Only during an election cycle in which a billionaire who lives in a gold-plated Fifth Avenue apartment serves as the blue-collar candidate could it make any sense that a first-generation American who’s been in debt much of his adult life can be so easily depicted as an effete elitist for wearing a pair of $130 boots — shiny and fashion-forward as those boots may be.
Yet here we are. Roughly 48 hours after a photo of the high-heeled boots Marco Rubio wore in New Hampshire went viral, several Republican competitors are exploiting the opportunity to tease the young senator.
And with a barrage of subtle ripostes, Donald Trump and Chris Christie among others are doing something potentially more damaging: They’re questioning Marco’s Man Card.
“They’re clearly trying to effeminize Marco Rubio,” said Steve Schmidt, a GOP strategist who guided John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “Wearing black, high-heeled booties is not exactly a statement of masculinity. And this is not groundbreaking. The sartorial choices of candidates have long been used by their opponents to say something negative about a larger personality trait, sometimes to devastating effect.”
You don’t have to go back too far to find examples of politicians whose opponents successfully seized on their unfortunate grooming habits, fashion choices and personal pastimes to define them in a negative and lasting way. Style, in politics, sometimes can become something akin to substance.
John Edwards, dismissed once as a “Breck girl” because of his shiny pelt of perfectly wavy brown hair, was later videotaped checking his appearance in a small compact and combing his hair before an interview (it ended up on YouTube to the tune of “I Feel Pretty”). The over-the-top primping, to say nothing of news about his $400 haircuts, exposed the vanity of a candidate selling himself a blue-collar champion in a way that stuck.
And there was Al Gore’s brown suit phase during the 2000 election, a sad effort to break free of the “boring” caricature that only hardened perceptions of him as a wooden politician who was trying far too hard (also see: John Kerry windsurfing, Michael Dukakis in the tank).
That pretext — and Rubio’s enviable positioning in the top tier of the GOP field — helps explain the responses this week from his rivals, who couldn’t resist reacting to Bootgate.
Almost as soon as New York magazine posted a short item online about Rubio’s “high-heeled booties,” there was Ted Cruz’s communications director, Rick Tyler, tweeting a link to it: “A vote for Marco Rubio Is a Vote for Men’s High-Heeled Booties,” he wrote.
Before an appearance on ABC’s “The View” on Wednesday, Rand Paul, with a bit of a lilt in his voice, filmed a video of himself picking out a pair, saying he’d seen “that Marco Rubio has these cute new boots and I don’t want to be outdone.”
Before long, the boots were fodder for conversation on cable news, with MSNBC folding the buzzy story into other, slightly newsier items: “RUBIO ADDS CAMPAIGN STAFF, AND NEW BOOTS,” one MSNBC chyron read on Wednesday.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/marco-rubio-boots-rivals-masculinity-217519
