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Marco Rubio: full-blooded conservatism with a smile
To some the Republicans’ best hope is a shallow opportunist; to others, an extremist. Might Marco Rubio be both?
http://www.economist.com/news/un ... ers-extremist-might
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HIS father Mario, a struggling bartender; Oriales, a hotel maid and devoted mother; Pedro, his garrulous, cigar-smoking grandfather, known to the grandchildren as Papá; an elder brother, also Mario, who became a Green Beret: the supporting cast in Marco Rubio’s back-story is a technicolour pageant of striving Cuban immigrants turned patriotic Americans. If Mr Rubio somehow manages to seize the Republican nomination from Donald Trump—a feat that, after his second-place finish in South Carolina, he seems best-placed to achieve—Americans will hear his story often. But what, exactly, is its moral?
In Mr Rubio’s telling, his biography is a fable of America, which “changed the history of my family”. In no other country could someone who, as a child, was taken by his father to ogle the dreamlike mansions of the rich, rise to the Senate, and possibly beyond. It follows that America must not forsake its rugged individualism: “We don’t want to become like the rest of the world,” Mr Rubio insists, delighting his many fellow exceptionalists.
It is also, of course, a story about Mr Rubio’s own exceptionalism—as some voters, knowing American meritocracy is often more promise than reality, intuitively understand. “It’s really cool,” said a young man cradling a baby after a rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, “that he could navigate through all these obstacles—it wasn’t just handed to him on a silver platter”. The contrast with some other candidates, privileged in money, schooling or connections, is plain. As for his difficulties with mortgage payments and ill-advised property dealings, which some have used against him: Mr Rubio adduces them, like his student debt and rueful talk of post-dating cheques in pinched times, as yet more evidence that he alone can “talk to people who are living the way I grew up”.
With its hardscrabble, everyman beginning, the tale also has a gratifyingly upbeat pay-off, featuring a photogenic family—his student-sweetheart wife is a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader—as well as success. And, as no other candidate could, Mr Rubio recounts all this as insinuatingly as a Hollywood weepie. Were he not a politician, it has been said, he could have been a televangelist; he might also have made it as a stand-up comic. His scripted jokes are actually funny, and, contrary to the impression created by his robotronic malfunction in the Republican debate in New Hampshire, he ad-libs with an easy charm. He can explain complex subjects, such as the national debt, persuasively. He banters about hip-hop.
These attributes bolster his claim that, in a field of Republican gargoyles, he is likeliest to prevail in November. Yet the longer he remains in the race, the louder two key criticisms will become. They seem contradictory, but both contain elements of truth. One is that, beneath the altar-boy haircut, winning smile, chirpy voice, football talk, jokes and jokes about football, Mr Rubio is as ideologically extreme as anyone in the contest. The other is that the feel-good narrative masks a void.
The pollster in the sky
“Marco Rubio,” Jeb Bush once said, “makes me cry”, a remark that would have been prophetic had he not added “for joy”. Mr Bush was Florida’s governor during Mr Rubio’s lightning rise through its house of representatives, which took him, in short order, from whip, to majority leader, to become, aged 34 (he is now 44), its first Cuban-American speaker. Alongside the portraits of his grizzlier predecessors that hang in the capitol in Tallahassee, his is startlingly boyish. Mr Bush presented him with a sword, symbolising conservatism; at least, that is what it symbolised then.
Strikingly, in the tussle that ended with Mr Bush’s withdrawal on February 20th—a face-off that, in a saner primary season, might have been the headline drama—most of Florida’s Republican establishment lined up behind the former governor. “They all went one in one direction like fish in a tank,” says Johnnie Byrd, a previous Florida speaker and among the minority who favoured Mr Rubio. Gratitude for Mr Bush’s patronage helps explain why the “Jebbies” picked him; some may just have jumped too early. But the preference also reflects a sense, even among the operators in Tallahassee, that the younger man’s breakneck ambition was offputting. Dwelling on opinion polls, fundraising, the mechanics of the game, Mr Rubio’s memoir, “An American Son”, reinforces the image of a pure politician. “Did God read polls?” he asks when, during his long-shot bid for the Senate in 2010, his wife tells him to trust the Almighty.
Both the resentment, and the air of weightless ambition, have been reinforced by his luck. For if Mr Rubio could not rely on a parental Rolodex, as he puts it, his career has been blessed in other ways: seats opening up at serendipitous moments, money and well-paid jobs magically materialising. Norman Braman, a Miami car-dealing tycoon, took a lucrative shine to him, donating generously and employing his wife. Not long after he secured the Florida speakership, Mr Rubio landed a $300,000-a-year post at a politically connected legal firm (he once specialised in land-use law). Some of his jobs were not terribly demanding, suggesting, to his critics, a pattern of absenteeism stretching to his poor attendance record in the Senate.
