Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  Marco Rubio’s Empty Suit

  SEPTEMBER 23, 2015

  Some GOP professionals are suggesting that the quest for an antidote to the dreaded Trump and Carson may land on Marco Rubio. Given that his chief assets are an affecting life story and superior performance skills, this seems an odd choice. For Rubio personifies the Republican complaint against Barack Obama, reflected in the fun house mirror of primary politics: the starter senator whose capacities for world leadership are unproven. Indeed, Rubio is the ultimate “pop-up” candidate, whose sole aim on entering the Senate was to leapfrog his inexperience in order to run for president.

  But there is little of substance to commend promoting Rubio to president in the political blink of an eye. His policy positions seem to involve positioning himself with the party’s right-wing base.8

  Though forcefully delivered, his foreign policy prescriptions are no more novel than Dick Cheney’s: disavow the opening to Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal, pledge allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu, consider intervening militarily in Syria and Iraq, and bulk up the military to project American power. His anodyne budget proposals include that chestnut of political fantasies, the balanced budget amendment. The current Rubio is so pro-life that he grants no exception to victims of rape or incest. His switch from believer to climate change denier was augured when he coined the dodge “I’m not a scientist”—which, given that he is also not a general, an economist, or an educator, if taken literally would seem to limit his role as president to pardoning turkeys and lighting Christmas trees.

  The most egregious example of Rubio’s evanescence on principles may be his head-spinning about-faces on immigration. Running for the Senate in 2010 he disdained a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But by 2013, he became instrumental in a bipartisan group of senators whose comprehensive immigration reform bill included just such a path, underscoring his zeal with impassioned speeches inside and outside the Senate.

  To his apparent surprise, the Republican base erupted in anger. When his legislation passed the Senate, Rubio did not appear with his colleagues at the press conference that followed. And four months later he publicly opposed his own bill’s passage in the House. These dizzying changes seem particularly soulless in a man who asserts that his parents’ immigrant experience is at the core of his political soul.9

  Equally problematic, Rubio is the poster child for the post-Citizens United systemic distortion that surfaced in 2012: candidates disproportionally financed by wealthy patrons (e.g., Newt Gingrich/Sheldon Adelson; Rick Santorum/Foster Friess). But Rubio’s ties to Florida billionaire Norman Braman suggest more than a short-term rental. Once Rubio became a Florida legislator, Braman funded his campaigns, financed his legislative agenda, and subsidized his personal finances, employing Rubio as a lawyer and his wife as a philanthropic adviser. While Speaker of the Florida House, Rubio helped steer $85 million in state funds to Braman’s favorite causes. And now Braman is expected to spend at least $10 million to help Rubio become president.

  But Rubio is also a leading contender for the largess of Sheldon Adelson, the right-wing ideologue who spent $100 million in the presidential campaign of 2012. In addition to courting Adelson at a half-dozen private meetings last summer, during which he laid out his foreign policy vision, Rubio cosponsored the casino mogul’s top legislative priority: a bill to outlaw Internet gambling. Lest Braman’s and Adelson’s interests seem merely parochial, both men vehemently oppose the Iran nuclear deal and criticize the proposed two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. For whatever reason, Rubio now espouses both positions, vowing to hamstring implementation of the Iran nuclear pact by rear-guard legislative tactics.

  The presidency is serious business—too serious, one would hope, to entrust to inexperienced candidates with malleable ideas and wealthy patrons whose desires are far from malleable. In more serious times, Rubio would be running for reelection to the Senate or, perhaps, for governor of Florida, hoping to benefit his state while preparing himself for national leadership.10 The current primary field contains at least two such candidates, Jeb Bush and John Kasich—both successful Republican governors who tested their ideas in the crucible of diverse and important states with major problems. In 2016, they are the adults in the room. By comparison, Rubio is a political adolescent, still dressed in short pants, dependent on a scholarship funded by powerful benefactors.

