Assuming Hillary Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee next year, we already know that the Republican candidate will be younger than the Democrat, maybe by just a few years (if it's Jeb Bush or Rick Perry, both in their 60s), but maybe by quite a bit. Marco Rubio is not only just 43, he also likes hip-hop (as he never tires of letting people know). Is it possible that the Republican Party will actually have a nominee who's cool? Or at least cooler than the Democrat? Conservative columnist Matt Lewis thinks so:
Like the products we purchase, the candidates we support say something about who we are (or, at least, who we want people to think we are). We might want to believe that our preference has to do with a candidate's policy positions, and in many cases it does. But it's also at least partly about cultural signaling. We all want to be seen affiliating with a cool brand, and we interpret what that cool brand is by means of our tribal identities.
In this sense, Republicans are faced with both a challenge and an opportunity. If a demographic shift has made it vital for Republicans to sell conservatism to more millennials and urban, cosmopolitan voters-and I believe it has-it makes sense to go for cool. Marco Rubio-who is young, handsome, and fluent in Spanish, sports, and pop culture-is cool. Especially compared to Hillary Clinton. Grandmothers (and grandfathers!) may be a lot of wonderful things, but "cool" isn't typically one of them, at least in the popular imagination.
And it's not just Rubio. Rand Paul is kind of cool, particularly among millennials who are socially liberal but wary of the intrusiveness of big government. Indeed, there might never be a better time for the GOP to steal the "cool" mojo from Democrats-who have tended to "own" the cool factor for the better part of the last 50 years.
I'd argue that the only genuinely cool presidents we've had in the last century were Kennedy and Obama, though you could throw in Clinton (although really dude, "I didn't inhale"? Not cool). But it depends on what standard you're using, because cool is complicated. There's the kind of cool Barack Obama embodies, which is all about emotional control, never being too high or too low. There's the cool that comes from just being young, in a culture where youth is inherently desirable. In any case, Lewis is right that voting is an act of cultural affiliation. It can be about the candidate in particular; I've said before that one of the things that made Obama's 2008 campaign so powerful for liberals was that they saw him as everything they wanted to be-youthful, erudite, cosmopolitan, his multiracial identity a tribute to their own open-mindedness, and so on. Republicans portray Democrats as weak and effeminate in part to convince male voters that a vote for such a candidate might say something about the person casting the ballot, too.
But when we're talking about politicians, who are inherently uncool, there's only so cool they can be. And it's enough to know that all the cool people are voting a particular way, even if the person they're voting for isn't particularly cool. Maybe Rubio can drop a few more Tupac references and pull a few votes from young people here and there, but his coolness factor is inevitably going to be pulled down by the fact that he's a member of the GOP, the party where some of the uncoolest people can be found.
