The myriad vulgarities of Donald Trump—examples of which are retailed daily on Web sites and front pages these days—are not news to those of us who have been living downwind of him for any period of time. I first encountered Trump more than 30 years ago. Back then he was a flashy go-getter from an outer borough eager to make his name in Manhattan real estate. Which he succeeded in doing in the only way he knew how: by putting his name in oversize type on anything he was associated with—buildings, yes, but also vodka, golf courses, starchy ties, and even a sham of a real-estate school. Most people who own private planes include their initials as part of the tail number. Not Trump. On his campaign jet, a Boeing 757, his name runs from the cockpit to the wings—in gold letters, 10 feet high. Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret. Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago. To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby. The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination. Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: “See, not so short!” I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, “Actually, quite short.” Which I can only assume gave him fits. 
 
 If Trump is like a feral forest animal on the campaign trail, his Democratic counterpart is a razor clam with a sharp mind and a long memory. They are like matter and anti-matter and really could not be more un-alike. Trump says whatever he wants, takes advice from no one, and so far seems politically unaffected by any of his loathsome boasts and put-downs. Whatever one thinks of Hillary Clinton—and, goodness knows, everyone has an opinion—she knows a lot about government. But she seems to rarely say what she thinks and has surrounded herself with a secretive phalanx of control-freak viziers. At this point, as Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison points out, you’d need to apply the famous Turing Test to see if any authentic human “Hillary” can be distinguished from the machine version that has been in development for more than three decades. In “Fortress Hillary,” Ellison describes the tight-knit group of advisers and surrogates that has grown up around Clinton like a coral reef. It once consisted mainly of women, but now is about evenly split between the genders. Some of them, like Mandy Grunwald and Huma Abedin, have formed part of Clinton’s defensive shield for almost a quarter-century. Hillary Clinton has been embattled ever since she entered public life, sometimes for reasons of her own making (and sometimes not). The wall around her is now high and thick. As Ellison notes, this wall creates its own set of problems—it’s like the Maginot Line. The State Department e-mail scandal is Exhibit A—the Clintonian zest for prophylactic secrecy is the root cause of the issue that has mired her campaign in the muck of the recent past. The wall also keeps information from getting in. During the dark days of the Whitewater investigation, one adviser told Hillary to stop reading the newspapers—her aides would tell her what she needed to know. How isolated is Clinton? Most of us would find a single day of full-time Secret Service protection to be intolerable. Hillary, Ellison writes, has had it for 23 years. No other recent presidential candidate—not Obama, not Bush, not even Nixon—has been as inaccessible as Hillary has been from day one of her campaign. ||||| 
 
 I can be every bit as petty and crude as you can, Donald! That’s why I should be president, and not you! (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan) 
 
 In recent days, Marco Rubio has been gamely experimenting with a new strategy: Attempting to outdo Donald Trump in his own carnivalesque reality TV arena. Rubio has suggested that Trump urinated in his pants backstage at last week’s debate, presumably meaning that Trump lost control of his bladder in a fit of terror over the Florida Senator’s withering attacks. Rubio has also ridiculed Trump’s “horrible spray tan.” Rubio has even mocked Trump’s “small hands,” though he has not gone so far as to give voice to the unstated implications of that barb and why they should, er, diminish Trump in the eyes of GOP primary voters. 
 
 One Rubio adviser explained Rubio’s descent into the lowest of lowbrow Trumpian antics by claiming: “We came to the conclusion that if being a part of the circus is the price you have to pay in order for us to ultimately be able to talk about substantive policy, then that’s what we’re going to do.” 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio took aim at Donald Trump Feb. 28, criticizing his rival's "small hands" and "spray tan." (Marco Rubio) 
 
 It turns out that this Rubio adviser, dispiritingly enough, may be on to something. 
 
 Here are a couple of charts that illustrate the point. 
 
 Democracy Corps, the polling firm run by veteran Dem pollster Stan Greenberg, today released an in depth study of Republican voter attitudes towards the 2016 campaign. There’s a ton to chew on in this study, which is based on a poll of 800 Republican voters nationwide. The poll tested how various attacks on Trump are perceived by Republican voters, and found this (click to enlarge): 
 
 The most effective attacks on Trump are that he’s an “egomaniac and entertainer that cares more about gaining power and fame than helping the country.” The second most effective attacks are those raising doubts about whether he can be trusted to have his finger on the nuke button, and the third most effective attacks spotlight Trump’s penchant for saying “very disrespectful” things about women. 
 
 Only 27 percent of Republicans say it raises doubts for them that Trump says he’d carry out mass deportations and and fewer still say it raises doubts for them that Trump denies climate change. 
 