  Ted Cruz

  The Lone Stranger

  SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

  Armchair psychoanalysis of political figures can be a dubious and even disreputable business. But one presidential candidate presents the following symptoms: feral aggression, reflexive demagoguery, self-absorption, paranoia, grandiosity, disdain for social norms, and an inability to cooperate with others. When such a person habitually imagines himself as Winston Churchill, the effect is truly destabilizing. So let us add to the DSM a newly discovered malady: Ted Cruz Syndrome.11

  For the historic figure Cruz most evokes is not Churchill, but a nascent Joseph McCarthy. It is not his fault that he resembles the young McCarthy (though he does), but that his words and actions bring the vulpine loner from Wisconsin to eerie recall. Like McCarthy, Cruz is capable of a casual cruelty that is startlingly gratuitous. Hard upon the death of Beau Biden, Cruz chortled to an audience, “Joe Biden. You know what the nice thing is? . . . [J]ust walk up to someone and say, ‘Vice President Joe Biden,’ and just close your mouth. They will crack up laughing.”

  Shortly after Jimmy Carter revealed his grim cancer diagnosis with admirable grace, Cruz ridiculed Barack Obama and Carter as having identical failed presidencies, as if merely attacking Obama was not pleasure enough. Sometimes, it seems, all one has to do is cross the senator’s radar screen, no matter how tragic the circumstances. For with Cruz, like McCarthy, merely calling his endless array of self-selected opponents wrong does not suffice to slake his psychic need to demean and disparage.

  The targets of these rhetorical drive-by shootings are often his fellow Republicans. During Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings, Cruz implied that Hagel had received money from North Korea. In the skirmishing over the Export-Import Bank, Cruz accused his own Majority Leader of telling a “flat-out lie.” And when John Boehner resigned under fire from hard-right House members whose ire Cruz relentlessly stoked, without citing any source the senator danced on the Speaker’s political grave, suggesting that Boehner had “cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of the year—and then presumably to land a cushy K Street job.”

  As for his policy pronouncements, they seem contrived to feed the gnawing victimization felt by those most alienated from society. His claims that there is a “war on faith in America today,” and that those “who are persecuting [Kentucky county clerk] Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office,” suggest an ignorance of law and history too profound to be credible in a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law. Just as dubious is that Cruz believes his comparison of scientists concerned about climate change to the flat-Earthers who rejected scientific truth. Asked to measure Cruz against his understanding of McCarthy, a prominent Republican professional with four decades of experience makes this troubling distinction: calling Cruz “the most calculating man I’ve seen in this business,” he posits that the newer version is much more “calculating and Machiavellian” than his predecessor in recklessness.

  Unsurprisingly, beneath such venom and demagoguery lurks a man who dramatizes himself as beset by venal Republican colleagues bent on punishing him for his lonely and courageous efforts to save America from the abyss. “Sometimes,” Cruz writes, “people ask me, ‘When you have a room full of Republican senators yelling at you to back down and compromise your principles, why don’t you just give in?’ I just remember all those men and women who pleaded with me, ‘Don’t become one of them.’” It never occurs to Cruz that his colleagues’ uniform contempt stems from a deeper reason—that he has made the Senate a soundstage for his own ps
ychodrama, good only for garnering money and attention while he pursues his larger ambition with relentless monomania.12

  As his colleagues suffer, so do we. In 2013, he infuriated his fellow Republicans by prompting a government shutdown without the slightest hope of achieving his stated purpose—defunding Obamacare. He preceded his twenty-one-hour filibuster by quoting Churchill that “we will fight on the beaches,” then went on to compare his GOP peers to “Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis.’” When his efforts ended in political disaster, he blamed his fellow Republicans in order to inflame the right-wing base, dishonestly ignoring that a presidential veto made his alleged goals impossible. Now, still blithely dismissing the separation of powers, he again proposes to force another government shutdown—drawing a rare public letter from Senator Kelly Ayotte asking him why this effort will be any less disastrous for the party or the country.

