It has been said that it simply wasn’t Marco Rubio’s night on Saturday. It’s been said he stumbled and was tripped up, causing him to revert back to a canned and practiced statement about how Obama has known all along what he wanted to do after he was elected. Rubio repeatedly insisted that Obama is not incompetent, he’s a radical. He didn’t say radical – he said Obama knows exactly what he’s doing – the radical is implied.
As has been widely reported, Marco Rubio repeated, four times, essentially that same canned talking point during Saturday’s debate, for which he was called out by blowhard Chris Christie – and now the media and pundit class. For this, many have taken to calling him Marco Robot and Marco Roboto.
But look at Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again.” How many times has he repeated that? By this time, who doesn’t know it? Of course, we have no idea of what it really means other than Trump says we’re going to “Make America Great Again.” He did what any good marketing agent would do – keep hammering it until it sticks.
It’s no different than “15 minutes can save you 15%,” or the old and highly successful Miller Lite ad, “Tastes Great – Less Filling.” Does anyone really know if spending 15 minutes on a Geico website will actually save 15%? Of course not and who cares? They don’t. All they care about is that everyone knows the slogan, equates it with Geico, and, if it’s repeated often enough, it becomes some sort of quasi-fact.
Trump doesn’t care what his slogan means. It means anything anyone wants it to mean. It doesn’t require details. It only has to be repeated ad-infinitum in order to stick – which it has.
Many studies suggest that repeated statements are perceived as more truthful than statements made less frequently, “presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity.” In other words: frequency breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust. It’s Marketing 101. In fact, marketing experts will tell you something must be repeating between six and 20 times to really be meaningful.
Similarly, studies show that repeated exposure to an opinion makes people believe the opinion is more prevalent, even if the source of that opinion is only one person. So not only do consumers remember a statement that gets repeated, they are more likely to believe it and think it is the popular opinion.
Could this be what Rubio was attempting to do, or was he, as so many insist, merely flustered? I don’t know and, short of him explaining, we may never discover the real motive behind the supposed faux-pas.
Yet, what appears to be getting lost in this mockery parade is the fact that Rubio is 100% correct. Many, if not most, politicians believe very little they say, but occasionally one comes along who is an advocate – a true believer. They are not willing to just say or do something to curry favor with one voting block or another. Ted Cruz is one of these believers – so is Barack Obama. People see this, which is why Obama scares those on the right and why the left and the establishment right are terrified of Cruz.
Oh sure there will be minor issues such as marriage or homosexual “equality” that mean little to a politician like Obama. Therefore, he has no problem flip-flopping on those types of relatively meaningless issues.
It’s the important issues on which he has and never will flip-flop. Issues that will “fundamentally change” the nation, such as Obamacare, which he knows to be the first step or foundation to single payer.
This was Rubio’s point. And, to his credit, everyone is talking about it.
So if this is indeed his strategy, he must now find a way to steer his talking point from a perceived blunder to a purposeful action. He must explain the constant repetition as tying Obama’s vision directly to Hillary’s – that Obama is a radical who knew exactly what he was doing and Hillary is cut from this same radical cloth.
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