Bet $5

5 Reasons to bet $5 on Marco Rubio

Here's why so many pundits, campaign pros and reporters bet on Rubio eventually winning the nomination.

By Glenn Thrush

Battery is the sincerest form of flattery.

Over the past couple of weeks, ever since his sneaky-impressive showing in the last GOP debate, Marco Rubio has found himself in the crosshairs of both the Republican establishment and anti-establishment wings of his party. No other candidate poses such a threat to either flank, so he should take it as a compliment.

The boyish, infamously thirsty and oratorically agile Florida senator has risen steadily from the 5 percent range to low-double-digits. That’s high enough to attract the usual rubber-chicken mugging from Trump (“He's overly ambitious, too young -- and I have better hair than he does, right?” Trump bellowed on a recent trip).

On the other end of the GOP’s bipolarity, a more polite Jeb Bush is getting meaner to him by the minute. Rubio poses an immediate threat (the worry is he could poach nervous Bush donors) which is why Bush’s campaign has started dispatching trackers to his events. With good reason. He’s Bush Plus -- younger, unburdened by his last name, with comparable general-election appeal. Hence, Jeb earlier in the week, thwacked Marco for lacking the requisite “leadership skills” to be president.

Here are five reasons why so many pundits, campaign pros and reporters bet on Rubio eventually winning the nomination, despite his shortcomings. Full disclosure: I have wagered on Rubio – but only for $5.

1. He’s a “baby.” The GOP base is in an angry, uncompromising mood but Rubio refused to sign on Trump’s proposal to roll back birthright citizenship or back Ted Cruz’s petition pledging to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding.

So… how can he afford to flout the big, bad base?

Because he still has that new candidate smell. There’s more than one way to position yourself as an opponent of the D.C. establishment: The first and most obvious is to reflexively attack it. The second (and more historically successful) is to vaguely define oneself as part of a new wave of fresh-faced leadership not beholden to the sour, old rules­ – like Barack Obama, JFK, Bill Clinton or age-defying Ronald Reagan. In applauding the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner, Rubio avoided vitriol but told his cheering anti-Boehner audience, “[T]he time has come to turn the page and allow a new generation of leadership in this country.” This was larceny. The language was Obama’s, swiped from a savagely successful generational diss against Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Every time Trump (who knows from branding) calls Rubio a “baby,” he’s doing him a favor.

2. Talent still matters. Rubio is a quicker study on policy, a superior speaker and a more concise counter-attacker than just about anyone else in the field. Trump gets more laughs and Rubio sometimes looks like your nephew who is running for the student council, but blur your eyes and slow down his rapid-fire delivery and his tone is unmistakably presidential (or, his rivals whisper, vice-presidential).

Just watch how he turns Trump’s attack on the use of Spanish on the campaign trail into a moving tribute to his Cuba-born grandfather who taught him to love Ronald Reagan. Or how he pivots on an equally tricky question on Black Lives Matter into a broad defense of equality of opportunity.

3. He has a plan – and is so far sticking to it. Rubio has no natural electoral or fundraising base, his tentative, unsuccessful stab at comprehensive immigration reform put him in a bad place at a time when the party’s likely voters are more interested in walls than paths to citizenship, and he’s not even especially popular with Latinos, not even in Florida. Yet this protean political personality also gives him flexibility to out-maneuver indelibly-branded candidates like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Bush and Trump.

Even before Donald Trump arose to devour the spotlight, Rubio’s team – led by wily veterans like Rich Beeson and Alex Conant – hit on a speak-softly-but-still-be-heard strategy that the candidate has followed with a discipline rarely seen in 2016. A senior Rubio strategist told me, a few months back, that he planned to “lay low until December or January – without disappearing.” He’s done that by putting his head down and sticking to solid, non-controversial Republican policy positions (especially on foreign affairs – presciently predicting Russia’s deployment of fighter jets in Syria and threading the needle on immigration.

He hasn’t picked fight but he’s been careful to show some spine. Unlike Bush, whose first response to Trump’s battering was a flinch, Rubio seems to be restraining anger, not looking for a podium to dive behind: When the “Apprentice” star slammed him as a “lightweight” and “clown,” the 44-year-old senator deftly responded in kind – while claiming not to respond at all. “I’m not interested in the back and forth, to be a member or a part of his freak show,” he condescended in a speech last weekend.

In the past few days he’s become more bellicose to both Trump and Bush – and his temper just might prove the biggest threat to his intentionally plodding rise.

4. He’s just conservative enough. The central challenge for Rubio is getting past the Tea Party sentries. If RedState’s Erick Ericson is right (I’m partial to the theory) that it will eventually come down to a Cruz-Rubio fight, the party’s right wing will pound him for sundry offenses to their ideology – especially on immigration and his (general) get-along support of the suddenly reviled left-wing leadership of Mitch McConnell in the Senate. Even his strength on foreign policy has come under attack for perceived squishinesses – the Daily Caller recently criticized his backhanded support for “humanitarian” foreign aid and Breitbart has tweaked FOX for what they see as the network’s pro-Rubio bias.

But it’s hard to paint a guy with 92 percent voting record with arch-conservative Heritage Action as Lowell Weicker. And his tone is far more moderate than his actual voting record -- which includes ‘no’ votes on DHS funding, same-sex marriage, Loretta Lynch for Attorney General, reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, measures pushing equal pay for women and, of course, funding for Planned Parenthood. He’s even come out against Common Core, putting him comfortably to the right of Bush.

5. He’s always out-performed expectations. The guy is just good at elections, like that other first-term senator who made out well eight years ago. Rubio learns fast on the trail, and he’s achieved larger margins of victory in his campaigns than comparable Republicans in similar races and similar states.

More importantly, he’s proven himself to be among the most durably likeable (or at least un-hateable) candidates in the GOP field, along with Cruz and Ben Carson. His unfavorable rating is roughly half that of Trump’s.

And that’s why Trump is going after a guy who is currently running fourth in his own state with such a vengeance.