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March 29th, 2024

Insight

Marco Rubio is the establishment GOP's new kid in town

John Kass

By John Kass

Published Feb. 4, 2016

If presidential politics were some half-bad movie you'd find while flipping through cable on a sleepless night, you might see this one:

"Jeb! Wandering Pilgrim in New Hampshire"

And there's Jeb Bush in a ball cap and Carhartt jacket, sitting alone in a Chili's parking lot on the outskirts of Nashua, "Live Free or Die" plates on his pickup truck, tears in his eyes.

With his upper lip trembling, he sings along to an Eagles song on a dusty radio.

"You're walking away and they're talking behind you/ They will never forget you 'til somebody new comes along/ Where you been lately? There's a new kid in town."

So just who is that new establishment kid in Republican town?

It's Marco Rubio, that's who.

Rubio, the senator from Florida, came in a victorious third in the Iowa Republican caucuses, or at least that's how the establishment GOP and their handmaidens in establishment media will spin it.

He's now the heir to the Bush family establishment legacy whether the Bushes like it or not.

And Jeb didn't even get a bowl of lentils, did he?

So now Rubio is poised to formally accept the establishment GOP, their blessing, and their gifts of campaign cash, and positive media coverage and neoconservative attention, as he offers himself as the guardian of a true and traditional conservative future.

"They told me that we have no chance because my hair wasn't gray enough and my boots were too high," Rubio told his crowd in Iowa before heading to New Hampshire. "They told me I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line."

It was a great speech actually. It wasn't shrill and angry like Hillary Clinton's tired status quo exhaustion on the Democratic side, after her embarrassing virtual tie with endearing but extreme socialist Bernie Sanders.

And it wasn't shrill and boring like Sen. Ted Cruz on the Republican side, with Cruz clubbing the enthusiasm out of all who watched as he went on, and on, and on. And on.

So at the risk of sounding like some establishment meat puppet made tame by Karl Rovian experiments involving bells, steak powder and saliva, I'd say the Rubio speech as he left Iowa for New Hampshire was stellar.

It was delivered without a teleprompter and was virtually perfect in tone and theme, demonstrating Rubio's talents in this area and contrasting well with Hillary's desperate truth-bending and that thin ghost of Bill standing behind her.

Instead, Rubio was optimistic and inclusive. As a son of immigrants myself, his immigrant story is uplifting, extremely American and inviting to Democrats as well.

Rubio also hit Clinton and Sanders hard on the most important theme of the 2016 campaign: that a Clinton restoration or a Sanders revolution will mean a Supreme Court controlled by liberal justices who'll protect big-government excesses at the cost of individual liberty.

And he demonstrated how he'll zero in on Hillary Clinton's email scandal, something that perhaps Sanders should have done to draw contrast between him and Hillary and her cynicism on the issue.

"Hillary Clinton is disqualified from being the president of the United States, because she stored classified and sensitive information on her email server, because she thinks she's above the law," Rubio said. "And Hillary Clinton cannot be commander in chief, because anyone who lies to the families of people who have lost their lives in the service of this country can never be commander in chief of the United States."

The first part is, for Clinton, devastating, given the ongoing FBI investigation of how classified emails ended up on her private email server and made ripe for picking by Russian and Chinese intelligence. She did so, Mrs. Clinton said, for the sake of "convenience."

But I don't know about that last one referencing Benghazi. Did former President George W. Bush tell the truth about those weapons of mass destruction as pretext for his invasion of Iraq and using military might to impose democracy on people who couldn't handle it?

Ask the parents of the American dead.

But rhetoric is only one aspect of presidential politics.

And if you're drawn to rhetoric and style alone, you're apt to fall into group or tribal think. But that's meat puppetry, and if you're reading this, I figure you've decided not to be a meat puppet.

Politics is about balancing interests and building coalitions, which is why Rubio is in an excellent position now.

Cruz, the true conservative in the top three, won Iowa and demonstrated that Trump wasn't inevitable after all. And Trump didn't do as well with the Evangelical Christian vote in Iowa. Perhaps the Donald should read that Greek novel, "Two Corinthians," to find out why.

The Republican establishment loathes the conservative Cruz. They can't control him. And they fear Trump, because a Trump presidency would mean they would each have to fall on their knees before the barbarian so they could maintain some level of influence with their K Street lobbyist friends.

So Rubio is the establishment GOP heir to the Bush legacy now. Not Jeb! Rubio's made it clear he's a Bushian, from his insistence on a military buildup to his neo-con eagerness for foreign military adventures.

These aren't conservative in the least. But with the nation in an insurgent mood, Rubio gives the establishment the best chance to hold on to power.

Rubio is fresh-faced. He's young. He sounds like what liberal media calls conservative.

Though he might be a Marco-come-lately, he is the establishment GOP's new kid in town.

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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.