  Cruz hears no voices but his own, and it has ever been thus. A college classmate has been quoted as saying, “It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else. . . . Four years of college education altered nothing.” His rise to prominence on the national stage personifies the degree to which our politics is gripped by a political distemper, drowning our capacity to seize the future in a tsunami of nihilism and fury. For our own sake as well as their party’s, his colleagues need to seal off his path to power, inflicting on Cruz the public ostracism that befell McCarthy and sent him skulking to the political margins with Joseph Welch’s famed admonition still ringing in his ears.13

  The Biden Dilemma

  OCTOBER 1, 2015

  Ever more, Democrats worried about the Clinton campaign hope that Joe Biden will jump into the race with all his capacious humanity. In this politically breathless moment, they will be spending the next few days waiting for Joe.

  It is easy enough to see why. At whatever distance, Joe Biden is an easy man to like. Those who have worked with him closely describe the Biden that voters see—a politician who loves people, as warm and generous as one could ask. It is no mean feat in his Darwinian milieu that almost everyone seems to like Biden. For Democrats, the sight of him in a crowd conjures a warmth the vice president clearly returns.

  And he is never better than in times of sorrow or adversity. His remembrance of Ted Kennedy at the senator’s memorial service was a marvel of empathy—not least when he addressed each family member with a memory preceded by “your uncle” or “your dad.”14 His grief over the loss of his son Beau is affecting beyond words, even more so when he struggles to find them. It is surely an asset for voters to see a candidate as someone they could turn to in the toughest of moments. And President Obama has done so—time and again, Biden has worked with his former colleagues to advance the president’s agenda, becoming in the process a truly consequential vice president.

  Like Bill Clinton, Biden savors every aspect of politics—except, unlike Clinton, raising money. To him the art of persuasion is a joyous pursuit, fueled by a commitment to the average American with whom he still identifies. For Biden, engagement with the maelstrom of politics and its inhabitants is as natural as breathing.

  But running for president does not engender fondness in one’s opponents. It seems no accident that a spate of recent articles has exhumed the roughest moments in Biden’s political past. Feminists with long memories challenge his performance in chairing the Clarence Thomas hearings, asserting that he allowed Thomas and his allies to savage Anita Hill without calling witnesses who could have corroborated her account of sexual harassment. Those who question his judgment as a candidate reach back to the 1988 campaign, when Biden appropriated details from the life of a British politician as his own.

  Progressives point to Biden’s votes in favor of the Iraq war resolution and a bankruptcy law that favored Delaware-based credit card companies. Other critics resurrect his advice to Obama not to go after Osama bin Laden. Should Biden run, these zombie issues will arise anew.

  To be unscripted and unpredictable is in Biden’s DNA. Most often this is engaging and fun to watch. But his powers of speech seem overprogrammed for output, creating the perpetual risk of a cringe-making lapsus linguae. Though the vice presidency has muted this, historically he has sometimes seemed defensive about his intellect, creating twitchy moments of public insecurity.15 And the high-stakes debates that lie ahead conjure Biden’s 2012 face-off with Paul Ryan, when Biden squandered his clear edge on substance through an overcaffeinated show of smirks, chuckles, and grins, punctuated with eye rolling and shakes of the head.

  But the central question is this: What, at its core, is the rationale for choosing Biden over Hillary Clinton? Their bases of support largely overlap, as do their stands on issues—unlike Bernie Sanders, Biden cannot claim to be fighting Clinton for the soul of the Democratic Party.

  The real differences are stylistic, and the implicit message of a Biden run would be that Clinton is too damaged to win. This is as hard to articulate as it is to assert with any confidence Biden’s long-run superiority as a candidate. Indeed, Kevin McCarthy’s dunderheaded admission that the Benghazi committee is a political witch hunt may help stiffen Clinton’s support.16 And among those Democrats who fear that nominating Sanders would be electoral disaster lurks the fear that Biden could widen the self-proclaimed socialist’s path to daylight.

