Because Rubio hasn’t been able to raise much money, he hasn’t been able to build the sort of campaign organization that winning candidates typically have, but he also isn’t barnstorming the early states as long-shot candidates with few resources have to do in order to compete. He is taking his support for granted, and he doesn’t seem to be working very hard at winning over new supporters....
Rubio is proving to be a candidate who is not only being out-organized, but also out-hustled. The senator likes to excuse his Senate absenteeism by referring to his presidential campaigning, but in light of these reports it’s fair to ask: what is Rubio doing during all the time he’s not spending doing his job?
December 14, 2015
"Rubio’s Weirdly Lazy Campaign for President."
A headline at The American Conservative. Excerpt:
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The senator likes to excuse his Senate absenteeism by referring to his presidential campaigning, but in light of these reports it’s fair to ask: what is Rubio doing during all the time he’s not spending doing his job?
Bush III's lame chide redux.
Obviously he wants to be the GOP's O. He should just play more golf, that will draw Prog votes. Maybe if he reaches O-level laziness he'll even unlose AA.
It's odd that so many GOP candidates (except maybe Cruz) haven't learned the lesson of how Obama pulled off his victories--data driven ground game and keeping permanent campaign presence. Ads help get your word out, but they have diminishing returns and ultimately won't get people to the polls. If you're going to pull off a surprise at the primaries and win key swing states in the general election, you're going to have to have a solid organization.
It's as though they saw Obama win in 2008 and 2012 and chalked it up to "sorcery" and learned nothing.
It may have dawned on him that his close involvement in comprehensive immigration has killed any chance he might have had of winning and nothing is going to change that, at least for this cycle.
Weird? Lazy? I like the man more already.
As for the Senate, they really only work about 4 days a year, the rest is all posturing.
If he's going to catch up to Obama in missed Senate time, he has to double his missed votes and needs to get to 89% to catch the all time best. The very French, James Taylor loving John Kerry.
what is Rubio doing during all the time he’s not spending doing his job?
Attempting to raise money by making personal apearances and phone calls.
A lazy Hispanic? I suppose there are plenty of lazy Hispanics but I associate Hispanics with hard work more than laziness. Sorry for the generalization, qualified though it is. Maybe the article is racist?
It's that Yacht/luxory Fishing Boat, I tell you.
Seriously, he probably spends the day cutting deals with Mega Donors. To paraphrase John Dillenger, " That's where the money is."
So isn't the problem that Jeb! lapped up all the money that could have gone to Rubio, and then Jeb! couldn't deliver? So the establishment/mainstream got stuck without a vigorous candidate. Now, they are panicking and it's too late. What are they supposed to do?
Maybe it's a rope a dope strategy. Rubin's poll numbers are pretty good for a guy laying low. He's ahead of Jeb, Christie, and others among the non Trump-Cruz-Carson faction.
The news cycles come so quickly and there isn't a primary for another six weeks. Last rat standing wins.
Just hang back until you're the last day
I'm guessing he's keeping busy at home on weekends with a wife that looks like her. Not since Jackie have we had a 1st lady look as hot as she does.
"So the establishment/mainstream got stuck without a vigorous candidate."
Don't believe everything you read, especially on topics like this. Whether Rubio's campaign is brilliant or foolish, whether he is going all out or is just slow-walking, etc. -- are questions to which the answers show more about the agenda of the author at this point than anything else. Rubio has his strategy, and his reasons for approaching the campaign in his way rather than the author's way. Time will tell whether it works out for him.
I do not understand a few things about this whole process:
1) How can guys like Scott Walker and Tim Pawlenty declare for Office and appear to campaign for a while then drop out before it even really gets started? Are they so stupid they do not plan/spend for the long haul (i.e. to at least make it through Super Tuesday)? I do not see how they could be dislodged months before a single vote was ever cast and if they were so tenuous why did they even declare in the first place?
If it is all about trying to ignite some viral support and their plan is all based on the come, then do they not see they are not even viable to start? They are running a pets.com campaign (Step One: Build website. Step Two: Campaign. Step Three: Profit)
2) Why would donors not link donations to evidence of forward progress? In the Venture Capital world no investor writes a blank check for a business plan. Instead, the startup "earns" the Series B funding by executing on the Series A plan. But it seems as if political donors are not demanding any discipline nor results in return for the initial Founders stock. Or it appears the requested valuation is way way too high at the beginning and any rational investor would take a pass.
