Marco Rubio’s Campaign Running on Empty Already

Florida’s Junior Senator Marco Rubio has shot himself in the foot, and the wound may be terminal to his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, which already seems to be running on empty. Speaking on the record on CBS’s Face the Nation, the 43 year-old first generation Cuban-American has been touting himself as the youth candidate, but his pronouncements moderating his previously expressed conservative positions on gay marriage may have offended the more conservative Republican base, and especially outraged the substantial fundamentalist faction of that voting block.

Saying that he believes that sexual preference is decided at birth is, however, just as ignorant as saying that sexual preferences aren’t genetic. There is no hard data for either position, although advocates for each position would have you believe otherwise. As recently as last month (March, 2015), the American Psychiatric Association issued a statement on its website confirming the consensus among actual experts that no one knows what causes people to be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or even asexual. Apparently, Rubio has more recent information.

Announcing his candidacy with the catchy but grammatically incorrect phrase, “The time has come for our generation to lead the way towards a new American century,” Rubio’s rhetoric is reminiscent of another youth candidate. No, not that one. Barack Obama’s campaign against Arizona Senator John McCain was very much a “youth against age” story and, considering how many feel about the Obama presidency, perhaps touting one’s youth might not be such a good idea after all.

Rubio’s natural constituency isn’t the youth vote because he has done nothing to appeal to young voters. He hasn’t proposed any student loan reforms, nor has he embraced any job creation legislation that might provide work for jobless Millennials. Until now, he hasn’t even paid lip service to youth voters but, all of a sudden, he’s the youth candidate? However, several potential Republican nominees have been harping upon the need to cut Social Security and other safety net services to appeal to a younger generation that has been schooled to believe that those services won’t be there when it is their turn to use them. Nevertheless, a recent Pew Foundation study reported that 73 percent of survey respondents in the 18 to 29 age group identified with liberal positions, against just six percent who identified with conservative views, suggesting that the youth vote isn’t going to be in Republican party’s back pocket.

Rubio’s natural constituency is in the Hispanic community, which is increasingly restive about Republican resistance to liberalizing immigration rules. He failed in his initial effort to sponsor a bill through the Senate that would have mildly moderated the current confusing and ineffective immigration policies, which contrasts strongly with the Democratic party’s proposals for a path to citizenship. A presidential executive order does not carry the force of law, but it is a statement of intent. Republican promises to undo what Obama has tried do not sit well with either that constituency or with the youth vote which, in recent elections, have demonstrated a decided preference for immigration reform. In fact, the long-term Republican preference among Latino voters has weakened significantly, with self-identified Republicans in the Cuban-American community falling from 64 percent in 2002 to 47 percent in 2012, while Democratic preferences doubled from 22 percent to 44 percent over the same ten-year period, according to another Pew Foundation study.

(In a rather egregious example of putting lipstick on a pig, Forbes magazine ran an article in 2014 titled, “Here’s Where Republicans Are Winning With Hispanics.” After you get past the misleading headline, it turns out that Republicans are narrowing the gap among Hispanic candidates, rather than actual voters, increasing the number of Hispanic Republican officeholders from 122 to 166 over a nine-year period. Democratic Hispanic officeholders still hold 1,345 seats. Game, set and match: Democrats.)

The Obama administration’s decision to relax the 55 year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba has also stolen much of the wind from Rubio’s sails about that issue by preempting any campaign rhetoric based on normalizing relations with Cuba. Indeed, the hard-core anti-Castro contingent in the Cuban-American community has painted itself into a corner by demanding that there be no rapprochement with Cuba until both Castros – Fidel (88) and Raul (83) – are gone and the communist government of Cuba is dismantled. Apparently the Cubans aren’t into youthful leaders.

The problem is that there is no international mechanism that could dismantle the communist system. The Cuban people will have to do that themselves if they want to, but it appears that all the Cubans who want to oust communism are here in the United States, not in Cuba. Communism in Cuba isn’t going anywhere until the Castros are gone, and the Castros have stubbornly refused to die, leaving Rubio nowhere to go with either immigration reform or relations with Cuba, not to mention the imaginary youth vote.

Attempting to recast the decision about whether to permit gay marriage as a state’s rights issue, as Rubio did during his Face The Nation appearance Sunday, is going to turn into another unproductive campaign plank for Rubio. The right-wing of the Republican party, which still controls the nominating process through the convoluted and Gerrymandered primary rules, won’t buy the state’s rights argument for gay marriage.

Even if they did buy it, the current right-leaning Supreme Court has already made it abundantly clear that gay marriage is a federal issue, not a state issue, through a series of decisions in which the high court has refused to overturn lower federal court rulings invalidating state anti-gay marriage statutes. It is also rather unseemly for a man running for president to start off by telling us what he won’t allow the federal government to do with respect to gay marriage, undermining the very office for which he has thrown his hat into the ring.

If elected, Rubio would become the third youngest man ever to serve as president of the United State, following Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when he succeeded William McKinley after McKinley succumbed to wounds received in an assassination attempt, and John F. Kennedy, who was 43 when he was elected. Kennedy, in turn, is followed by Bill Clinton and Ulysses S. Grant on the presidential age list, both of whom were 46 when they entered the Oval Office. (Barack Obama, by the way, was next on the list at 47.)

