Friday, February 5, 2016

Rubio the "moderate" (cough) hope

Lemieux at LGM:
My guess is still that Rubio will to some extent break the knot by finishing ahead of Cruz and clearly ahead of Christie and Jeb! in New Hampshire. Things are at least trending in a “Party Decides” direction. But given how long Rubio has run behind Cruz and Trump, considerable skepticism about his candidacy remains justified.
How long Rubio has run behind?  It's really not that long when you consider that the actual voting has just started.  The real reason for skepticism about Rubio's candidacy is that he appears determined to repeat stale, idiotic talking points, as when he accused Pres. Obama of "pitting people against each other" [!] by giving a speech at a mosque at which Obama urged the inclusion of Muslims in American society on the same basis of tolerance accorded to members of all other religious groups (and to the non-religious, for that matter).

P.s. I'm not actually linking to the LGM post from which I quote because they already get enough ******* traffic. If they don't like it, that's just too damn bad. (Of course, they won't know one way or the other.)

2 comments:

Peter T said...

I find Sam Wang's analysis over at Princeton Election Consortium to be the most convincing. He observes that any candidate with over 30% of the vote has a majority of delegates by Super Tuesday (that means Trump). And with the "others" split (Cruz in Iowa, Rubio or maybe Kasich in NH, Cruz again in SC..) that favours Trump. He further notes that candidates tend to hang on at least one round later than they should.

I take it the moderate tag is ironic? In any other country Rubio would be on the raving right.

LFC said...

Yup, the "moderate" tag is ironic.