The Electability Spin Machine
Here’s where the spin begins.
Ordinarily you would think math would settle the issue of who won or did not win an election, but that’s not the country we live in. The spin started months ago, and will continue forever. Barack Obama didn’t win 2012: That RINO Romney surrendered it to him. And he didn’t win 2008: The media didn’t vet him, and George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism handed half the country over while the New Black Panther Party and ACORN stole the rest.
Even now some buzz-cut Nixon die-hard gasping his last breath in a hospice named Shady Palms Death Quonset is probably still raging against the Daley machine for delivering 1960 to Kennedy. Or against that ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. Or Kennedy’s father’s money. Or the media, who televised that famous debate.
So naturally for the rest of the week we will learn that nobody who lost actually lost, and that all the winners are frauds. Campaign strategists have to justify where all that money went, and those in the media who prognosticate into lifelong panel-show sinecures have to course-correct reality when it gets in the way of a good story. And as for the candidates — if we absolutely must drag them into this — they have to persuade voters and donors that they haven’t wasted their time, energy and money.
First up was the perpetual load billed as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who emerged at his headquarters to announce, “So this is the moment they said would never happen.” Well, no. He was polling in third place, and that’s where he finished. Apparently that’s enough for victory.
“For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because we offer too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance. For months they told us because we didn’t have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance…. But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message.”
Once again, he came in third, which is where the Real Clear Politics average has had him ever since Ben Carson’s numbers started nosediving around mid-December.
What Rubio was really saying — through the perpetual vocal quaver of alternately traumatized patriotic horror or beatific patriotic awe he has sported during every public speech since 2010 — was that he needed to repudiate the Cruz/Trump argument that this was a two-man race and prove that a third person was involved. But, “I showed ’em all by coming in third!” isn’t much of a sales pitch.
Not that the PR wing of the Republican Party hasn’t been making it. Fox News spent the evening pumping up Rubio’s surging numbers in a recent Quinnipiac poll to prove that the ethnic telegenic candidate situated firmly between the establishment and the Tea Party wing is just as prime for an “inevitable” breakout as he has been every week since around August 4, when Donald Trump started eating his (and everyone else’s) lunch.
The Electability Spin Machine, Page 1 of 4