Unless you are a member of the glorious small community of political junkies who also happen to be Olympics fanatics, you probably have never heard of one Park Si-Hun. But his story has an odd relevance to the 2016 elections.
Park was the Olympic boxing gold medallist in the Light Heavyweight division at the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988, but his victory did not come without considerable controversy. Even before he won his gold medal match against American Roy Jones, his path to the medal round was littered with controversial decisions over fighters who statistically (and according to the “eye test”) appeared to easily vanquish him. After one loss, Italy’s Vincenzo Nardello was so outraged he refused to leave the ring. In the Olympic final, Jones almost tripled the punching output of his foe, and still lost on a 3-2 decision. It was a ruling so utterly controversial that two of the judges received a lifetime ban, and the international boxing community felt compelled to change the scoring rules for their sport at the amateur level.
Park Si-Hun’s Olympic tournament was best summarized a bitter complaint from an Olympic boxer, who observed that “as long as the Korean is standing after three rounds, they declare him the winner.”
Sound familiar?
Marco Rubio is the political reincarnation of Park Si-Hun. When in public forums against his Republican foes, Rubio is declared the victor no matter the level of his achievement, unless he messes the bed so profoundly that even the press cannot rationalize his performance.
At no time was it more evident than Thursday evening, when the press positively got starbursts in their eyes after Rubio’s aggressive attempt to out-Trump the GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump. It was entirely possible that, in the twelve hours after the GOP contretemps, a reader could physically get buried beneath the avalanche of hagiography bestowed upon Rubio. Indeed, by Friday morning, it seemed quite possible that Marco Rubio had delivered a debate performance superior to Lincoln and/or Douglas, to say nothing of the other men who graced the stage with him in Houston.
It seems self-evident that they’re trying to help him. But follow me past the jump for why they may be doing their anointed savior of the GOP from Donald Trump considerably more harm than good.
Let’s start by stipulating one thing: this Marcomania post-debate, especially on the part of the right-leaning segments of the press, clarify one thing: they are utterly terrified at the prospect of a Trump nomination. Which is a bit odd, because his general election polling against Hillary Clinton (who, if the Super Tuesday primary polling is to be believed, will be the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nod by Wednesday) is actually not that bad. They clearly are calculating that his numbers are artificially high now, and will crater in the general election.
What’s more: they are also calculating that Trump needs a singular opponent in order to be defeated, and that winnowing needs to happen now. That’s why the conservative media, to say nothing of the press at-large, have totally ignored Ted Cruz’s debate performance. While one can quibble over who “won the debate” between the two also-rans, only a Rubio staffer or shameless cheerleader would say Cruz’s effort on Thursday night was markedly worse than Rubio’s.
The narrative is so evident, and has been for a long while, that it has become a running joke on social media. “Congratulations, Marco Rubio, on your impressive second place win!” was sent about a thousand times, by a thousand different people, on Twitter after both South Carolina and Nevada.
But, that narrative was given a jolt like we have yet to see after Rubio’s sparring with Trump in Houston. While I won’t call individuals out for their breathless tweets, anyone following Twitter post-debate saw this basic litany of declarations:
“OMG! Rubio tore him up! Trump may not recover from this beating!”
“The entire GOP primary has been reset after the beating Trump suffered tonight at the hands of Marco Rubio!”
“GAME CHANGER!!!!!!!1111!!!!”
This wave of Rubio adulation was apparently fierce enough that Donald Trump, showing a savvy that even his most vicious detractors have to acknowledge, immediately stepped on the Rubio love-fest by trotting out the endorsement of Chris Christie on Friday.
The Marco-mentum also elicited two responses from me as I scoured the internet on Thursday night and Friday morning.
The first one was: “wow, they aren’t even trying to hide it at this point. They want it so badly, that they’re creating an alternate universe where Marco Rubio just changed the course of U.S. History in one debate.”
But the second one was: “wow, I don’t think they’re doing him any favors.”
Here is why: what happens now if Rubio goes into Super Tuesday, and flops?
Polling suggests that it is a very real possibility, after all. And Trump, no matter what you think of him or his politics, has shown an amazing ability (on the GOP side, at least) to easily deflect what seems to be a weekly barrage of “this will really be the thing that does him in this time!” game-changers.
In terms of delegates, Super Tuesday is obviously big. However, it is not necessarily decisive. A candidate could, in theory, recover from a middling Super Tuesday performance and still catch Trump from behind. As our own piece by Taniel noted earlier in the week, about half of the contests on Super Tuesday have delegate distribution methods that will dampen Trump’s ability to make monstrous gains in delegates. And one of the ones with a “winner-take-most” method is Texas, which is one of his weaker states, potentially.
But if the press, to say nothing of the myriad of leading GOP voices that are skeptics of Trump, defines the Thursday debate as a game changer, and relentlessly flog Rubio as the ascendant candidate at a volume that even they haven’t managed thus far, what happens if he loses everywhere? What happens if the best Rubio can muster is a litany of distant second place finishes punctuated by the occasional third place finish?
There is simply no way for the pro-Rubio conservative press, and the press at-large, to sustain the kind of Rubio adoration we saw after Thursday night, unless Rubio runs essentially even with Trump on Super Tuesday. A push like that must result in a payoff.
And if that payoff doesn’t come, it becomes essentially impossible for the “ascendant Rubio” case to be made. And that’s when the GOP, and their allies in the press, will probably need to finally move onto the “acceptance” phase of the process.