2016

Yesterday, Marco Rubio made another flub that left him appearing more robotic than human. Just as he did in his interaction with Chris Christie in the last debate, Rubio repeated a mess of talking points in a dizzying rhetorical meltdown. Here’s video:

And here’s the transcript:

We are taking our message to families that are struggling to raise their children in the 21st century because as you saw Jeanette and I are raising our four children in the 21st century and we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids, instead of the values they try to ram down our throats. In the 21st century, it’s become harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church, instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats in the movies, in music, and in popular culture.

Fascinating stuff, here. I’m most struck by that awkward repetition of “the values that they try to ram down our throats,” which even seems to give Rubio pause on the second instance, and the ill-fitting talk about the 21st century, which has been a recurring theme in Rubio’s campaign. Ever since he announced his candidacy, Rubio has pivoted off his youth and inexperience by talking endlessly about the 21st century, which frankly feels, in 2016, like a quaint callback to 1999. Here, Rubio overindulges in the 21st century talk, which makes it sound hollow. The thing that truly gifted orators understand about claiming the future is that it’s showing, not telling, that matters. Steve Jobs didn’t bore us with talk about what the iPhone could become. He showed us what it did and let us imagine the rest. John F. Kennedy didn’t confuse the American public with scientific jargon; he promised to take us to the moon.

As with most politicians, Rubio’s overstatements disguise an untruth. He is not interested in the future. I’ve written about his reliance on old ideas before. The only way that Rubio’s brand of trickle down economics differs from the trickle down economics of Mitt Romney or George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan is that it favors the wealthy even more than any of the plans that came before. His tax plan is downright disastrous.

But his tax plan isn’t the only callback in Marco Rubio’s campaign. He’s also out of step with the 21st century’s acceptance of same-sex marriage. Michael Barbaro at the New York Times wrote about Rubio’s encounter with a gay man named Timothy Kierstead at a New Hampshire diner. Kierstead argued that Rubio didn’t care about gay people.

Mr. Rubio, who was standing with his youngest son, Dominick, 8, by his side, gently disagreed. “No, I just believe marriage is between one man and one woman.”

“Well,” replied Mr. Kierstead, “that’s your belief.”

Mr. Rubio continued: “I think that’s what the law should be. And if you don’t agree you should have the law changed by a legislature.”

Again, if you look at Rubio’s comments, they don’t really make sense. Same-sex marriage has been affirmed by the Supreme Court as the law of the land. And Rubio doesn’t agree with same-sex marriage, but he encourages Kierstead to overrule Rubio’s (non-existent) anti-gay-marriage law by convincing a legislature to make gay marriage legal, even though it’s already legal? This is all very mysterious and confusing and insubstantial. And it flies in the face of Rubio’s claims to be a 21st century candidate. Why would anyone want to turn back the clock to the bad old 20th century days of the Defense of Marriage Act? Same-sex marriage is a settled issue in America in the 21st century. We prefer including more married couples, not fewer, in our society. It’s better for our communities, our economy, and our families. Someone should reprogram Rubio’s faulty speech program; even a broken robot should understand that we want a more inclusive society in America.

As Iowa prepares to kick off the national presidential race tonight, it occurs to me that most people have at least one vote in their history that they wish they could retract. That often happens when you vote for a personality, or are swayed by one single issue.

Maybe if there were some sort of a checklist for voters to examine before they head out to the polls or the primaries or the caucuses, those tragic voting mistakes wouldn’t happen? In an effort to encourage voters to keep the big picture in mind, I thought it might be useful to present a checklist that you can consult when considering the candidates. The rules are simple: if the candidate doesn’t align with the checklist, you should find another candidate that does. This is a first draft, but it gets to the basic idea that if you don’t vote with an inclusive agenda at heart, you’re voting against your own interests.

A Brief Inclusive Voting Checklist

Does the candidate support an economic agenda that includes everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality?

Does the candidate support raising the minimum wage to livable levels?

Does the candidate support raising the taxes on the top one percent to pay for sensible investments like infrastructure, education, and clean energy?

Does the candidate support gun responsibility laws?

Does the candidate recognize the fact that punishing poor people for being poor is a race to the bottom?

If the answer to all five of those questions is “yes,” you’re voting for the right person. If the answer is “no,” you’re probably going to regret your vote. Let’s go through the reasoning, step by step.

1. If a candidate opposes a particular group of people—refugees, say, or immigrants, or a certain religion or race—then that candidate is encouraging exclusivity. We’ve published many pieces on this blog explaining why excluding people from your economy is a bad idea; in short, it creates a negative feedback loop that discourages participation. Eventually, diverse populations will choose to go somewhere else, and your economy will suffer.

2. If low-wage workers can’t climb above the poverty line by working 40 hours a week, you might as well admit that the American dream is dead.

3. You need money to make money. We haven’t been investing in our future, and it shows. While the Tea Party/Libertarian alliance would like you to believe that all government spending is bad, the truth is that government investments in topics that the market doesn’t have the capacity to support—things like experimental clean energy, education for all, and public transportation—actually helps the market in the long run. A vote against all government spending is a vote against the future.

4. This is pretty simple: you shouldn’t support candidates who are in favor of the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year.

5. Candidates who favor rules that bar access to mental health care and food stamps are only making the system worse. If they support predatory lenders, they’re not betting on the American future. They’re intent on creating an American underclass that remains eternally in debt while the rich get richer. That’s downright un-American.

There are plenty more items that should be on this checklist — I’ll keep adding to it as election season progresses — but it’s a good start. The most basic rule to keep in mind, I think, should always be item one: is the candidate inclusive or exclusive? If they exclude people, they don’t deserve your vote.

