Marco Rubio’s moment: Can he meld establishment cash, outsider appeal?
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Version 0 of 1. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is a politician of considerable natural talents, and those attributes will be put to the ultimate test in the coming months. For in his bid to become the Republican presidential nominee, Rubio seeks to walk a hybrid path, that of the establishment outsider, in a party torn between the two camps. Rubio’s record of nearly two decades in elective office pegs him as a political insider. He started as a West Miami city commissioner. Barely in office, he set his sights on the Florida legislature. Once there, he soon became majority leader and later rose to the ultimate insider position as state House speaker. To win his seat in the U.S. Senate in 2010, he vanquished Charlie Crist, eventually driving the sitting governor from the GOP. He arrived in Washington in 2011, fully credentialed as a tea party conservative. In his third year as a freshman senator, he helped broker a deal that led to Senate passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which included a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants. Only later, when sentiment among conservatives shifted and support for such legislation became politically untenable, he walked away from it. [The story behind Marco Rubio’s cut-down of Jeb Bush] Today, to match the mood of the GOP primary electorate that has put Donald Trump and Ben Carson at the top of the polls, Rubio seeks to grab a piece of the mantle of the outsider. He is not running for president from the Senate. To the contrary, he is running for the White House by running away from the Senate. Rubio knows that identification with the Senate is toxic to many of the Republican voters who will have a significant influence on who becomes the party’s nominee. These voters see the Senate and the House as symbols of corrupted politics that need to be shaken to their roots. They also see those bodies as evidence of the impotence of the party’s leaders and their collective failure to enact and implement a conservative agenda. Rubio’s disdain for the Senate isn’t that unusual for politicians with ambitions to become president. When Barack Obama was a freshman senator, he quickly came to dislike the institution as well. But he was more careful than Rubio to disguise those feelings. Rubio’s disparagement of the Senate and his record of absenteeism as a presidential candidate have become an issue in his campaign. His political mentor, Republican presidential rival Jeb Bush, thought he could use that record of missed votes against Rubio in this past week’s debate in Colorado. Rubio turned the issue back on Bush in a devastating exchange that has left the former Florida governor struggling for political oxygen. [Rubio and Bush tangle in Colorado] Meanwhile, Rubio is suddenly soaring, at least among the insiders. His performance in Wednesday night’s debate enhanced his appeal to the party’s wealthy establishment. They see in Rubio a skilled politician whose biography and youth could provide a sharp contrast with Hillary Rodham Clinton, if she wins the Democratic nomination, and help expand the party’s appeal to Hispanic voters. Evidence of establishment validation for Rubio’s candidacy came on Friday, when billionaire Paul Singer, one of the party’s most sought-after fundraisers and bundlers, signed on with the senator’s campaign. More of such support is likely to come in the days ahead, and Rubio badly needs it. He raised just $5.7 million in the third quarter, less than half as much as Bush and about half as much as Sen. Ted Cruz (and far behind Carson). Rubio has plenty of super PAC money to draw on, as do Bush and Cruz (R-Tex.). But the demise of former Texas governor Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the 2016 race shows that without a hefty bank account to fund campaign operations, super PAC money is no salvation. Now it’s likely that Rubio will find bundlers flocking to his campaign in bigger numbers, cementing his reputation as a favorite of the GOP’s moneyed elite. For Rubio, the sudden attention is a mixed blessing. He no doubt would have preferred to stay in the shadows until closer to the first votes in Iowa and New Hampshire. His success will bring scrutiny and more questions for him and for a campaign team that operates with supreme confidence. The Bush campaign already has made clear how it hopes to go after him. [Can Jeb Bush bounce back?] The questions for Rubio are both political and substantive. For all his potential, he has yet to strike a chord with sizable numbers of voters. Realistically, there is time enough for those numbers to move, but in the hothouse media and political climate of this election, he’ll face pressure to show improvement quickly. His path through the early states is problematic. In Iowa, he will bump up against Carson, Cruz, Trump and possibly the past two winners of the caucuses, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. In New Hampshire, he must deal with Trump, Bush and two other mainstream conservatives, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. In South Carolina, he will benefit from a team of advisers with roots in that state. Substantively, he will draw attention in at least three broad areas — taxes and the economy; social issues; and foreign policy — that probably will become issues in a general election against the Democrats. His tax plan offers notable benefits to the poor, but it also provides major cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Those in the middle class come third. According to a post-debate posting by the Tax Foundation, “The smallest benefits from the Rubio-Lee [Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah] tax plan would go to taxpayers between the 40th and 90th percentiles of income.” Rubio deftly skirted a question about the distribution of his tax cuts during Wednesday’s debate by highlighting the benefits for those at the lower end of the scale. Questions will keep coming about whether he is overly generous to those at the top at the expense of the middle class. On social issues, he has outlined a hard-line position on abortion. He opposed exceptions to abortion prohibitions in cases of rape and incest. He has supported legislation that includes such exceptions, he has said, in an effort to reduce the number of abortions. On foreign policy, Rubio has schooled himself on the issues and has been among his party’s sharpest critics of the policies of the Obama administration. But the comparisons with Obama — a young freshman senator with an aspirational message but no executive experience — will inevitably lead to an examination of whether he has the judgment, maturity, toughness and decisiveness to outmaneuver Russian President Vladimir Putin, develop an effective policy to combat the Islamic State, confront the Iranian regime and generally deal with the dangerous world the next president will inherit. Since the debate, Rubio’s campaign has blasted a series of e-mails with the subject line, “Wait for what?” He claims “the establishment has been telling me for years” to “wait my turn.” He has no intention of doing that and the spotlight is now on him as he tries to translate establishment kudos for his debate performance into anti-establishment, grass-roots support for his candidacy. Corrections: An earlier version of this report incorrectly stated that Sen. Marco Rubio opposes an exception to abortion prohibitions in cases when the life of the mother is at stake. The report also misspelled the last name of former Florida governor Charlie Crist. |