How being a senator helped Marco Rubio avoid Jeb Bush’s mistakes

(Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: Steve Helber/AP, Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

A New Hampshire woman told Marco Rubio recently that he sounded like a broken record.

“I’ve watched your stump speech a couple of times, and I haven’t heard anything new. So I want you to say something new,” the woman demanded of the Republican presidential candidate at a town hall in Derry earlier this month.

She had a point: Rubio, the 44-year-old first-term U.S. senator from Florida, rarely strays from his talking points.

That message discipline, in fact, is one of the things that has helped him navigate the roiling waters of his first presidential bid with nary an “oops” moment. Unlike former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who he will face off against in the third presidential debate Wednesday, Rubio came of age during an era that has flipped the traditional political script on its head and left U.S. senators in some ways better prepared for the rigors of a modern presidential campaign than today’s governors are.

Life in the Washington fishbowl schools senators in what it’s like to live under the intense spotlight of the national press in the social media age, while governors — especially those from conservative states — increasingly face off only against attenuated regional press corps with limited budgets, in an environment lacking in powerful local partisan opposition research groups.

Senators learn quickly that their every utterance can be amplified by outside groups and the tightly networked national press on Twitter and online video networks — that they live in a world where any stray comment, regardless of intention, can be weaponized against them by opponents to drive negative media. And senators do it all under the watch of a D.C.-based cottage industry of groups that exist largely to highlight the foibles of whatever side they consider the other side.

This difference in training grounds could help explain some of the missteps of the Bush campaign, helmed by a former governor so used to speaking frankly in his pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube years in office that he began his presidential campaign by emailing reporters directly himself — and still does so occasionally.

His favorite type of campaign event is a town hall setting where he can talk at length and engage in a give-and-take with voters without worrying about how to package his thoughts into sound bites. But what seemed like a charmingly anachronistic level of accessibility at the start of the campaign has increasingly left Bush out of step in the gotcha-watch heat of the national presidential campaign, where every utterance is shrunk into 140-character tweets and 10-second video clips.

Exhibit A: Bush’s “stuff happens” remark in early October, where White House reporters asked President Obama about Bush’s remarks on gun control in the wake of the school shooting in Oregon before Bush’s words had even been posted as more than a single tweet. It was a debacle, and while it was clear what Bush meant — that not every new event can or should lead to policy changes, and especially not in the heat of the moment — it left him sounding like he was shrugging off a national tragedy that killed nine.

As a presidential candidate over the past year, Bush has had a pattern of carelessness with his words. Rubio would never say — as Bush did in July — that he wants to “phase out” Medicare, even though he and Bush both believe the program as it exists now needs to be dramatically overhauled. Bush’s comments that “people need to work longer hours” and that he was “not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” in reference to Planned Parenthood, were both similar own goals.

One person who saw this coming way back in December was Obama’s former White House messaging and media guru Dan Pfeiffer. He compared Bush to a character in HBO’s “The Wire” named Dennis “Cutty” Wise, who reenters his old Baltimore neighborhood after 14 years in jail and finds himself completely disoriented.

“Out of the game for a long time, gets back in the game, game’s changed,” Pfeiffer told the Huffington Post. “Jeb Bush — it’s been a long time since he’s run for office. Politics has changed dramatically since his last race.“

“I think it will be very challenging for someone who has not been in prominent public life in the age of Twitter to go out on the campaign trail,” Pfeiffer said.

He was right that Bush, who ran his last campaign for office back in 2002, was rusty. But Bush’s slowness to adapt to the modern presidential campaign also has a lot to do with the dramatic changes in politics and media since that run.

“Think about this: when Bush last ran for office, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube didn’t exist,” Pfeiffer told Yahoo News in an email. “The non-wire print press filed one story a day and the digital media was in its infancy. The odds of and penalty for making a gaffe were much lower.”

“Bill Clinton suffered through a similar transition on the ‘08 campaign,” he added.

Bush, as the scion of a political family, has experienced some national-level scrutiny during his lifetime before this year. But as a governor, his relations with the press were generally good and he suffered no penalties for operating in a freewheeling, open manner, talking to reporters at length and often.

Rubio’s experience couldn’t have been more different from Bush’s. Before he ever got to Washington, Rubio experienced the magnifying glare of the national press, having taken on former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in the Florida GOP Senate primary on the strength of the cresting tea party wave.