  In the end, Biden’s decision comes down, as it so often does with him, to the human element. He is a seventy-two-year-old man who has overcome great hardship to achieve a truly estimable career at the apex of American politics. Though it may be hard to gaze into the chasm of retirement, for Biden grace and honor are no small things. He surely questions the siren song of poll numbers buoyed by sympathy for his loss, also knowing that the tyranny of state filing deadlines will force a decision far too soon.

  In some recess of his mind he must recoil at the thought of a failed campaign and, far worse, at being remembered as a spoiler who weakened the Democrats’ chances. And those who watch and wait are left to wonder if a Biden candidacy would be a kindness to his party, or to the man himself.17

  The Paradox of Bernie Sanders

  OCTOBER 5, 2015

  The surge of money and enthusiasm propelling Bernie Sanders has long since trampled conventional wisdom. The question now is where that takes us.

  Through a progressive lens, the systemic inequities Sanders eviscerates are a blistering rebuke to politics as usual. The soul-shriveling gap between the fortunate and the rest in the essentials of a decent life—education, economic opportunity, health care. A system of campaign finance that is elegant bribery. Ordinary people losing their homes as Wall Street malefactors go unpunished. The cynical equation of “class warfare” with increased taxes on the very rich. To many who feel this social corrosion most acutely, Hillary Clinton personifies a party adrift from its liberal moorings. They long for a truth-teller free of Super PACs and pollsters, primed to at last take the gloves off.

  Now comes Senator Sanders—not only with attitude, but an agenda. Single-payer health care. Free tuition at public colleges.18 Affordable day care. Billions more for Social Security. Higher taxes on the wealthy to cover an estimated $4 trillion price tag. And, necessarily, the most dramatic expansion of government in three generations.

  But as of now these proposals are political ships in a bottle, faced with inescapable threshold questions. Can Sanders win the presidency? If so, can he enact any part of his vision? And what is the balance between primary voting as an act of self-expression and a cold-eyed look at a candidate’s prospects in a general election? Resolving this cage match between head and heart is vexing work. For the Sanders phenomenon presents the impassioned but thoughtful progressive with a painful electoral paradox: When might the most heartfelt vote for a better society preserve the ills one seeks to banish? And here we start with Sanders himself.

  For Democrats of a certain age, Sanders evokes a familiar figure from the ’60s: the committed ideologue transfixed by a visi
on of tectonic change and driven by total fidelity to principle. Such people would rather lose an election than trim their sails to the winds of the electorate. And Sanders did lose—six elections in a row before, with admirable persistence, becoming the first socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

  Beyond achieving some concrete civic good, Sanders launched his modest burg into the arena of foreign policy, writing letters of reproof to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and imploring the UK, China, and the Soviet Union to embrace military disarmament. He climaxed these efforts by visiting Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, writing Reagan on his return proposing to help resolve America’s conflict with the Sandinistas. The results beg stating.

  Which raises questions for the present day. While Sanders has been giving the same basic speech—keyed to income inequality—for decades, the turn of history’s wheel has given him a megaphone of impressive power. His career in Congress is noteworthy for his votes against the Iraq war and the Patriot Act, and progressives dearly wish that more Democrats could say that. But his legislative accomplishments are slight. And none of the 250 Democrats in Congress support him, nor any governor—including Vermont’s.

  This is not simply because of policy differences—some Democrats overlap Sanders on key issues—but because in a business where personal relations count, Sanders is viewed as a brusque and inflexible loner.19 The indubitably progressive Barney Frank summarized the common view of the senator’s ability to move the body politic: “He went for the ideal, but he was not part of the legislative process. He chose to be an outsider.” Asked to imagine a Sanders presidency, an avowedly liberal insider expresses the worries of many who know him, ruefully concluding that “Bernie would be among the least effective presidents ever.”