On the Water

It always amazes me what goes viral. Sen. Marco Rubio gave a fairly flat response to the State of the Union on Tuesdays, packed with standard conservative bromides and stale ideas, but a GIF of his lunge for his water bottle has won him more Internet attention than anything he said about the dangers of big government.

Rubio is trying to take advantage of it, however, and the Post reports that he “swiftly moved to turn an unexpected glitch to his advantage.” Probably no one will remember this in the long run, just as the GOP consultants who talked to Politico suggest. “I thought it made him human,” said one. “Washington types will snort and buzz about it but it probably made the average voter smile.” That’s true. It will be amusing fodder for Gawker and Facebook for a few days, until it inevitably upstaged by the next dancing dog or foul-mouthed toddler. But in terms of building a brand and capitalizing on a gaffe, this is the best idea since Republicans started selling “We Built That!” t-shirts during the election.

It’s yours with a mere $25 donation to Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC! Republicans are often accused of lagging behind Obama and the Democrats in online outreach; indeed, technology goof-ups were blamed for many of Romney’s election-day turnout problems. But perhaps Rubio is young enough that he knows how to “work the Twitter,” as one might say. (It’s a much smarter, as well more pro-active and humble, reaction than the silence Bobby Jindal maintained after his own widely-panned SOTU response.) He immediately tweeted the GIF of his awkward maneuver after the speech, and joked about it yesterday, writing: “Picked up over 13,000 new followers on #twitter since last night! Im going to start drinking #water in the middle of all of my speeches!” As much as the dull speech itself, this should raise Rubio’s profile.

I’m sure Jon Stewart has already mined the rich vein of comedy provided by Rubio’s gaffe, and Politco has already dismissed the incident as “Water Under the Bridge.” But the best so-bad-it’s-good play on words came via the National Review. The title of a blog post on Rubio’s newfound Reddit/YouTube fame? Water-Gate.

A Difference Without a Distinction?

Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore has been a persistent critic of the mainstream media narrative that posits a split in the Republican Party between the Tea Party set and reformers like Marco Rubio, who is at least willing to consider a deal on immigration, and Bobby Jindal, who admonished GOP’ers to “stop being the stupid party.” Today, with the announcement that libertarian isolationist Rand Paul will deliver the Tea Party’s response to the State of the Union address, setting up a potential conflict with the official Republican response given by Marco Rubio, Kilgore writes:

And before you can say “phony war,” the MSM is setting this up as reflecting the yawning gap between the Rubio/Rove “establishment” and the True Conservative tribes—once again showing how no matter what happens to and within the GOP, its “center” keeps getting pulled to the Right.

I don’t know what if anything Rubio or Paul will say on international issues; if so they will probably be offering a stark choice between immediate and ultimate war with much of the rest of the world. But on domestic issues, you’ll need a crow-bar to pry them apart.

He links to a post on a CNN blog that informs us “The dueling GOP speeches come at a time when a very public rift is developing between the Republican establishment and conservative activists over the direction of the party.” And the Washington Post hypes the dissension as well, observing that the Tea Party’s counter-programming hasn’t been received well in the past, with Michele Bachmann’s 2011 address leaving Republican insiders “annoyedthat CNN agreed to air her remarks in their entirety because they were concerned that showing Bachmann’s speech alongside the official GOP response from Rep. Paul Ryan would make the party look conflicted.”

I take Kilgore’s point: from an outside perspective, the policy differences between the right and the far-right are minimal. Even Republicans like Jindal who are heralded by outfits like Politico and the Times for presenting a fresh face for the party are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives at heart. Eliminating Louisiana’s income tax, handing out vouchers to schools that preach creationism, block-granting Medicaid — these are not positions that differ greatly from those held by the so-called kooks of the party, the Todd Akins and Ted Cruzes. When the Post encourages Democrats to “give Eric Cantor a chance,” it downplays the fact that Cantor’s much-ballyhooed “Making Life Work” speech offered zero new ideas — smaller government! private enterprise! — about improving the life of the average voter. Kilgore is understandably angry that the mainstream media treats the GOP’s efforts to rebrand itself as a rethinking, when the real consensus among Republicans is that, while their message may have failed in 2012, their ideology is beyond reproach. He would, I’m sure, like to see the Times and the Post paint Republicans as the radicals they are.

