Greenville, S.C. — It’s 7: 00 a.m. I’m sitting in the lobby of the EconoLodge, watching a hotel clerk watching a TV screen showing a hotel waitress watching Rubio speak on a tiny little TV set about the debt he owes to America.
It’s a Rubio ad. The actress playing a hotel waitress on the TV screen (the real one, in the lobby) nods thoughtfully at everything Rubio says. But the real hotel clerk is a Bernie Sanders fan.
By 7:30 a.m., I’ve seen two anti-Trump ads from Cruz on eminent domain, a.k.a. fat-cat cronyism, one anti-Trump ad from one of those faceless SuperPACS saying we don’t need Trumpcare any more than we need Obamacare or Hillarycare. Several Marco Rubio ads call Ted Cruz the same thing Donald Trump called him, only the word used is “weak.” (Don’t think it works, by the way; advertisement works best when it reinforces a desire or fear the voter already has, not when it tries to implant a false or manufactured narrative.)
I’m here in Greenville for the Faith and Family Forum, co-sponsored by the Palmetto Family Council and the American Principles Project (where I work). In a few hours, these South Carolina Christians will release the news of which candidates responded to the South Carolina Southern Baptists, the Catholic Church, and several other groups’ request for an answer: Who will lead for practical religious-liberty protections? Who will fight for the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA)?
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The event takes place at Bob Jones University, the nonprofit school that learned what happens when the Supreme Court rules (correctly, in the case of interracial marriage, I hasten to add) that your views on marriage are bigoted and discriminatory — and when just a few years down the road an IRS bureaucrat decides you aren’t worthy of your nonprofit status because your views are discriminatory.
South Carolina is where the titans clash, the seminal event in this campaign.
At 7:45 a.m., a pro-Cruz ad floats on the TV screen. Cruz fought against Obamacare and he single-handedly disrupted the immigration deal that Rubio and Chuck Schumer tried to put together. True enough. And I don’t even agree with Cruz on immigration. That’s not the main point. The main point is: “There is only one conservative in the campaign you can trust to stand on principles. Vote for the conservative you can trust.”
It’s the keynote of the Cruz campaign, and it speaks to the 50 percent of Republican voters in New Hampshire (and elsewhere) who feel betrayed, not just by Washington in general but by our own party.
Rubio’s implicit appeal is that he’s the most electable. I don’t think so. But even if true, it doesn’t speak to what so many voters are screaming about: How do we have a victory that matters?
While Rubio’s anti-Cruz ads clutter the screen, Cruz is focusing his fire on the big dog in the race, the undisputed front-runner. “To him [Trump], she was a nobody, so Trump schemed with Atlantic City government to force Coking from her home, using eminent domain,” Cruz’s devastating new ad “Parking Lot” correctly points out.
“Trump uses power for personal gain. Imagine the damage he could do as president.”
#share#Rubio, meanwhile, slams his opponents, by name, for not having as much foreign-policy experience as the first-term senator. “We’ll have a debate on Saturday. Who on that stage has more experience or has shown better judgment or a better understanding of the foreign-policy and national-security issues than I have on that stage?” Rubio asked at a town hall on Hilton Head Island.
“The governors haven’t dealt with foreign policy, in the case of John Kasich, in a long time,” Rubio added. He also targeted former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s foreign-policy credentials.
The Florida senator went on to poke at Trump: “Donald Trump has zero foreign-policy experience,” Rubio said. “Negotiating a hotel deal in another country is not foreign-policy experience.”
This is not a candidate with the instinct for the jugular, in a year when Americans are looking for fighters. That’s the real meaning of his failure to respond to Chris Christie. He fell back on platitudes when under attack.
#related#It’s not really a character issue. It’s a temperament problem: Rubio is a people pleaser by nature. He loves uplift and applause. He’s just not suited to the fighter role that this election season demands — and which will be even more necessary in November. A candidate whose instinct is to brag to Americans that he wants to draft our daughters on an equal basis is just not going to be up to this particular fight.
I do not know whether Cruz will win in South Carolina. The next raft of polls is not out yet, as I write. But to those who doubt his electability, let South Carolina be the test.
Running a great campaign is no guarantee that a man (or woman) would be a great president. But it is the first test.