Barack Obama was the winner of Sunday’s Democratic debate: Did you tune in to watch Bernie, Hillary, and the other guy debate after Sunday football? Probably not, and that brings a smile to the face of Debbie Wasserman Schultz!

If you by any chance did watch the extremely well-moderated debate, you would have noticed that Barack Obama’s name and legacy were enthusiastically embraced by all candidates on stage – especially Hillary Clinton. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews noted,

[Hillary] also cited Sanders’s past criticisms of the president and flirtation with supporting a primary challenge against him in 2011/2012…Clinton’s message is clear: I am the true defender of Obama’s legacy, I will preserve his gains, while Sanders dismissed them.

This may seem like a strange strategy, especially if you watched the Republican debate earlier in the week. There, Obama was portrayed as nothing short of evil. Yet within Democratic circles, the current president is seen in a very positive light. Consider this:

Why is Hillary hugging Obama? 87% of Dem primary voters and 81% of all Dems approve of his job, per new NBC/WSJ poll https://t.co/pJhnqzqddS

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) January 19, 2016

To put these numbers in perspective, George W. Bush’s approval among Republicans in 2007 sat at 70 percent – 17 points lower than Obama’s standing with Democrats today. For this reason, expect the Democratic nominee to not distance themselves from the president like John McCain did with Bush.

Weekly bashing of David Brooks: As most reader(s) of Daily Clips will know, I have a habit of rebutting columns written by the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Why specifically him? Because he’s a “middle-of-the-road Republican” that asks all the right questions, but then ends up with the wrong answers. He’s so close to being politically sane. Unlike Breitbart or Fox News, Brooks lives an examined life, yet he all too often falls back on faulty assumptions about life and politics.

This week, he’s basically arguing that it would be terrible for the Republican party if either Cruz or Trump wins the nomination. No faulty logic there. He believes “there’s a silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans. You know who you are.”

To cure Republican voters from the anger and contempt of this election cycle Brooks argues that “maybe it’s time a center-right movement actually offered” an agenda that dealt with “working class populism, religious compassion and institutional reform.” Read this as: Rubio is our only hope, Republican establishment.

Which is a pathetic option. Because Rubio, as we saw in the last debate, is willing to go angry Republican Dad to get the nomination. And Brooks isn’t the only one hoping for a Rubio surge. A similar call to action was raised in Michael Gerson’s latest column. The intellectual conservative class has finally understood that their party has lost the plot. But to offer Rubio as the bastion of the center-right? Give me a break.

Tweet of the day: This headline made me smile.

Poll: Public opinion of GOP falls amid heated primary https://t.co/hdF3b79I71 pic.twitter.com/Ry5dsLmTWq

— The Hill (@thehill) January 19, 2016

In last year’s State of the Union, Obama opened by telling the American people he wanted his speech to focus less on “a checklist of proposals and focus more on the values at stake in the choices before us.” This year he basically cut and pasted that line, starting off by promising Congress and viewers that he would “go easy on the traditional list of proposals for the year ahead.” Such laid back, colloquial language was dispersed throughout Barack “4th quarter” Obama’s speech. Just because his style was relaxed and informal doesn’t mean his speech was bereft of vision and substance.

From the start, you could tell he felt compelled to set the direction for the progressive cause. He knows that big advances are coming. They are tantalizingly close to being within his legacy. While he may not be there for the culmination of many of these policies, Obama wanted this speech to be a touchstone for many of those accomplishments. Ever the man in control, and with the media spotlight slipping away from him, for now, he wants to be the compass for the next (hopefully) Democratic president.

Let me be the first to admit, these speeches are notoriously tough to excel at (and often tough to watch). There’s so much to unpack, so many demographics to appeal to. As Zach Silk wrote to me during the speech, “every sentence has a constituency. And even with all that said some constituency is pissed they didn’t get mentioned.”

Obama did some flexing in front of his colleagues, where he proceeded to essentially say “I told you so” to his doubters. He flaunted gas prices, talked about the recovery, and the robust jobs growth. He touted these successes for their due applause, but he didn’t dwell on them for long. He didn’t want to upset the economic anxieties that so many Americans currently feel. This sentence in particular highlights the tension inherent within this section of the speech:

For the past 7 years, our goal has been a growing economy that works better for everybody. We’ve made progress. But we need to make more.

From here, Obama really emphasized the idea of “choices.” He noted how optimistic he was for the future, but only if we make the right choices. This was most notable during the economic portion of his speech. Obama mentioned the necessity of having something similar to Nick Hanauer and David Rolf’s Shared Security system, where all of the employment benefits traditionally provided by a full-time salaried job are detached from the employer and made “prorated, portable, and universal.” As the president pointed out, “that’s what the Affordable Care Act is all about.” He knows that creating more fluid benefits systems is going to be imperative for growing the American middle class. I must say, I believe his proposed trajectory is true.

His foreign policy part of the speech was vintage Obama. Rational, direct, and laced with bits of realism and liberalism. He focused almost exclusively on American “hard power,” boasting “the United States is the most powerful nation on earth. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. It’s not even close.” The dude was telling Republicans he knows this nation isn’t crumbling. He warned against nation building, arguing that this always leads to quagmires. “It is the lesson of Vietnam, it’s the lesson of Iraq and we should have learned it by now.” Perfect.

But more than anything else, Obama was himself.  Just like in his first year addressing the nation. The man will be remembered extremely fondly within the progressive movement. As a millennial, he will forever be the captain of 21st century American progressivism to me. Did he get it all right? Of course not. And thirty years from now we’ll probably have progressives stating he wasn’t a beacon for a brighter democracy. But within the context of 2016, he delivered a speech and a presidency that sets a wonderful course for progressivism. And you could tell he felt confident about our chances. He sounded like he trusted us to get us there:

“Because of you. I believe in you. That’s why I stand here confident that the State of our Union is strong.”