the bill dies and he is whacking at every attempt to mislead.” 
After all, if Rubio can’t sell the conservative base on immigration reform, it would be hard to argue that any Republican can. 
The 20,000 foot political question as this debate unfolds is whether having the ideal Republican on board as a chief advocate is enough to help the pro-reform crowd break through to skeptical conservatives, who hold sway in the Senate, and wield even more clout in the GOP-controlled House. So far, it isn’t clear that it will be.

The notion that Rubio is the ideal salesman to Republicans for adding lots of Hispanics to the voting rolls is very common, but doesn't anybody notice that a better salesman would be somebody more disinterested? Obviously, Rubio wants to add Hispanics because he is Hispanic and, relative at least to his non-Hispanic Republican rivals, this will help his career. Why in the world should I therefore listen to him?

In general, the concepts of "conflict of interest" versus "disinterestedness" seem to be disappearing from memory. The Democrats have an interest in electing a new people, as does Rubio, both both are unquestioningly presented as the heroes in this drama. Disinterestedness must be some old dead white European male thing we'll have left behind in the rush to our diverse future.

19 comments:

  1. Sailer writes:

    It's a commonplace that modern political journalism focuses too much on personalities

    I respond:

    Politics are Hollywood for the old and ugly. It's no surprise that political journalism is becoming TMZ-y and Perez Hilton-y. It's just a subset of the low information undertow.

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  2. I'm rather skeptical about what this diverse future holds; at least our generation had the privilege to enjoy a colorful past, all but gone now.

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  3. That's a really boring "Washington Post article," Steve. You're over-intellectualizing it.

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  4. Immigration Deform.

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  5. The questions from Rush are more interesting than the Rubio answers. Rush is challenging Rubio with many of your talking points.

    http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/04/18/eib_interview_why_senator_rubio

    "RUSH: I understand. I have some questions for you about that, but the politics of this still fascinate me. If you look at the 2010 election or 2012 election results. The percentage of the electorate that was Hispanic was 7%, and we got 27 or 28% of that vote. The evangelical vote was about 28% of the electorate, and we got 78% of that.

    RUBIO: Right.

    RUSH: The Republican Party seems to be saying, "We need to focus on the Hispanic vote and get rid of the social issues. The social issues are killing us." But the Hispanic vote is not that big a percentage of the vote in order for the party to be totally turning upside down what it believes in.

    ...

    RUSH: You have been, and your personal story is a profoundly motivational and inspirational one, the one that you tell about your father. But then I see polling data again that suggests that 70% of the Hispanic population in the country believes that government is the primary source of prosperity. I don't, therefore, understand this contention that Hispanics are conservatives-in-waiting.

    ...

    "RUSH: -- want to explore it. You said that as the Democrats propose it, we can't just ignore it, we have to offer alternatives. Now, you're a freshman in the Senate so this is not a comment directed at you, but I have been, just as a commentator and an observer, I've been amazed. The Democrats propose anything, and we have to accept it, that becomes the news of the day, the item of the day. We somehow have to be in favor of it, but we're gonna make alternatives. Why can't we just oppose something that they propose, such as Obamacare. Why did we have to offer alternatives? I know you weren't there then, but why do we have to offer alternatives? They are proposing things that we intrinsically disagree with, why can't we just say no?"

    RUSH: And we're back on the Rush Limbaugh program with Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, and we're talking about the upcoming legislation involving immigration. Senator, I know you say that the political aspects of this are not yours, but so many people are scared to death, Senator, that the Republican Party is committing suicide, that we're going to end up legalizing nine million automatic Democrat voters, and that's why the Democrats are so adamant. We don't understand why the Republicans are so eager to make that happen. We seem to be wanting to reach out to Hispanics. Once we do everything we do to reach out to Hispanics, how can we ever reform welfare? How can we reform anything that we might want to change if it's the product of reaching out to Hispanics, giving them what we think they want in order to get their votes, when they're already gonna vote Democrat?"

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  6. It now occurs to me that latter-day political coverage may have been transformed by John Kennedy Jr.'s execrable George magazine, just as he intended. So there's a legacy for you. Bummer.

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  7. "Rubio said. 'I would just remind them, America is a nation of immigrants.'"

    Yes, and the first wave of immigrants brought in to supplant white European workers was African Blacks. And here we are, 300 years later and they still haven't assimilated.

    Colonial Whites preferred striking out for the frontier and farming on their own to working as a laborer for a landed gentleman who received his grant from the King in Feudalism's last gasp. What free man can barter his labor for a living wage when he had to compete with black slaves who were "paid" a subsistence wage? The South remained an economic backwater because there was no middle class to provide demand and stimulate growth in productivity. And here we go again, reviving the Plantation Economy with Financial Elites as our Masters and permanent debt slavery the lot of our workers. The major difference is that now, there's no frontier to escape to.

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  8. The best I can come up with for Rubio is that he is too young and naive to realize that the Democrats will never, ever, ever, implement the tighter border security he fantasizes about, no matter what they ostensibly sign on to. Nor will they make the "path to citizenship" difficult because they will instantly circumvent whatever "rules" are put in place.

    Rubio should perhaps change his name to Rube-io because he's just another Republican rube being rolled by the snake oil salesmen in the Dem establishment.

    So my best case scenario for Rube-io is that he's a dope. Let's not discuss my worst case.

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  9. Concerning immigration.

    Comparing ourselves to others is at times healthy. When we felt there was a bomber and missile gap with the USSR, we decided to close it.

    When the USSR launched Sputnik, we had a science and space gap. America put great effort into promoting science education and went all out to get to the moon.

    Likewise today we are prompted to remain competitive with the world on issues such as broadband deployment, green energy and worker education.

