Sunday, March 06, 2016

Varieties of crazy

Here's a section from C-Span of Marco Rubio's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday. One of the many challenges with Rubio is that his speeches are filled code which is understood by particular audiences but will seem abstract to a more general audience -- it's one of the ways in which he's gotten light treatment from the media compared to Donald Trump. The first minute or so of this clip is a good example. When he's talking about the right to live out first amendment rights, he means being able to carry religious beliefs well into contexts where the government has intervened to provide specific benefits and rights, such as healthcare. And when he says explicitly that families need the second amendment -- guns -- to protect themselves from terrorists, he's going well beyond what most Americans, even gun-owning ones, would think of reasons why they want to have a gun. But this is what Rubio thinks will sell well with his donors and voters while making him the sane alternative to Trump. So far, it's only working with the former. 

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