“He’s just like Barack Obama”, worried a woman in Florence, where Tim Scott, a South Carolinian senator, whooped Mr Rubio onto the stage like a boxing announcer. The implicit concern is that he has more offices to his name than achievements, or, some say, principles. They point, above all, to his gymnastics over immigration: running for the Senate, he opposed a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, then embraced it as part of a doomed reform in 2013; now, in the xenophobic heat of the campaign, he downplays that idea, arguing that terrorism has upended even unrelated aspects of his policy. (This revision could forfeit some of the Hispanic votes that Republican apparatchiks covet—though given the tensions between Hispanic communities, confidence that he would deliver them might be naive.)
Still, anyone who thinks Mr Rubio entirely devoid of convictions should watch his farewell speech in Tallahassee in 2008. “God is real,” Mr Rubio passionately declared: “He loves you...whether you are an embryo or behind bars.” God’s providence, and Mr Rubio’s gratitude for it, often feature in his story. His faith is longstanding: as a boy, he would don a sheet after mass and pretend to be a priest. (It is also ecumenical: in Miami, he attends both Catholic and Baptist churches, and during a childhood spell in Las Vegas went to a Mormon one.)
And for all his pole-climbing, his philosophy has been consistent. A better reading of his flip-flop-flip on immigration may be that his liberal stance was an anomaly. His tougher line today—no Syrian refugees; fewer family-reunion visas—fits into an ultra-conservative outlook that his story has sometimes camouflaged.
Smile and smile and be a Tea Partier
A standard critique of Republican strategy is that it exploits social issues to divide and distract groups whose economic interests lie in more redistributive government. Mr Rubio’s tactic, alleges an old adversary from his days in Florida politics, is to “use [his background] as a shield to push forward his agenda”. Or, as Mr Rubio writes in his memoir of Barack Obama: “his personality and language gave an impression of moderation, but his ideas and voting record” revealed a zealot.
Take his avowed commitment to helping the little guy. He acknowledges the alienation some members of minorities feel, drawing on his own experiences in cosmopolitan Miami. He speaks warmly of early intervention for disadvantaged toddlers, and of leniency towards mildly straying youngsters. He can be insightful about America’s precarious place in a globalised, post-industrial economy. But when it comes to taxation, his priorities lie elsewhere. One of his favourite lines is that the poor are not made richer by making the rich poorer. Under his plans there is no fear of that: his proposal to scrap taxes on capital-gains and dividends would instead make the rich richer.
The exigencies of the primaries have sharpened Mr Rubio’s tone. But, in content, he is a veteran hardliner. Dan Gelber, formerly the Democratic minority leader in the Florida house, calls him “the best spokesman that the severe right-wing could ever hope for” (adding that he “was never dishonest or disreputable”). Indeed, while Mr Rubio is more clubbable than his fire-breathing rival Ted Cruz—witness his ongoing stream of endorsements from congressmen and governors—he and Mr Cruz, another Cuban immigrant’s son and devout first-term senator, have more in common than either cares to admit.
For example, though Mr Rubio doesn’t deny climate change, as Mr Cruz does, he says, in effect, that America shouldn’t do much about it. He claims gun controls fail wherever they are tried. Like Mr Cruz he wants to abolish the department of education; ditto, naturally, Obamacare. He opposes abortion unless the mother’s life is endangered. He wants the legalisation of gay marriage to be reversed.
His upbringing shaped his global outlook as well as his morality. His focus on foreign affairs may partly be designed to imbue his youthfulness with gravitas. But it can also be traced to the seething entrepôt of Miami-Dade, which, quips Mr Gelber, may be the only county with a foreign policy. What he somewhat prematurely calls “the Rubio doctrine” reflects the congenital neoconservatism of many exiles: he may not be quite as hawkish as his revered Papá, who thought Margaret Thatcher should invade Argentina as well as the Falklands, but it is close. He says he would cancel the nuclear deal with Iran on his first day in office, and undo the normalisation of relations with Cuba. He wants to send American troops into Syria, and take on Bashar al-Assad and Islamic State at once. He threatens to pack off more terrorists to Guantánamo.
The final chapter
“Just because someone is wrong,” Mr Rubio says, “doesn’t mean they are bad”. Wrong is wrong, however, and, beyond the politesse, he shows little appetite for compromise on the neuralgic issues that will continue to divide America under its next president. That might hamstring him in the White House; more immediately, it might prevent him reaching it. His well-honed formula—robust conservatism with a smile—will attract some voters who share his instincts but are repelled by harsher rhetoric. Whether it can convert moderates in sufficient numbers is unclear.
That is where the story comes in. “It makes him a whole person, a real person”, said a supporter in a barn in Gilbert, as the obligatory country music rolled. Transmuting astringent economics into compassion, promising tolerance without a cost, wreathing jeremiads in sunshine, the story might even do the trick. Mr Rubio’s inauguration is the climax its logic demands. In the end, its meaning is simple. The moral of the story is its teller, Marco Rubio.
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