Marco Rubio wants his identity back
“Someone stole my credit card,” Marco Rubio said when I entered his office last week. He was standing behind his desk, resting an iPad on one hand and peering at the screen intently, as if it might at any moment reveal the origin of Stonehenge. He glanced up and apologized for keeping me waiting.
“I got a fraud alert, and I keep hitting this button, but it’s not going through,” he said. He squinted a little harder at the screen. “What is that?” He sounded out a name that sounded like “Mahjong,” or at least that’s how I remembered it later. “Is that a store?”
Writers are always searching for apt metaphors, but in Rubio’s case you could do a lot worse than to start the discussion with a case of stolen identity. Almost as soon as he walked into the Senate four years ago, at the age of 39, Rubio was regarded as a future president, or at least a top-tier contender. Republicans talked about him — a lot — as the harbinger of a movement in their party toward youth, diversity, and swing-state appeal, all without sacrificing the ideological purity that motivated their base. Rubio seemed to solve a lot of problems all at once.
As Rubio prepares to announce his presidential campaign on April 13, each aspect of his political persona seems to have been pirated by a better-known rival. He can’t by a long shot claim to be the tea party’s standard-bearer in the field (that’s probably Ted Cruz, or maybe Rand Paul); or the only Latino (Cruz is Cuban-American, too); or the freshest face (Scott Walker is newer on the national scene and only a little older); or the guy who locks down Florida (Jeb Bush does that).
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., arrives to speak during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 27, 2015. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Until recently, it wasn’t clear that Rubio, facing a series of difficult calculations about his future, would even enter the presidential fray. (It means he can’t defend his Senate seat and stands a pretty good chance of ending up back at a law firm.) In national and primary-state polls, which are pretty much useless at this stage of a campaign except to tell you how much work a candidate will have to do to get a serious hearing, Republican voters routinely relegate Rubio to single digits — well behind Bush, Walker, Paul and Ben Carson, and in most polls trailing Chris Christie, too.
Rubio does his damnedest to seem blasé about this shrunken stature, although you have to imagine there are moments when he wishes he could hit a button on his iPad and report all of these guys for swiping his mojo.
“I used to tell people all the time, ‘Today it’s me, and tomorrow it’ll be someone else,’” he told me with a shrug. “That’s just the nature of how politics is covered. In many ways, it resembles sports coverage. Everyone wants to know who’s winning and who’s ahead.”
Rubio speaks remarkably fast and in long, eloquent bursts, with a formality that’s surprising in a young politician. Interviewing him, as I’ve done a few times now , can sometimes feel more like visiting an interactive exhibit than like an actual conversation.
If I had Walker’s secret campaign stash, I’d bet a lot of it right now that Rubio’s biggest moment in national politics is still ahead of him, timed to land precisely when it matters most.
Touch the screen where it says “economic policy,” and Rubio expounds in fully formed paragraphs on the transition from agrarianism to industrialism at the dawn of the last century. Hit “foreign policy,” and he speeds through the complexity of challenges in El Salvador, Guatemala, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Israel, China and the “post-Soviet European order” without seeming to take a breath.
No comments:
Post a Comment