The GOP's 2016 presidential nomination will lead, I'd wager, to the Democrats' 1932 election that was not.
That is probably one of the more enigmatic sentences I have ever written. I'll explain.
The other night I was rereading H.L. Mencken's Baltimore Sun coverage of the Chicago nominating convention, which pit NY's Gov. Franklin Roosevelt against NY's former governor, Al Smith, and which also harbored (among a half-dozen or so others) the Hearst-backed John Nance Garner of Texas as a potential power broker. Mencken was there, sweating out the July heat along with the deadlocked delegates (those were the rewarding days in which nominating conventions were more than predetermined coronations), and at the end of it all, after the fourth ballot, the Sun's reporter ventured this:
"Here was a great party convention … nominating the weakest candidate before it." FDR was "one whose competence was plainly in doubt." "[A]mong the parties to the [nominating] business were a dozen who were patently his superior." And then, from Mencken, came this, perhaps the most remarkable miscalculation in the history of political reporting: FDR was "facing a very difficult and perhaps almost impossible campaign before the people." Herbert Hoover shared Mencken's prophecy about Roosevelt's nomination; the president had been rooting for Roosevelt, whom he also saw as the Democrats' weakest candidate — who went on to destroy Hoover 472 to 59 in the Electoral College.
Mencken, theretofore an astute observer of American politics, can be forgiven. He was writing at a time when competent polling was not yet in the womb, when reporters and columnists and editorial writers and above all the president of the United States were comfortably removed from the depressionary misery of the body politic. Who the hell was this upstart Roosevelt? — a man, a cripple no less, known only to the citizens of New York? Mencken could not have been more out of touch, nor could Hoover, who ran one of the worst presidential campaigns ever.
Permit me to play a kind of equally confident anti-Mencken, one in possession of more empirical foresight than Henry Louis possessed. Whoever is the Republican nominee in 2016 will be the weakest, least competent, most superiors-surrounded candidate who will in fact — not speculation — face "a very difficult and perhaps almost impossible campaign before the people."
Yesterday the NYT's Jeremy Peters, trying to whip up a little electoral suspense, penned a piece in which Marco Rubio is portrayed as Team Clinton's nightmare opponent: "Democrats express concerns not only about whether Mr. Rubio … will win over Hispanic voters…. They also worry that he would offer a sharp generational contrast to Mrs. Clinton…. As her supporters recall, Barack Obama beat Mrs. Clinton for the nomination in the 2008 elections after drawing similar contrasts himself." Peters quotes a Florida Democratic strategist: "Marco Rubio scares me."
He scares me too, but only as a bogeymen-under-the-bed who, I'm pretty sure, is not really there. Marco Rubio is a precocious klutz prone to saying klutzy things and a helpless captive of a decidedly nonconservative (meaning radical) base — which is surely destroying all his superiors, too. As for Rubio's Obamalike "sharp generational contrast," that is almost laughably overblown. Obama beat — or rather pounded — Clinton in '08 on the issue of Iraq, not youth vs. dotage.
Clinton, this time around, is also keeping her mouth shut, much as nominee Roosevelt did in '32 as he allowed the electorate to soak up the unappealing alternative of the utterly backward Republican Party. Team Clinton is worried that the jabbering Rubio presents himself as a visionary of the "21st century, not the 20th," but slogans are no substitute for 19th-century policy positions.
Which every one of Rubio's competitors must also cling to. His party has no Roosevelt — a misperceived weak candidate who can blast his way to victory — because the party, by personal choice or not, is brimming with Herbert Hoovers.