“When America needed a bold plan of action from our commander in chief, we instead got a lecture on love, tolerance, and gun control designed to please the talking heads at MSNBC,” Mr. Rubio said. “The result of all of this is that people are afraid. And they have every right to be.”
.. He then offered his own diagnosis: “The reason why is, in 2008 we elected as president in America someone who wasn’t interested in simply fixing the problems in America. We elected someone as president in 2008 that wanted to fundamentally change America.”
Marco Rubio Doesn’t Add Up
His promise seems to lie instead in his biography as the son of hard-working Cuban immigrants, in his good looks, in the polish of his oratory, in the nimbleness with which he debates.
And in this: Reasonable people can’t stomach the thought of Trump or Cruz as the nominee. We can’t accept what that would say about America, or what that could mean for it. Rubio is the flawed, rickety lifeboat we cling to, the amulet we clutch. He’ll prevail because he must. The alternative is simply too perverse (Trump) or too cruel (Cruz).
.. But in a Washington Post/ABC News poll in late November, his support was more than twice as strong among Republican voters 65 and older as among those under 50.
And he’s at sharp odds with millennials on a range of issues. Most of them favor same-sex marriage; he doesn’t. Most are wary of government surveillance; he’s one of its fiercest proponents. Unlike him, they wantmarijuana legalized. Unlike him, they want decisive government actionagainst climate change.
In Iowa, Whispers of an Anti-Cruz (and Pro-Rubio) Alliance
Many supporters of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the last two winners of Iowa’s Republican presidential contests, are grappling with a pair of grim realities as the 2016 caucuses approach. Not only have their candidates been stuck in the low single digits for months in Iowa, but they also view Cruz, the new front-runner, as a phony opportunist who has pandered to Evangelicals for political gain, particularly in Iowa.
.. At the heart of these amorphous efforts is an agreement among supporters of both Huckabee and Santorum that if their candidate can’t win Iowa, they should at least work toward stopping Cruz from running away with a victory.
.. A primary target of such a campaign would be Iowa’s churches, where Cruz’s opponents believe parishioners have been misled about the Texas senator’s record on the issue of same-sex marriage.
.. While Cruz’s remarks do not represent an overt contradiction, his view — that each state should make its own marriage laws — is atypical for a candidate who, like Cruz, has worked tirelessly (and rather successfully) to win the endorsements of Evangelical leaders across the country.
.. “There isn’t a substantive policy difference between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz,” Beynon says of the immigration dispute. “The difference is, Marco Rubio is honest about his position. So while Senator Santorum disagrees with both of them, at least Senator Rubio is being honest with the American people about what his position is.”
Marco Rubio and the Problem of the Political Natural
Rubio’s conservatism is not in any major substantive way an update of George W. Bush’s, and if you hated the original you probably won’t love the sequel, which harbors the same instinctive militarism, rigid social conservatism, and gauzy talk of freedom. But Rubio has President Obama’s sharp, outsider eye for human longing and suffering: his talent is in giving stray, chaotic conservative interests an emotional coherence. Walking away, I had the same feeling I’ve had each time I’ve seen him: the man is a natural.
.. The comedy of this combat is that the politics of the Republican primary more or less forbid Rubio from making the obvious case against Cruz—that he is too conservative to be elected President—and so Rubio has gamely fought to tarnish Cruz as an “isolationist hawk,” noting that taking an isolationist line during the Tea Party ascendancy, as the Texan did, before insisting that he would “carpet bomb” ISIS until “the sand glows,” as Cruz has done recently, suggests someone who is fundamentally not serious about being President.