LAND OF THE LOST
Rubbish from also-rans fuels Trumpmania They’re ones taking voters for suckers
It is a good thing that sports doesn’t work the way politics does. If it did, the Carolina Panthers would have flown straight back to Charlotte after the Broncos threw them down the stairs in the Super Bowl and thrown themselves a victory parade.
You know who the real losers are in this political season? The ones who claim victory after they’ve lost another primary or caucus, the way Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders did this past weekend.
It wasn’t so long ago that Cruz was famously mocking New York values. Somebody should explain to him that at least in New York, we know how to keep score. It appar- ently doesn’t work that way with him or Rubio, who made secondand third-places finishes in Saturday’s South Carolina primary sound like the most rousing political triumphs since Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and then John McCain eight years ago.
If you are following this race — and you should be, just because the whole thing has turned into the hottest political show this side of “Hamilton” — you know that the big story continues to be just how angry voters, at least the ones who have voted so far, are with the way Washington is being run, in Congress and from the White House. And that story, more than anything else, continues to inform the rise of Donald Trump, whatever you think about his positions on Muslims or Megyn Kelly or even the Pope.
Somehow there is this notion that only people not smart enough to understand the issues are the ones voting for Trump. Sure, go with that, as if we in the media are the only ones who understand what matters in this country, or what voters should be angry about.
But Trump’s not the one treating voters like suckers. No, the ones doing that are guys like Cruz and Rubio, Washington insiders desperately trying to convince ev- erybody that they’re outsiders in the race. And that they’re on some kind of winning streak.
Here was Cruz after running third in South Carolina, suggesting that somehow he was continuing to “defy the pundits,” even in a conservative state where you can’t walk a couple of blocks without tripping over white evangelicals.
“Friends,” Cruz said Saturday night, “once again we have made history.”
As soon as he said that, you started to worry that he had fallen off the couch in his hotel suite and hit his head when he realized that he wasn’t just going to finish 10 percentage points behind Trump, he was going to finish behind Rubio, too.
“The screaming you hear to-
Sen. Ted Cruz: Friends, once again we have made history.
night, from across the Potomac, is the Washington cartel in full terror, because you — the conservative grass roots — are rising up,” Cruz said.
Well, they might be rising up, just not behind him, at least not on this night.
Later in the same speech, Cruz paused for a moment of silence about Justice Antonin Scalia. This was in the same week when he loudly began filibustering about the filibuster he planned if President Obama exercised his constitutional right to nominate Scalia’s replacement. Nobody was supposed to notice that Cruz was doing all this before Scalia’s body made it back to Washington.
But Cruz was no better than Rubio after the votes had been counted. Rubio somehow wants you to believe that his campaign is ascendant even though he hasn’t come closing to winning anything. He is another one apparently mistaking silver and bronze medals for gold. Well, yeah. Fool’s gold, maybe.
On the night when Rubio barely defeated Cruz, and was essentially no closer to Trump than Cruz was, he talked about being the heir to the Reagan Revolution, and on his way, full throttle, to the Oval Office. You waited for him to get flagged the way they do in football for excessive celebration, except you actually have to get into the end zone for that.
“This country is now ready for a new generation of conservatives to guide us into the 21st century,” Rubio said.
This was a career politician, sounding exactly like what he is: career politician on the make, even at this young an age. Cruz sounded the same way. So did old Bernie, losing in Nevada and then talking about how the wind is at his back.
Trump is running against all that, already running against Hillary Clinton, who said this to CBS’ Scott Pelley when Pelley referenced Jimmy Carter once promising he would never lie to the American people:
“I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever have (lied).”
In that moment, she gave every nuanced answer that she or her husband has ever given when simply asked for a straight answer, back to Bill Clinton once saying, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
It’s the most ironic thing about the rise of Trump. All the people he keeps calling losers are the ones helping him look like this kind of winner. For now, and like it or not, that’s what is.
Sen. Marco Rubio: This country is now ready for a new generation of conservatives to guide us into the 21st century.