Rubio campaign on brink of death without dignity: Jill Lawrence
Sometimes you ride the wave, and sometimes it sweeps you under.
Marco Rubio has experienced both in a national political career that started in 2010 with a huge assist from the surging Tea Party movement and now is fading amid miscalculations, inconsistencies and a new rebel movement that has ignored rather than embraced him.
Neither the mood of the moment nor Rubio’s vaunted political skills have done him any favors. If anything, the brutal testing ground of the Republican presidential campaign has raised questions about earlier assessments of the man his pollster once called “the Michael Jordan of American politics.”
That was apparent early in the final debate before what could be Rubio’s final contest, in his home state on Tuesday. The subject was Disney laying off 250 tech workers in Orlando, replacing them with foreign workers, and requiring many of them to train those replacements. The online chatter during the segment was that Rubio had not been helpful to those laid off. In the debate itself, Donald Trump noted with his customary modesty that “Very importantly, the Disney workers endorsed me, as you probably read.”
Michael Jordan would not have let that happen.
Rubio’s advantages theoretically included his natural political gifts, his age (a fresh-faced 44), ethnicity (Cuban-American), personality (articulate and upbeat), and substance (a deep thinker). But little went as planned. It turned out that Rubio was not the only young Cuban-American in the field. And while he started off trying to emit Reaganesque sunniness, he ended up driving the race even deeper into the gutter with his suggestions that Trump wanted a mirror during a debate break to maybe “make sure his pants weren’t wet” and had “small hands” that perhaps signified the smallness of something else.
Some of Rubio’s ideas have been problematic, particularly his defense of George W. Bush’s foreign policy and safety record on terrorism. And then there is Rubio’s rejection of his key role in writing the bipartisan “Gang of 8“ immigration reform bill that passed the Senate. In 2013 he called it “good piece of legislation.” In February he said it was merely “the best we could do” and had not been “headed towards becoming law.” Which is too bad for the GOP and for him. If some version of it had been enacted, the party might not be saddled with a frontrunner who is driving away sorely-needed Hispanics and provoking more of them to become citizens so they can vote against him.
The immigration bill and the gutter attacks on Trump illuminate the core of Rubio’s problem. It is one of confused identity created by his tendency to careen from one position and tactic to another.There were the recent veers from Reaganesque optimism to Trumpesque vulgarity to regret over having gone there. (“That’s not something I'm entirely proud of. My kids were embarrassed by it, and you know? If I had to do it again, I wouldn't,” he said this week when NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he regretted the “schoolyard stuff”)
And there was his boomerang in 2013 when he realized that the Gang of 8 immigration bill and his role in it were going over very badly with the militant GOP base. To restore his Tea Party cred, he abruptly became Obamacare’s enemy no. 1 — even pushing for a government shutdown, along with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, in an absurd quest to make Obama kill his own signature achievement.
At the time, political scientist Dante Scala made a prescient observation about Rubio’s lane changes from insurgent to establishment and back. "It appears right now as if the path is not clear for Rubio. And sometimes if one foot is in each camp, neither camp adopts you as their own," he told me. Another prescient commenter: Craig Robinson, an Iowa Republican who said of conservatives: "I think it is going to be a while before they're mesmerized by Marco Rubio again."
Rubio could have run a different race. Listening to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders argue over what is possible and practical to achieve under our system of checks and balances, I kept imagining Rubio having the same debate with Cruz, who loves courting confrontation in the service of lost causes.
The truth is that Rubio chose the establishment lane when he joined the Gang of 8 and in fact that was his natural home. He happened to be far more conservative than rival Charlie Crist, Florida’s moderate Republican governor, when they were facing off in 2010 Senate primary, and therefore he was a comfortable repository for Tea Party discontent, money and hope. But he’d been speaker of the Florida House – not exactly an outsider ready to storm the barricades.It’s hard to avoid wondering what would have happened if Rubio had taken ownership of his establishment identity and his immigration work throughout his Senate tenure and presidential campaign. At least then, with his candidacy hanging by a thread and dependent on avoiding humiliation in his own home, it would have been a death — or near-death — with dignity.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/03/11/marco-rubio-dropout-cruz-trump-column/81644078/