3) A model where a pets.com can hoover up all the available venture money, leaving investors, as a class, spent and other startups without funding seems like a really poor environment that is very very ripe for disruption… Or very ripe for a self-funded or bootstrapped disruptor. One way to cut the cost of media is to be controversial or newsworthy and thus get covered. Maybe Donald Trump is not as stupid as he looks with all the free media he "earns". He certainy doesn't look any more stupid than Obama.
4) There needs to be a conservative owned and run social media company. Facebook and others have too much control over what is presented in the timelines and there is now evidence that Facebook (as a media aggregator and ranker) has the ability to swing about 10% of the vote. People who do not like Facebook having this power (and the ability to shutdown and suppress things people see based n Facebook's own bias) or who do not like the obvious bias so shamefully highlighted by Harwood, Quick and Quintanilla in the CNBC debate should start planning a way to not be dependent on MSM. Maybe by 2020 they can be debates streams as a pay-per-view with proceeds going to charity and leave the media out of it. Who needs the networks? Glenn Reynolds has said that perhaps the best investment a rich person could make would not be to fund a PAC but to buy one of the media companies, many of which seem to be valued at pennies not he dollar these days. When Newsweek and WaPo sell for the virtually zero it is time for a smart conservative to buy one and present an alternate viewpoint. I say this as someone who once watched Sunday morning political shows and now is actively boycotting them.
14th Amendment citizens" are NATURALIZED according to Afroyim v. Rusk. 387 US 253 (1967)
"The entire legislative history of the 1868 Act makes it abundantly clear that there was a strong feeling in the Congress that the only way the citizenship it conferred could be lost was by the voluntary renunciation or abandonment by the citizen himself. And this was the unequivocal statement of the Court in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649. The issues in that case were whether a person born in the United States to Chinese aliens was a citizen of the United States and whether, nevertheless, he could be excluded under the Chinese Exclusion Act, 22 Stat. 58. The Court first held that, within the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, Wong Kim Ark was a citizen of the United States, and then pointed out that, though he might "renounce this citizenship, and become a citizen of . . . any other country," he had never done so. Id. at 704-705. The Court then held [n22] that Congress could not do anything to abridge or affect his citizenship conferred by the Fourteenth Amendment". Id. @276
The 14th Amendment ITSELF "confers citizenship"
What is the definition of naturalization in INS 1952, and still used today?
"The conferring of nationality, by ANY MEANS WHATSOEVER" (INS 1952(23))
Rubio was born in the same situation, to legal resident alien parents, and would be considered NATURALIZED by the holding of Afroyim v. Rusk.
Rubio is not an eligible ("capable of being elected") natural born Citizen.
"There needs to be a conservative owned and run social media company"
There are too many threads in the conservative movement that are hostile to each other for this to work.
I joined Ricochet, said to be a conservative web site about a year and a half ago. That was OK until I posted a comment, not a post but a comment, that I would not write a letter of recommendation to medical school for an applicant who did not believe in evolution.
That unleashed a storm of indignation from creationists that went on for weeks. I had other physicians alleging that they had gone to better medical schools than I had and they knew very successful biology professors who did not believe in evolution and it got worse from there.
I think I mentioned that here some months ago.
Social "Conservatives" have not been housebroken, as far as I am concerned, and cannot be included in adult discussions without a filter. I respect their opinions and have some devout relatives but they will screw up any attempt to reach out to libertarians. "My way or the Highway" for them is the rule.
That would be a problem for conservative media eventually.
"his close involvement in comprehensive immigration has killed any chance he might have had of winning"
I think this is true and, unless all else fails, he will have little chance of wide acceptance,
Muslim violence, which I think has not peaked, will doom any idea of immigration loosening.
Michael K - you raise a good point, but a true social media network should build community not focus on differences. One way to do that is to allow a variety of viewpoints to flourish but allow people to friend or follow any people they want. The flip side of that is the ability to ignore anyone they want.
In all the concentric or overlapping relationships in the networks this engenders there is room for disagreement but also for alignment. The problem on blogs like Ricochet is that it may reinforce a false choice to say "my way or the highway." Unlike the flat comment structure, the friend/follow structure adds enough comfort to offset the discomfort of alternate opinions.
I would rather my social media not be tracked by Facebook, who worked closely with my adversaries like Obama and instructed the Obama campaign how to leverage the API and data-mining to exert peer pressure and influence votes. Facebook's product is my profile and map of friends and frankly I don't trust them with it.
Ann Althouse has done a good job of building a community that has a lot of polar viewpoints without degenerating into hate.
I think there are a lot of people like me that are uncomfortable with Facebook and its biases and would love to use a social network that was more conservative and that protected our privacy better.
Thanks, Will.
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