It was a national story. Rubio aides are fond of pointing out that there were 400 credentialed media at his election night party, covering his victory speech. A Washington Post reporter rushed to publish a biography of Rubio that came out early in the summer of 2012, anticipating that he might be chosen as a vice presidential candidate by the GOP nominee. Within two years of becoming a national figure, Rubio was under presidential-campaign-level scrutiny. Everyday life in Washington involved walking through throngs of national reporters inside the Capitol multiple times each day.

The two candidates to drop out of the Republican presidential primary so far were both governors: Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry, who was Texas’ governor for three terms until 2015. And none of the Republican candidates in the establishment wing of the party have come under the scrutiny Bush has as the presumptive frontrunner throughout the spring and summer, or like Rubio has been under for years in the Senate as a rising national star.

Other governors in the race do have experience that has conditioned them for a presidential campaign. New Jersey’s Chris Christie has been a national figure since first getting elected in 2009, and two others — Ohio’s John Kasich and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — both hosted their own TV shows on Fox News for a few years.

And the two frontrunners over the past two months, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, have soared while saying things that would drive a conventional politician out of the race, plowing unapologetically ahead in the face of what would seem like clear gaffes. Trump in particular uses social media to needle Bush, making himself part of the social media circus mocking the participants of the presidential campaign and ignoring the snorts of disgust from the establishment media.

The senatorial experience in the public eye is more intense than the governors’ in other ways, as well.

“The nationalization of Senate races mean that the races are more aligned with the bases, as opposed to governors who don’t have primary issues and control the parties and the money in their states so they are further insulated,” noted one Republican consultant who is close to the Bush campaign. Even Trump and Carson are competing for a narrow strand of the electorate, the hard-right conservative base, and finding success with that approach.

And Pfeiffer pointed out that “the diminution of press in state capitols and in local press generally means that governors outside of California and New York are not used to dealing with real scrutiny.” Bush dealt with a pretty vigorous press corps in Tallahassee, but the principle applies more broadly.

Rubio’s background — coming from a working-class family, not from privilege — also may play a role in how he communicates differently than Bush. He is the rare politician “who hears himself talk before he talks,” said Yuval Levin, editor of the Washington-based National Affairs magazine and a thinker often sought after by GOP presidential candidates for his views.

Perhaps because he has lived much of his life in contact with people who disagree with his conservative views, Levin said, Rubio can hear how what he’s about to say will sound to others who don’t share his worldview or assumptions.

Ronald Reagan was a Republican who came out of Hollywood, and Bill Clinton was a Democrat who came out of Arkansas, Levin pointed out. Living and working in communities with a wide array of opinions helped them hone their messages for a broad electorate.

Bush supporters maintain that their candidate still has time to change the country’s impression of him.

“What people are watching right now is snippets, and it’s the most outrageous and sensationalistic,” said Juleanna Glover, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House who is connected to Jeb Bush’s campaign. “We’re not seeing the quality of each of the candidates.”

When candidates’ full town hall meetings are televised live and watched by voters in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, Glover said, voters will appreciate Bush’s strengths.

“He doesn’t need a breakout moment. What he needs is extended coverage. I don’t know that any candidate has the same scope. They run up against their talking points pretty quickly,” she said.

The big question hanging over Rubio’s candidacy and his campaign, meanwhile, is how it might handle the white-hot heat that comes with being the frontrunner, should the race start moving his way. So far, in dry run moments, Rubio and his staff have passed with flying colors.

A series of New York Times stories about Rubio’s finances is remembered mostly for the way that the campaign quickly and forcefully seized on the Times’ characterization of Rubio’s $80,000 fishing boat as a “luxury speedboat,” pushed its rebuttal pictures out to other media organizations and used the Times’ characterizations to mock the entire piece.

Rubio followed up by ridiculing the piece himself at a political event, where he joked that “any boat where you have to go to the bathroom off the side of the boat is not a yacht.”

In an age where the media is dominated by memes and moments, Rubio knows how to play the game. His time in the Senate has prepared him for that. Whether he’s ready for the intensity of the scrutiny to increase even more — if he becomes the frontrunner in the coming weeks or months — will go a long way toward answering whether he becomes the GOP nominee.