Those are some pretty impressive presidential incumbents to follow. including one Mt. Rushmore figurehead, a murdered icon, an economic wizard, and the only man who could rightfully claim to have saved the Republic not once or twice, but three times, although he himself would never have said such a thing.

It is instructive to compare the current crop of Republican candidates with either Roosevelt or Grant, both of whom were legitimate war heroes. Grant would have been a Medal of Honor winner for his conduct during the War with Mexico, but the medal hadn’t been invented yet. Roosevelt won his medal (posthumously, in 2001) for the charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American war, in a battle that not coincidentally resulted in the liberation of Cuba from Spain. Curiously, Roosevelt was awarded his medal 57 years after his son, Brig. General Theodore Roosevelt, III, received his Medal of Honor – also posthumously – for leading the breakout from the Normandy beachhead on D-Day in 1944. (Both men, oddly enough, also served as Assistant Secretaries of the Navy.)

Grant went on, of course, to save the nation by winning the Civil War, then had to spend four years as the de facto military governor of the nation while controlling the increasingly insane behavior of Abraham Lincoln’s former vice president, Andrew Johnson, and eight years more implementing Lincoln’s plan for the reunification of the nation through Reconstruction. Roosevelt created the national park system, championed the environment against encroaching mercantile interests, won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War, and championed workers and small farmers against the monopolists.

These are the kinds of men the Republicans used to offer the people as their candidates, men who were elected to great offices because of the great things they had already done. They didn’t have to promise anything. They had already delivered. So far, at least, all Marco Rubio has done is run for office. He has failed to create any new laws through his legislative efforts and, after the failure of the 2013 bipartisan effort to craft an immigration reform bill, he said that the experience taught him that Americans would not accept immigration reform until the borders were “secured.”

Not much of a pronouncement from someone whose family came here, legally, in 1956 in order to find a better life for themselves, rather than 1959, as he has repeatedly stated, to escape from Castro’s communist regime, which did not come into power until three years after the Rubios left. (To be fair, the New Republic published an article in 2012 reporting that the Rubios left Cuba in 1956 to escape the Batista regime, returned to Cuba in 1959, after Castro came to power, and left again in 1961, after Castro’s love affair with communism became self-evident. At the very least, Rubio is vague about his own family’s timeline.)

Memo to Rubio’s handlers: No American president is ever going to secure the borders. The only way to create an impermeable border is to create a police state. You can’t have one without the other. In effect, then, by suggesting that Americans won’t accept immigration reform until the borders are secured, Rubio – without realizing it, of course – is advocating for a police state by accepting the idea that immigration reform depends on secure borders.

Rubio’s record as a Senator is lackluster at best. Since arriving in the Senate in 2011, Rubio has sponsored 19 bills and co-sponsored another 88 bills with a zero percent success rate, according to OpenCongress.com. In fact, he has the second worst record as a proposer of legislation, although with a zero for 19 record it is hard to see how anyone else could have done worse. He also has a zero for 88 record for co-sponsorship of legislation, which gives him the worst record in the Senate as a co-sponsor. Granted, he was working in a Democratically controlled Senate and behaviorally dysfunctional Congress until January of 2015, but the fact remains that Rubio has been a singularly ineffective senator, rather like another young Senator, Barack Obama.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, a very young American president-elect (another ineffectual senator, by the way) announced on the occasion of his inauguration that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed.”

Now, that was a generational moment. John Kennedy epitomized his generation, even if he did come from a highly privileged, élite, entitled family because he had been there and back again, fighting a war with the members of his generation. They had voted for Dwight David Eisenhower, twice, because he had led them through a great war, and they would have voted for him again, and again, had the Republicans not pushed through a Constitutional Amendment limiting the president to two terms. They voted for Kennedy because they knew he had fought beside them, regardless of entitled status, over Nixon, who never saw combat.

(Nixon’s tent did see combat, however. It was destroyed by enemy fire once, but he wasn’t in it at the time. To be fair, Nixon tried to “get into the shit” in the parlance of a later war, but he was singularly inept at finding the war he wanted to get into. This was odd, because his MOS was as a logistical specialist, sending other men into the combat he was unable to find.)

Marco Rubio has no business batting in the same lineup and his claim that his candidacy is a generational milestone belies one basic fact. Rubio isn’t a child of the 21st century. He was born and raised in the 20th century. Claiming to be the “youth” president is just as vacuous as claiming to be for immigration reform or gay rights when you really aren’t in favor of either.

If you are handicapping the 2016 campaign, Rubio will soon join the ranks of the “also rans.” He’s just another Ted Cruz wannabe, without either charisma or capital. Cruz has some charisma and plenty of money. Rubio has neither. Be thankful for small blessings.

(Correction: When John Kennedy gave his “torch has been passed speech” he was already president, having been sworn into office a few minutes before delivering his inaugural address. editor) 

 Featured image  from Marco Rubio campaign website

 

Loading