The corporate media is desperately pushing the establishment line that insider Marco Rubio can beat Herr Trumpf. And the Boston Globe had a poll that proves it they're peddling to show that the sweaty little high-heeled man-boy is moving up. The Kochs, Adelson, et all, are petrified that Herr or Cruz will win the nomination and trigger a gigantic landslide -- up and down the ticket-- away from the GOP. Pressure is mounting on Jeb and the other establishment candidates to stop attacking Rubio. The Globe insists the race in New Hampshire "is tightening." The RealClearPolitics average among New Hampshire GOP voters has Herr at 31.1%, and Rubio at around half that with 15.1%. But...
With four days until New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, the Republican contest is tightening at the top and churning in the middle as one third of likely Republican voters say they could still change their mind, according to a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll released Friday.New York businessman Donald Trump has a nearly 10 percentage-point lead over the field-- but the gap between him and the rest of the field has shrunk since his disappointing second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Trump received 29 percent in the survey, while US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida took second place with 19 percent....“What a difference a caucus makes,” said David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University. “By exceeding expectations in Iowa, Marco Rubio is converting likability to electability even more so than Ted Cruz, who, like many conservative Iowa winners of the past like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, can’t seem to convert an Iowa win into a major showing in New Hampshire.”
Steven Shepard, writing for Politico warns readers to ignore New Hampshire's volatile polls, which, he asserts, "may" be even less predictive than Iowa's. And this, the establishment narrative goes, is helping Rubio.Friday, without much fanfare, colossally unpopular former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, one of the big jokes of the 2106 Republican race, endorsed Rubio, excited about Rubio's neocon foreign policy agenda. Meanwhile, Herr Trumpf fired a shot over the bow of Rubio's S.S. Pinafore by having his son-in-law's paper, the New York Observer, unload all the crap and sleaze on Rubio they could dig up, a warning that if Rubio attacks him personally, Trumpf will uses his big megaphone to end the bubble boy's slimy career.And yesterday Erik Erickson reprised the Cruz v Rubio battle for the soul of the soulless GOP. He writes off Herr and declares the race comes down to a battle between the two right-wing Cubans. "Both," he wrote, "have substantial war chests and heavily funded super PACs to run ads and build ground game operations. Rubio continues to get endorsements from political leaders, but Cruz continues to pick up sizable support from people mad at political leaders." He explains their differences in the eyes of potential voters:
If voters feel like the 2016 election is the last election to save the American experiment, Ted Cruz really is their only option. If voters feel like things are coming to an end in this country without drastic action, they really do not have a choice between Rubio and Cruz. They have only Cruz. Cruz is the disruptive candidate. A voter who feels like the end is near without drastic action has to take the gamble on Cruz, who still has a good chance to win.Rubio, on the other hand, is the candidate for voters who think the best days are still ahead of us regardless of what happens in 2016. Democrats may fear Rubio as a candidate, but the base of the Democratic Party does not fear him like Ted Cruz. They think they could wait out Marco Rubio, even after eight years in power, and see few of their advances surrendered.Washington's lobbyists think that Marco Rubio will not be a disruptive force to them. They know Washington will still be mostly the center of people's lives to a greater degree with Marco Rubio than with Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz will burn Washington to the ground and throw lobbyists on the street. Marco Rubio will strategically raze parts of Washington, putting fewer lobbyists in danger than Cruz. At least that is the thinking, and it is the thinking that is reflected in the attacks on both men.For critics of Cruz, he cannot win. The reality is that Cruz can win, but if he wins those lobbyists and politicians attacking him will be out of a job. The Washington elite have every incentive to stop Cruz because he absolutely would be transformational, though his path to victory may be harder than Rubio's.For critics of Rubio, he will not go far enough. The reality is that Rubio may have an easier time winning, but his critics do not believe he will go far enough and do as much to fix the problems in Washington.Cruz and Rubio would both be conservative to varying degrees. What is at stake between the two is how easy their election would be and how transformational their presidency would be. Rubio backers are looking at the path to the White House. Cruz backers are willing to take a gamble on the slog of a general election campaign so they can see Washington rent asunder.
Sheldon Adelson had his newspaper endorse Rubio yesterday. It's a completely silly endorsement that Adelson appears to have dictated while he was taking a dump, even touting Adelson's approval of Rubio's plan to slash Social Security and Medicare to ribbons:
After much consideration, the Review-Journal is endorsing Sen. Marco Rubio for Nevada's first-in-the-West Republican caucus on Feb. 23. The RJ met with Sen. Rubio on Oct. 9, two months before the announcement of the newspaper's sale to the family of Las Vegas Sands Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson. The Adelsons have detached themselves from our endorsement process, and our endorsement of Sen. Rubio does not represent the support of the family.Our reasons for endorsing Sen. Rubio are many. Notably, the Florida senator has deep personal connections to the state. He lived in the Las Vegas Valley from age 8 to age 14, the son of immigrants employed by the hotel industry. The driving force behind the 44-year-old's compelling story is his family's pursuit of better opportunities and a better life. The policies he champions in his campaign are intended to provide all Americans as much.Those policies include issues of key concern for Nevadans. For example, Sen. Rubio agrees that the federal government owns too much land within Nevada's borders-- more than 80 percent-- and doesn't actively and appropriately manage that land. He believes the lack of privately owned land in Nevada and across the West greatly limits economic opportunity, and he supports transferring some federal land to private ownership. "There's no need for Washington to hold that much land," he told us.On immigration, Sen. Rubio backs a reasonable approach to fix a broken system, while noting that legal immigration deserves just as much attention as illegal immigration. Among other reforms, he wants a merit-based system of legal immigration to replace today's family-based system.Sen. Rubio also recognizes that entitlement reform is a must if Medicare and Social Security are to avoid insolvency. "If we deal with them now, we don't have to change them for current beneficiaries," he said. And on economic policy, Sen. Rubio understands that everything a presidential administration does influences the economy.
