| Rush had a conversation with a Cruz supporter today. [Check the full transcript linked to above on Rush's site.]
The piece is an attempt by Rush to explain why the Cruz campaign has failed.
I've condensed the points Rush made below. In his remarks today, Rush also heavily sourced and commented on the ideas of a Rich Danker, a former guy in the Cruz campaign whose article appeared on the April 24th Weekly Standard.
So here are the Rush/Danekr points followed by my commentary:
- Presidential elections are situational and not ideological -- This theory helps you understand why the Clintons won twice and why Obama wins. Obama's not even thought of as a liberal by people who voted for him.
Sure, Obama's liberal to the hardcore leftists. But the low-information crowd that elected him didn't think of him that way. Obama was responding to certain circumstances at the moment like the Iraq war, and he was able to position himself in a situational way and not even have to run as an ideologue.
- Ideological conservatives are stratching their heads in this election -- For many people [Rush included], ideology is a single focus. They write about, study it, and try to persuade people to believe it.
And this year, many of them thought the closest thing to the dream conservative candidate was Ted Cruz. But his appeal to conservatives has not been as good as you would predict.
- Cruz has followed the traditional conservative consultant's playbook -- You basically have one stump speech, you give it over and over again. And the stump speech is regionalized based on focus groups and polling.
Problem is: instead of the candidate being who he is, a consultant creates a candidate based on the consultants' polling. And while all this is going on, the candidate never has a chance to develop as a human being, because consultants turn them into robots.
And you end up slicing and dicing voters so that virtually everything the candidate says is geared toward an interest group rather than the electorate at large. You're focus-grouping interest groups, you're focus-grouping women here, men over here, immigrants here, Hispanics there, you tailor your message. Soon or later, this pandering turns people off, it becomes predictable, and worst of all, it isn't believable.
- Trump's approach is to not get caught up in ideology -- Trump says I'm going to win every state and win over every voter. I'm gonna do as many public appearances I can. Every appearance I do is gonna be a bit different, but I'm not going to overly regionalize my positions other than to connect to the local crowd.
Trump understands that presidential elections are situational, not ideological. The candidate is the one who best applies their ideological outlook to the issues of the day.
And rather than announcing at every speech, "And I'm going to make sure that conservative values triumph in this country," you simply stake out your position on an issue that is conservative. You don't call it conservative.
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| And here's my own commentary on Rush's points:
- Don't lead with ideology -- OK, I get the Rush/Danker point about not overly emphasizing ideology. That makes sense, and Trump has certainly not played up the fact that we should bracket him narrowly as a conservative. Trump's been more intent on explaining his positions on specific areas and not labeling them as part of any ideology.
- But what else can Cruz talk about?-- On the other hand, Cruz has zero experience as an executive. He never served as a governor. He's been a senator for only a couple years. And he's had a few years of experience as a lawyer and Soliciter for the state of Texas. Great. But boil it own, Cruz has really very little to talk about except his ideology or his position on various issues.
- Voters are not keyed in on ideology alone, but also the man himself -- The other thing that Rush/Danker seem to miss is the experience and proven capabilities of the candidate. These guys are only trying to understand Cruz's defeat through the prism of how the message is deliver. There must be some error in strategy that caused Cruz's message to fail. Cruz got bad advice: that's why he was rejected.
However another explanation is that Cruz was not the consistent conservative he claimed to be. A label like "Lyin' Ted" doesn't stick unless there's some truth to it.
Plus, when you think of a guy like Reagan or Trump, there's a man of steel behind the words. Sure, he may modify his position a bit, but he's got a long history of making decisions and maintaining a general philosophy. For Reagan, it was being Governor or California. For Trump, it's owning and running a successful $10 billion private enterprise.
If you take away Trump's experience in the world and his track record as a successful executive and public figure, you're only left with 50% of the value IMO. Trump's proven ability to execute is key to his appeal.
And if Cruz sounds "robotic", perhaps it's because voters sense there's not enough of a man behind the candidate.
And it's this crucial ability to execute that seems totally missing in the Rush/Danker analysis of Cruz's failure.
I made an attempt to quantitatively factor in the importance of executive experience in an FR vanity: Excel Scoresheet: Who Should Republicans Nominate for President?
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