Marco Rubio has gotten himself into a pickle, hasn’t he? Is the shine off the apple, or is there something behind that Bush? These questions forced the first of the faux 2016 presidential candidates to show up in Iowa 10 scant days after the election to give a speech. Rubio officially found out on Nov. 6 that Americans rejected the fearful-anxious movement that catapulted him onto the national scene in the first place. The Tea party is not dead but it does not have as much of a future as the ink it gets.
What Marco Rubio said during his transparent trip to Iowa last week is not going to cut it for him or his party – or the nation. The country today needs real leadership – political brinksmanship, even – not the cautious catnip Rubio offered last week. The country needs more from all of us. It needs us to be less ideological. It needs the no-tax pledge signers to understand fiscal reality. It needs environmentalists to understand natural gas development. It needs a new integrity. It needs less media. It needs a new way to fund campaigns. It needs a lot more than what we are giving it. And it certainly needs more from young telegenic Hispanic/Latinos like Marco Rubio who are supposed to be a great part of the future.
Even though the media reported that he had distanced himself from his party’s failed presidential nominee, Rubio traveled all the way to Altoona to repeat the same doggerel that led to Mitt Romney’s defeat. Democratic strategists will not have to jump in early to define the candidates readying for 2016 like they did Romney this year. Would-be Presidents like Rubio will do just fine on their own, thank you.
Does the junior senator from the Tea party truly believe that voters – whose snap judgments come faster and last longer – are going to accept someone repeating the same claptrap that doomed Romney? And who practically said in another report that he believes in creationism? I think most Americans might want to believe that a loving God created the universe but that its formation might have come through evolution instead of a seven-day Cecil B. DeMille spectacular. The ongoing Republican attack on science is an attack on one of America’s sacred traditions. Science helped create, no pun intended, the country’s economy. And protecting the economy is supposed to be the Republicans’ strong suit. Science – more so than Rubio’s ‘limited government conservatism’ – remains the change agent the nation will depend on always for its economic and social development. Some grad students debating each other over a pitcher of suds in dozens of colleges across Iowa itself had multiple keener insights than that crowd who gathered to hear Rubio on the same night. Of the two, which crowd would most Americans want to be a part?
Having heard about this bit of biblical weirdness from Rubio, I went back to listen to the full speech in Altoona. Nothing in his remarks about creationism but, holy cow, has ever a candidate been so shackled by the power of bromides? On and on he went, reciting the same refrains that have no more texture than marshmallows. Rubio said he grounded his views in what he heard from the people he had listened to during the long presidential campaign. The only problem, Marco, is that those people no longer constitute the electoral majority – or the future of the country.
Rubio is trapped. On the one hand the Tea party that made him is no longer selling and on the other hand two portentous developments have cropped up in Florida, Rubio’s alleged base. One is the onward movement of the Cuban electorate, however smaller each day, toward its original Democratic home. President Obama carried the Cuban American vote in Florida on Nov 6. People forget that before the Cubans went bananas over their betrayal by John F. Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs, most of them were very friendly to Democrats. Only after their anger got the best of them did they become flaming Republicans. Cuban Republicans were the first angry Republicans, and they are part of the old America fading quickly that Rubio champions. Once any of the fecund rumors about Fidel Castro’s demise proves true, the last link to the immediate past will have been broken. Rubio might soon need to spend more time in Aventura than Altoona. A part of the new demography remaking the nation, he ironically does not understand it and might be a casualty of it.
The second glitch is as ominous: The evident moves by the state’s former governor, Jeb Bush, to run for President. No one other than his own son, George Prescott Bush, went on CNN to say he ‘certainly hopes’ that his father runs for the White House. This was not an errant missile shot from Gaza. But it is just as dangerous. Two individuals from the same state cannot be on the same presidential ticket. If Rubio does not run now – and aggressively – to win his party’s nomination, he risks perhaps not even being Vice President should Bush win the nomination, and Rubio risks possibly not being on a national ticket until – get this – 2024.
It would be an okay move were his Tea party something more than a spent wave. The Bush name is not what it used to be, thanks to unemployment rates that could near nine percent again if the Tea party – them, again! – gums up the fiscal works in Washington in the next few days. But a Bush would trump a Rubio.
Going over the cliff with the Tea party while being caught behind a Bush is more than a pickle. How do you like them apples?
Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.