re: #170 BeachDem

How about this—they could fucking stand for something they believe in and tell people why. I know—how novel. If poor wittle Marco has to derp to avoid getting savaged by voters who don’t trust him, he’s in the wrong business.

The “just stand up” idea does really work in this case except for someone like, yes, Donald Trump, who has enough money that parts of the base are willing to believe him when he says he’ll tell business seeking cheap labor “No dice, you’ll have to pay higher labor costs.”, because Trump could afford to forgo the campaign monies offered by those businesses.

Marco Rubio doesn’t have enough money to do something like that, so he’s stuck between two competing interests within the Republican Party, both of which are too strong for him to effectively oppose. So instead he tries to keep both factions sufficiently not unhappy enough with him to have a shot at winning.

I don’t love it, but the days when a politician could resolve questions about himself on an issue with one very-good speech, as Richard Nixon did with his “Checkers Speech”, are gone. Today that sort of standing up will be reduced to a few sound bytes, with most people never hearing or reading most of the speech or idea.