welp @nycsouthpaw pic.twitter.com/oyUkYi2hQV
— darth!™ (@darth) March 17, 2016
Because it’s never too late for dissecting the opposition. Michael Grunwald, who wrote that cover story (but not, he stresses, the original REPUBLICAN SAVIOR tag line), defends himself in Politico:
In February 2013, Senator Marco Rubio let me sit in on the politics course he taught part time at Florida International University. He knew I was writing a cover story about him for Time magazine, but he still gave his students a master class in self-promotion in my presence, explaining the machinations he had used to persuade his colleagues to elect him speaker of the Florida House of Representatives: “You raise money for them. You befriend them. You make sure your kids are friends with their kids. And then you cut the best deal you can.” He also candidly described how partisan redistricting had driven him and his caucus toward ideological extremes: “If you know the only way to lose your seat is to get out-conservatived in a primary, you’ll never let anyone get to your right.”…
… I thought Rubio made so much sense for the GOP in 2016; he was the quintessential modern Republican. He stood for almost everything Mitt Romney stood for—massive tax cuts, muscular foreign policy, social conservatism—but while Romney, a former Massachusetts moderate, spoke Republican as a second language, Rubio was fluent. The one issue where he strayed from orthodoxy was immigration, but the Republican National Committee’s “autopsy” after Romney’s defeat had urged the party to moderate its views on immigration to attract more Hispanics to the party. And what better messenger than a telegenic young Cuban-American with a beautiful family and an inspiring personal story, the son of a bartender and a maid with an amazing rap about the American Dream?…
Ultimately, though, Republican voters didn’t want a conservative version of Obama, another fresh-faced minority first-term senator who gave a great speech. They wanted an anti-Obama, a bombastic billionaire who wasn’t a politician, wasn’t no-drama, wasn’t interested in public policy, wasn’t going to improve Republican outreach to minorities, and definitely wasn’t a law professor or a community organizer. They didn’t want a new rock star with broad appeal. They wanted a rock thrower who reflected their anger…
I will miss Marco Rubio most of all for saying the smartest thing in this campaign: "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing."
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) March 16, 2016
Jeb Lund, in Rolling Stone, on the “Death of a Mannequin”:
…Better things were supposed to be in store for Marco Rubio. The people paid to tell you that couldn’t stop telling you.
He was young and good-looking and told inspiring stories that made the hairs stand on the backs of the necks of people who can be inspired by American conservatism. He stood a generation apart from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and he could deliver a new way forward, for the American people. He was the one candidate that the Beltway chattering classes knew the Democratic establishment most feared, and some Democrats agreed with them. He could make his voice warble when saying “America” emphatically…
The fatal streak running through the Rubio narrative was the same one that runs through so many conservative candidates. For someone bound by blood to the cult of the self-made entrepreneur as the only non-cop/soldier of any value as a citizen, Rubio merely spent two awkward belches in the private sector amid a career built on taxpayer dollars, donor largesse and patronage. He was a career politician and glad-hander calling out government cronyism with a sense of self-awareness so broken that he couldn’t weather the barest standards of his own ideology…
Throwback Wednesday: Rubio, Rue-Bye-Oh…Post + Comments (149)