    Yet why do we insist on being number one in the world on immigration when no one else, at least real economic competitors, are even competing for that title? Given that the immigration debate has been framed as being vital for our economy, shouldn't we think twice when our main economic competitors, the BRICs, Japan, and South Korea, are essentially not even competing with us for immigrants, especially low-skilled ones? What is so different about America's economy that it needs more immigrants per year than our main competitors combined to achieve lackluster results?

    Why won't people challenge the open border guys about this? They say we will fall behind and no longer be an innovator. But is that bad? Does one have to be the leader in innovation to benefit?

    China doesn't innovate, nor does she win many Nobel prizes. Yet look at her growth rates. Korea and Japan don't win many Nobels either. They did not play a leading role in inventing the automobile, mobile phones, computers or the internet, yet they still seem to be able to profit off those technologies.

    So why does the USA have to invent new technologies in order to profit? It seems we have been inventing things for a while, but others profit off their exploitation.

    At this point I wouldn't even care if Microsoft or Apple left the USA. What would it matter to me? People from Iceland to Antarctica use MSFT and AAPL products. So I imagine a USA without either of those firms would still have the ability to use their products too.

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  10. Richard Nixon talking about the press:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzF80OPxXrE

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  11. I agree that Steve is overanalyzing it. D.C. is a company town and this is the kind of ouput/crap is pretty routine from them.

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  12. old weird us4/22/13, 6:45 PM

    re: Richie Havens

    Yeah, seems we may have had more non-synthetic diversity before commissioning this 5,000-lawyer Ivy League SWAT team to enforce it across the fruited plain. Soviet power + electrification of the whole country

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  13. Anonymous writes:

    RUSH: The Republican Party seems to be saying, "We need to focus on the Hispanic vote and get rid of the social issues. The social issues are killing us." But the Hispanic vote is not that big a percentage of the vote in order for the party to be totally turning upside down what it believes in.

    I respond:

    The irony is that some of the same people touting Hispanic voters as "natural conservatives" because of certain social issues are the same people telling the Republican Party to ditch social issues.

    Of course it doesn't make sense. It's not meant to make sense. It's meant to flood the country with as much cheap labor as possible.

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  14. Harry Baldwin4/22/13, 8:18 PM

    Rush was telling Rubio everything that needed to be said. He took him to school. If Rubio goes on repeating the same debunked talking points, as we know he will, he will demonstrate that he's a duplicitous swine trying to sell the public a bill of goods.

    I want to see Rubio drop off the stage like Juan Gabriel.

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  15. Uncle Peregrine4/22/13, 10:13 PM

    Fewer and fewer people seem to grasp the difference between disinterested and uninterested. We seem to be losing the concept along with our former precision in speech and writing.

    "The notion that Rubio is the ideal salesman to Republicans for adding lots of Hispanics to the voting rolls is very common, but doesn't anybody notice that a better salesman would be somebody more disinterested? Obviously, Rubio wants to add Hispanics because he is Hispanic and, relative at least to his non-Hispanic Republican rivals, this will help his career. Why in the world should I therefore listen to him?

    In general, the concepts of "conflict of interest" versus "disinterestedness" seem to be disappearing from memory. The Democrats have an interest in electing a new people, as does Rubio, both both are unquestioningly presented as the heroes in this drama. Disinterestedness must be some old dead white European male thing we'll have left behind in the rush to our diverse future."

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  16. Salesman or Schumer's shoeshine boy? It's painful to see how outclassed he is, both intellectually and politically.

    A Cuban trying to buy Mexican votes to win an election in America. What a country!

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  17. Rubio was being regarded as by some as the frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination but I think he is taking himself out of it with this campaign. The majority of Americans don't want amnesty, they want enforcement and restrictions. Among Republicans support is even lower. My parents waited ten years for an immigration visa to come through before we came in legally, and I resent the people who waltz in. Rubio has killed any potential support for the nomination from me.

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  18. Gould K.L. Brownlee4/23/13, 8:31 AM

    Journalists are fairly stupid people as a whole. I don't mean that they are not intelligent. Lots of them have high IQs.

    But most journalists are cowards, and they will use any insane rationalization they can think of to try and justify their fears and fantasies. That is the essence of the Left; to somehow rationalize cowardice as courage, courage as criminal aggression, wrong as right, self interest as selfishness, self defense as murder, etc. To redefine everything as the opposite of what it is. That's the only way to justify Leftist evil.

    Our newest class of affirmative-action parasites, Hispanics, are both the source of a lot of White fears, and a new model to emulate and admire. Typically for the Left, this new model is mediocre at best and more frequently just plain ignorant and boorish.

    What's amazing to me is that most Hispanics, that the Left gets so tingly about, resemble that bete noir of the Left, the White trailer park trash; a relatively rare and harmless breed compared to the hordes of Hispanic third-world savages.

    Because of where I live and what I do, I have known a LOT of Mexicans. Some were at least nominally middle-class, most were not. But books for them in general are simply not on the radar screen. If it's not sports (the more gossipy the better), simple-minded music or porno/action films with very little
    dialogue and huge amounts of cartoony violence, then it's nothing to get excited about for them.

    A few of these people I know are actually in positions of power at a major newspaper. When I hear them laugh together about what they think is funny or what impresses them, I might as well be back in the 9th grade. That's a generous assessment.

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  19. “Leaving things the way they are, that’s the real amnesty.”

    We have laws not being applied right now - 287(g), REAL ID, the border fence, the entry-exit tracking system, and Obama's "temporary" amnesty for "children." Why would we accept amnesty in exchange for more laws they will not enforce?

    Leaving things the way they are is a form of amnesty. Remember that quote when the bill fails and Rubio refuses to support any sort of enforcement-only bill. It means he supports amnesty.

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