RUTHFULLY YOURS

Miami — “I loved watching Michael Jordan play basketball, because he could do things with the basketball that were not teachable,” Whit Ayres, a highly regarded Republican pollster, said in between sips of coffee in a downtown D.C. hotel conference room. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.”

It was March 31, 2015, just 13 days before Rubio, long considered the GOP’s brightest star, would launch his campaign at the Freedom Tower here in his hometown. Ayres, Rubio’s polling guru, had written a book with detailed, data-driven prescriptions for Republicans to take back the White House in 2016. He met on that March morning with a few dozen reporters to make his case — not just for the book and its blueprint, but for Rubio, whom he did not hesitate to hail as the party’s messiah.

Ayres was not alone in his assessment of Rubio’s unique talents. The 44-year-old son of Cuban immigrants became a celebrity in 2010, when he toppled Florida’s popular governor, Charlie Crist, en route to winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. His victory epitomized everything the then-ascendant Tea Party stood for — disrupting the established order, cleansing the landscape of Republicans perceived as too moderate — and he became a refutation, in the flesh, of charges that the party was a home only for old, wealthy, white men.

Though he ran as an outsider, the young senator wasted no time forging connections with Washington heavyweights and surrounding himself with skilled campaign operatives to help plot a path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After wisely sitting out the 2012 race, in which Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of Latino voters after a primary filled with harsh rhetoric about illegal immigration, Rubio and his team were convinced that spearheading a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration-reform effort would earn him the party’s goodwill and position him as a 2016 front-runner. They were wrong. The conservative grassroots revolted at Rubio’s co-authorship of a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill collapsed, and by the summer of 2013 Rubio had become persona non grata to the same Tea Party movement that had carried him into office just three years earlier.

His star was dimmed — but hardly diminished. In a tribute to both his resilience and the stubbornness of elite impressions of his aptitude, the Florida senator found himself a top-tier contender at the outset of the 2016 race. There were reasons it should not have been so: his misreading of the base on immigration; his standing with conservatives, who had defected in droves to Ted Cruz, another charismatic Cuban-American senator with designs on the presidency; and the looming presence of friend and former mentor Jeb Bush, who was the first Republican to announce his intention to enter the race. Yet Rubio and his team began the campaign in April 2015 convinced of his unmatched talent, and bullish — bordering on cocky — about his prospects of winning the nomination and the White House.

Those dreams came crashing down Tuesday night when Rubio lost the Florida primary in a landslide to Donald Trump. The bombastic real-estate mogul, whom Rubio spent most of the campaign ignoring in hopes that he would implode, took 46 percent of the vote to Rubio’s 27 percent. After an atrocious 3-for-26 start to the primary season — the wins coming in Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. — Rubio’s campaign had hoped his home state and its 99 delegates could save him. Instead, his defeat here dealt a death blow to what will likely be remembered as one of the most underachieving campaigns in modern Republican history.

“It is clear that while we’re on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio told a crowd of several hundred supporters at Florida International University. Having foregone reelection to the Senate to focus on his presidential bid, he now faces an uncertain political future. With an eye on 2020, convinced that Trump will be devastated in a general election, Rubio used his closing remarks Tuesday night to condemn the GOP front-runner in harsh terms — though not by name — for using “fear” to “prey upon” the insecurities of voters.

RUBIO WAS THE BEST GOP CANDIDATE AND MOST LIKELY TO TROUNCE HILLARY….HE ASKED HIS SUPPORTERS TO VOTE FOR KASICH IN OHIO, BUT CRUZ WOULD NOT DO THE SAME IN FLORIDA….SHAME ON ALL OF THEM…..RSK
Marco Rubio was the Julius Caesar of the 2016 campaign. For months, other candidates saw him as the most effective debater, one of the strongest candidates for November, and a benchmark by which to judge their own success. When the candidate of hope and “a new American century” finally succumbed, it wasn’t just due to Donald Trump — it was a whole host of candidates who did him in.

Rubio targeted too wide an audience, earning him too many foes who each considered him competition for their “lane” of the Republican primary. Rubio was seen as establishment, Tea Party, social conservative, and even slightly libertarian. That made him the perfect punching bag for every other candidate.

Furthermore, as he picked up endorsements from leading Republicans in the last months of his campaign, Rubio seemed all but coronated as the “establishment” nominee — something as toxic to the Republican party this cycle as being presented a crown by the Roman people was to the senators who decided to murder Julius Caesar.

Here is PJ Media’s list of Republican candidates who attacked Rubio, stabbing him in the back before he finally suspended his campaign on March 15, the same day Julius Caesar collapsed under the knives of his fellow Romans.
1. Jeb Bush
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was the first to attack Rubio. George W. Bush’s brother saw Rubio as a threat early on, and spent heavily to derail his campaign. On Sunday, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol estimated that Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, spent $25 million in attack ads against Rubio, while it only spent about $5 million attacking Trump. Kristol said that “if Rubio is going to lose on Tuesday,…part of it is because the Bush campaign dropped $20 million of negative ads on him in Florida.”

As Slate’s Jim Newell put it, “Jeb Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise–after burning through $40 million already–has made a $1.4 million buy in…Iowa? To go after Sen. Marco Rubio? Yes, the same Rubio who currently polls at a distant third in the first caucus state, one that no one (including Rubio) expects him to win.” Bush attacked Rubio for being too inexperienced, for his use of a charge card for personal expenses, and for switching his position on immigration.

Attacking Rubio only made sense because every campaign — besides Trumps, of course — bought into the false idea of “lanes.” Instead of focusing fire on the front-runner, Bush and his unconnected PAC directed their ammunition on Rubio, the greatest threat in the “establishment” lane. There may be some truth to the idea that their bases overlapped, but it was a huge mistake to overlook the polls, despite the unreliability of polling. Had Bush’s campaign thrown its weight against The Donald, how different would 2016 have looked?
2. Chris Christie
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie also threw punches at the Florida senator, and his blows hit home. Christie attacked Rubio and Cruz as inexperienced time and time again, touting his experience as governor.

Most famously, Christie hit Rubio hard in one of the debates, saying that Washington elites attack using a “15-second speech” to demonize opponents and come out on top. Rubio played right into Christie’s attack, repeating himself three times with a stock quote: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

This is just getting creepy.

Donald Trump’s campaign blocked a Politico reporter from attending the candidate’s victory rally on Tuesday night, continuing a troubling trend of denying access to reporters who write critically about Trump and his campaign.

Ben Schreckinger, who has been covering Trump for more than six months, was denied access to Tuesday night’s “press conference” — Trump did not actually take any questions — despite the fact that the campaign had already given press credentials.

In blocking Schreckinger, the Trump campaign appears to have been following through on a threat it made last week to exclude Politico reporters from campaign events because it did not approve of their coverage.

Schreckinger and his colleagues also reported Tuesday morning that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — who was recently accused of assaulting a female reporter — had a “quick temper and heavy-handed leadership,” which was becoming a source of concern among fellow Trump staffers.

In a statement to CNNMoney, Trump called Schreckinger “a dishonest, third-rate reporter with a failing outlet that will soon be out of business, hopefully.”

Of all the seemingly impossible things this mercurial Trump candidacy has accomplished, the biggest may be that he’s actually making me feel sympathy for members of the MSM.