The Fall Of Marco Rubio
We can now, in hindsight, identify last February as the apex of the Rubio bubble. Over the next few months, conservatives shook off Rubio’s charm offensive and whipped themselves into a familiar frenzy against his immigration-reform plan. They picked apart details just as they had every major legislative proposal of the Obama era—it was long; it was complicated; it gave power to bureaucrats; it would hand Obama a victory. A May National Review cover depicted Rubio, smiling between no-longer-tolerated deal-maker John McCain and loathed liberal Democrat Charles Schumer, under the headline “Rubio’s Folly.” By June, Hannity and Limbaugh had turned unreservedly against Rubio’s plan. By October, the Rubio compromise had grown so radioactive on the right Rubio had to, humiliatingly, renounce his own legislation.
Chait finishes with this delicious flourish:
Everything Rubio touches has turned to shit. The cumulative humiliations have transformed the former party savior into a figure himself in need of saving. How did it all go so badly? The Rubio Plan had sounded clever in the abstract. The premise, as Krauthammer had explicitly laid out, was that the party could jettison a single-issue position while holding fast to its cherished anti-government bromides. (“No reinvention when none is needed,” urged Krauthammer. “Do conservatism but do it better.”) Krauthammer may have been right that Republican elites would more willingly, or even eagerly, toss aside their fear of illegal immigration than revise their cherished anti-tax, anti-spending dogma. But broadening the party’s economic message has turned out to be easier. Republicans have delivered a series of well-received speeches advocating new proposals for health care, tax reform, and the like, softening the harsh plutocratic message they projected with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. None of this has prevented them from continuing to wage a campaign to immiserate the poor by cutting food stamps, ending unemployment benefits, and denying Medicaid to the uninsured. When you don’t need to grapple with specifics or difficult trade-offs, writing speeches with uplifting themes is extremely easy.
Passing immigration reform, on the other hand, is hard. It requires writing bills. Conservatives liked the sound of Rubio’s immigration plan, but it could not survive legislative contact with the enemy. Compromising on immigration means handing a legislative accomplishment to Obama, a taboo that dwarfs any ideological commitments. And so Rubio was cast in a role nobody could play. The party elders who thought they were enlisting him as the Republican savior were instead making him its martyr.
Copyright 2014 Liberaland
By: dave-dr-gonzo
David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.
* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.