Marco Rubio Cuban Views Shaped in Childhood
Students of generational identity, starting with Karl Mannheim, have long observed that people are disproportionately influenced by the events that occur in their late teens and twenties, once they leave their parents’ homes and begin seeing the world through independent eyes. A classic example is Hillary Clinton, who attended Wellesley College and Yale Law School at the height of the Vietnam War, and in rejecting the war came to reject her father’s right-wing Republicanism as well.
.. In American Son, however, Rubio roots his political identity not in incipient adulthood but in childhood. His grandfather, a Castro-hating shoemaker named Pedro Victor Garcia who left Cuba in 1956, “was my mentor and my closest boyhood friend,” he writes.
.. Rubio writes, “Reagan’s election and my grandfather’s allegiance to him were defining influences on me politically. I’ve been a Republican ever since.” Rubio’s defining political influence, in other words, occurred when he was 9 years old.
.. Michael Kinsley once called Al Gore “an old person’s idea of a young person.” It wasn’t a compliment back then. And it won’t serve Marco Rubio well right now.