The Common Denominator to Unify the GOP

Rubio is at the make or break time for his campaign.   

Someone is going to come out of New Hampshire and South Carolina having consolidated a big part of the GOP coalition.  It could be Rubio.

Rubio is very skilled presenting his biography and set speech.   Christie is trying to make it an issue, citing it as proof that he doesn't know anything beyond his 40 minutes of material.  Trump says it proves he will say whatever his money puppet masters tell him to say.   Reporters now allude to it because it is undeniable to anyone who has heard Rubio in more than 3 different contexts.    Rubio is a performer doing the playlist from his one and only debut album.   It is a good one, but the songs get familiar quickly.

Rubio's speeches are about ideals, goals, generalized fears, aspirations, and a New American Century that suggests that the post WW2 economic world (where the USA was intact and every other industrialized country was in rubble) and the brief uni-polar world following the Soviet Union's disintegration could be re-established.   America on top, exceptional and beloved.  It is a poetic and romantic version of Trump's Make America Great Again.   

But it is softer focus than Trump's world.  Trump says we will get back to greatness by knocking heads, while Rubio suggests we will get there by being good, strong, and true to our own inner greatness.

The less Rubio says, the better for him.  The various conflicts within the GOP, on immigration, on citizenship/amnesty, on tax policy, on domestic surveillance, on the details of abortion policy all serve to divide up the GOP.   Actual stands on things have been the thing that has caused Rubio problems, because he has evolved and changed with the changing political mood.   Positions on policy stick him with a record: he was a leader in the Gang of 8.   Jeb Bush condemns him for abandoning that position; the most angry elements of the Republican primary electorate condemn him for being a part of it.  Problems either way.

New American Century

Poetry and ideals let him unify, and Rubio's route to the White House is as the unifier who can re-link the Tea Party populist Republicans with the donors, the Chambers of Commerce, K-Street, the people who support incremental change.  Tea Party anger and Establishment money and credibility.   That is Rubio's path to the presidency.

The common denominator for the GOP is anger and disgust aimed at Obama and Hillary Clinton.  

Cruz and Trump direct some of their anger against Republican targets as they attempt to reshape the GOP as a uncompromisingly very conservative party (Cruz) or an uncompromisingly populist party (Trump).   There is no common denominator there with the donor-business class.   

The common denominator is denouncing Obama and Hillary.  Crowds like it.   The donor business class can see it as harmless pandering, doing whatever works.  Hating Obama isn't policy.   Rubio now says, in speeches and in ads, that Obama actively hates America, that he is intentionally working to weaken America. 

No charge is too strong:   “It’s now abundantly clear: Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America.  He has made an intentional effort to humble us back to size. . . . Happiest of all have been America’s enemies."

And at another time:  "Barack Obama does not believe that America is a great global power. Barack Obama believes America is an arrogant global power that needs to be cut down to size."

Yesterday Obama visited a mosque for the first time in his presidency, commenting on the long inclusion of Muslims in American life, saying that Americans should not be pitted against one another on racial or religious lines.   Obama cannot win.   Rubio condemned the speech, saying Obama was doing exactly what Obama condemned, pitting Americans against each other along "ethnic lines and racial lines and economic lines and religious lines.   I'm tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president's done.   Always pitting people against each other.  Always."

And Hillary Clinton "wouldn’t just be a disaster. . . . Hillary Clinton is disqualified from being commander in chief of the United States."

Rubio is getting criticized for being a lightweight with nothing behind him but a speech about his love of America and God and his contempt for Obama and Hillary.  But I expect him to endure the criticism and maybe even embrace it, saying the most important thing in America is getting the America-hating traitor out of the White House.  Anything more will just get him in trouble.