But that’s not going to happen. And where I think Kilgore errs is in presuming that the “very public rift” is unimportant. Rand Paul himself thinks there’s a split, telling Brian Doherty of Reason Magazine that the party’s libertarian wing, which wants to cut spending but also curtail foreign adventures and legalize marijuana, doesn’t fit well with the establishment. After John Boehner stripped a handful of House members their committee positions in what was widely viewed as retaliation for voting against the party line, rumors circulated that a Paul-inspired band of representatives might try to topple the Speaker in a coup. Rep. Justin Amash, described by the Doherty as “the most prominent House “Paulite,” reportedly “relishes how his libertarianism marks him as a rebel in his own party.”

Beyond the libertarian-conservative divide, Republicans are also up in arms about just how far to the right to push the party. In the last week, a bitter feud has erupted between Tea Party stalwarts like the Club for Growth Karl Rove, whose newly founded Conservative Victory Project aims to boost electable conservatives (read: not Todd Akin) in Republican primaries. Despite a vow that the group will “wherever possible try to find consensus among groups on the right,” talk-radio hosts and old media pundits alike believe that its mission to “support the most conservative candidate who can win — as we put it, institutionalizing the Buckley rule” is simply code for running wishy-washy, Constitution-hating RINOs.

Rove has been roundly denounced by the conservative blogosphere, with reliable right-wingers like Citizens United’s David Bossie writing that “The Civil War Has Begun” and Rove’s spokesperson dramatically labeling activist Brent Bozell a “hater” in an interview. The response? A letter signed by Bossie and over 20 conservative groups reading, “You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party. Let it start here.” At the reactionary American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord fumes that “Rove’s project is seen here as nothing less than renewing the long ago battle over GOP principles between the moderate Ford/Bush Establishment GOP and Ronald Reagan.” This sounds like quite a gap — perhaps not a “yawning” one, but a gap nevertheless.

Whether or not there is a real divide in the GOP, conservatives sure think there is. They interpret Rove’s efforts to win elections as injecting dangerous moderation into their party, a threat they take with deadly seriousness. This is the significance that I think Kilgore misses: As long as Republicans believe there is a split, as long as they squabble among themselves, the real work of positioning the party for 2014 and beyond will be hampered. Internecine warfare takes a toll on a movement, and candidates going to battle in GOP primaries to out-conservative each other will only leave fewer resources available to fight the Democrat in the general election. When the director of the Senate Conservatives Fund is recasting the Rove’s Victory Project as “The Conservative Defeat Project” and writing that it “is yet another example of the Republican establishment’s hostility toward its conservative base,” you know there’s at least the perception of a real break.

So the left can continue to lament the hair-width differences between the reformers and the, uh, “patriots,” as the Tea Partiers might call themselves. But they shouldn’t pretend the split isn’t real simply because it is based more on ego (of which Karl Rove has plenty) and power grabs than an actual opening of the conservative mind. Sure, abortion will still be compared to the Holocaust and poor people will still be state-coddled moochers. Those aren’t stripes the GOP is ever going to change, softened rhetoric or no. But as long as Republicans are hitting each other, their punches against Democrats will have less oomph. A party “in disarray,” as a melodramatic, narrative-crafting outfit like Politico might say, will have difficulty presenting a united front. To the extent that the backlash against Rove goads state-level Republicans into nominating even more rigidly ideological candidates — see Iowa’s Steve King, whom Rove deputy Steven Law singled out as having a “Todd Akin problem” — Democrats may also benefit from being able to run against controversy-provoking opponents who present ripe targets for attack ads. King runs behind the more moderate Tom Latham in statewide polls, but the Tea Party, outraged at Rove’s slight, is firmly behind King. Iowa Democrats must be fervently hoping the GOP keeps believing it’s at war with itself, because King would surely be an easier candidate to defeat than Latham.

Rand Paul won’t say anything substantially different from Marco Rubio on Tuesday. But conservatives will think he is, and that’s what counts.