 The 46 percent of Republicans who say doubts are raised by Trump’s egomania and frivolity seems, if anything, low. But it turns out that number is substantially higher among moderates (click to enlarge): 
 
 Fifty six percent of moderate Republicans find attacks on Trump’s egomania and lust for power to be troubling. Rubio is making an appeal to relatively moderate, college educated, and suburban Republican voters in the Super Tuesday states and beyond. You can bet that the Rubio campaign has focus groups and internal polling that also show that this is the most effective way to go after Trump. 
 
 In the above poll, high percentages of moderates, it turns out, are also troubled by Trump’s policies and statements towards immigrants and Muslims. But one can’t help but notice that Rubio has not made a serious, sustained moral critique of those policies and statements a part of his arsenal of attacks against Trump. This is probably in part because he doesn’t want to alienate some of Trump’s less committed supporters, in hopes that he, rather than say Ted Cruz, might inherit them. 
 
 But this also points to a broader problem Rubio faces, which is that he can’t go really hard at some of the very things that are enabling Trump to succeed. It’s difficult for Rubio to attack Trump as too far to the right on immigration, because Rubio’s own alleged softness on immigration is one of the reasons he may be struggling among GOP primary voters. It’s also hard for Rubio to fault some of Trump’s other substantive positions, such as they are, because it may be Trump’s very willingness to break with conservative orthodoxy on multiple fronts (he seems to envision some kind of government role in giving everyone health care; he opposes free trade deals; he won’t touch entitlements) that is helping him succeed. Rubio generally faults Trump as a phony conservative, and attacks Trump for not having specific plans, but he seems reluctant to get all that specific about the true policy implications of their ideological differences. As Brian Beutler explains, the apparent appeal of Trump’s ideological heterodoxy is precisely what makes it so hard for establishment Republicans to attack him. 
 
 All of which means that joining Trump’s circus, as Rubio’s own adviser puts it above, really may be the only option for taking down Trump. And who knows: it’s still possible that it could work. Of course, as Jonathan Chait writes, there may well be a danger that this approach could end up diminishing Rubio, too. And it’s hard to see how anyone can beat Trump at this particular game, given that his talent for it seems pretty boundless. ||||| Trump nails Rubio: I have beautiful hands 
 
 One of Marco Rubio’s latest barbs played right into Donald Trump’s “beautiful hands.” 
 
 Trump has begun referring to the Florida senator as “Little Marco,” so Rubio went after the businessman’s “small hands.” 
 
 “He’s like 6-2, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-2,” Rubio said at a rally in Roanoke, Virginia, on Sunday. “Have you seen his hands? You know what they say about men with small hands — you can’t trust them.” 
 
 The billionaire responded to Rubio's remarks Tuesday at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. 
 
 “Actually I’m 6-3, not 6-2 — but he said I had small hands. They’re not small, are they?” Trump asked, extending his hands for supporters to see. “I never heard — I never heard that one before. I’ve always had people say, ‘Donald, you have the most beautiful hands.’” 
 
 Former GOP candidate and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker got into the action on Tuesday afternoon, tweeting a photo of his hand before signing dozens of bills into law. The tweet itself made no direct reference to any other candidate's hands. 
 
 Photo of my hand before signing 58 bills into law today: pic.twitter.com/crM19dwjNi — Governor Walker (@GovWalker) March 1, 2016
– The size of Donald Trump's hands has been a thing for decades, stretching back to the days when Graydon Carter dubbed him a "short-fingered vulgarian" in Spy magazine. In his November editor's letter for Vanity Fair, Carter wrote that over the years, and as recently as last year, Trump would send him the occasional photo, "generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers." Those photos did little to convince Carter, and now Marco Rubio has apparently taken up the mantle. Politico quotes Rubio as saying the following on Sunday: "[Trump is] like 6-2, which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-2. Have you seen his hands? You know what they say about men with small hands—you can’t trust them." While in Ohio on Tuesday, Trump swung back, trotting out one of his favorite adjectives in the process: "Actually I’m 6-3, not 6-2—but he said I had small hands. ... I never heard—I never heard that one before. I've always had people say, 'Donald, you have the most beautiful hands.'" In noting Rubio's new tactic, the Washington Post writes he "may be on to something." It reports on recent polling that identified the type of attack that would be most likely to raise serious doubts about Trump among GOP voters. The winner: attacks framing Trump as an "egomaniac and entertainer that cares more about gaining power and fame than helping the country." More policy-minded attacks—think immigration, climate change, big oil—were far less effective. (See previous Trump-Rubio slams, including one about "wet pants," here. And John Oliver's tirade on Trump also addresses his hand size.)