Rubio updated
Now that he’s Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has been giving a lot of interviews. A few examples can be found here and on many blogs. I’ve noticed a pattern in the comments – which usually seem to be from people on the right – a great many of which say something like, “He’s so much better than I thought he’d be.”
I think Rubio got a bad reputation on the right for a number of reasons, the first (but only among people old enough to remember) being his participation as a new senator in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” attempt to deal with illegal immigration in a bipartisan manner including a path to citizenship for illegal aliens already in the country. A second reason for his problematic reputation was twofold, and occurred during his 2016 run for president: Trump’s “Little Marco” nickname for him (Rubio isn’t tall; he’s officially listed as 5’9″ or so, but having actually stood next to him once during the 2016 campaign, I’d say he’s at least an inch shorter), and Chris Christie’s mocking tactics concerning Rubio’s repeating himself during a Republican primary debate in February of 2016. I did a lengthy analysis of the latter; you can find it here, and I think it shows that Rubio was nowhere near as bad as Christie’s attack made him out to be.
Trump’s “Little Marco” nickname for Rubio drew blood not only because Rubio is relatively short, but because he also has a baby face and looks younger than he is. Plus, he is fairly young even now – 53 – and at the time of that debate he was 44. When he became a senator he was forty, by my calculations. Pretty darn young.
But I’ve always been impressed by Rubio, who is one of the most articulate politicians in stating a case without being pedantic or obscure or affected. That’s what people are responding to now in those YouTube videos featuring him. I was surprised and pleased when Trump chose him for the SOS position, and so far so good.
NOTE: Rubio’s birth name is Marco Antonio Rubio – Mark Antony?
He has matured and is a very good Sect State.
Rubio is great at representing the US, and President Trump. What a change!
he has done much better than expected, just recently he negotiated a release from the Taliban,
Trump hasn’t selected dolts who cannot speak without a script. Trump can be confident that they will give impromptu articulations of administration policy–and expose MSM people for being partisan dolts. Trump hit it out of the park in his second term selections.
Marco Rubio is one more example of the high quality of Cuban refugees in the US. Ted Cruz, another. I just read Francisco Jose Moreno’s memoir: Before Fidel: The Cuba I Remember. He was active in the anti-Batista resistance before Fidel’s July 26, 1953 failed uprising at the Moncada Barracks. He left Cuba in 1956. Having been offered positions in Castro’s government, he returned in 1959, but declined them, and left Cuba, never to return. He made the point in his book that Batista wasn’t the cause of Cuba’s woes, but a symptom of them. Corruption, for example was widespread. He also noted that many of those in the resistance were as authoritarian as Batista. (His evaluation of Fidel before 1953: “overbearing.”)
NOTE: Rubio’s birth name is Marco Antonio Rubio – Mark Antony?
I’ve run across only one Marco Antonio in my life.
Not sure that Chris Christie has any business criticizing ANYONE.
yes I learned to loath Christie early when they pushing him as a prospective candidate, because he had a loud mouth, but like Michigan J Frog, he was quiet when it mattered, like throwing a real reformer like Bret Schundler overboard to the teachers union, also quietly pushing a Hamas lawyer to the superior court,
Rubio came up from West Miami, a small hamlet in Dade County, then rose up in the state legislature, which is much like herding cats, by that time I was living in Broward, he fell in line with the establishment on the amnesty question, even though he had been supported by the tea party, unlike Cruz who held firm, part of the reason why I voted for him in the primary,
And now for something just a little bit different…(but does it make a difference?)
“Gazan peace activist: ‘Campus protestors suppress voice like mine, it’s about fantasies’;
“Palestinian Arab peace activist and former Gazan resident Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib speaks with i24NEWS about his journey, his work countering the wave of campus antisemitism, and what he wants Israelis to know about Gazans.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/405686
Wasn’t he the one who had that awkward water drinking incident?
You can count me into that group, though I would have expressed it as ‘Rubio is doing much better (so far!) than I was _afraid_ he would’.
It’s just about impossible to overstate the importance of the Gang of Eight Bill to Rubio’s career, or the damage it did. I remember noting back in 2016, when Rubio ran for President, that every time he appeared on TV, an imaginary chyron was flashing ‘GANG OF EIGHT!!!!’ over his head in the eyes of the people who he needed to be his core voters.
Rubio was TEA Party favorite when he first was elected. The thing is that a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, fundamentally misunderstood the TEA Party back then, and paid a price. Though they were superficially protesting spending priorities (hence the TEA acronym: Taxed Enough Already), the movement was built atop pre-existing roots.
Some Dems accused the TEA Party movement of being astroturf, citing the suddenness of its appearance and organization as evidence. In fact, it really is almost impossible for such a movement to materialize out of nowhere spontaneously.
But the TEA movement didn’t do that. It was built atop the networks of activists and active private citizens that had come together to oppose the Bush/Kennedy Amnesty bills in 2006 and 2007. But that in turn meant that the TEA Party movement was born already anti-open borders and anti-immigration amnesty. More than one libertarianish GOPer initially welcomed it and then recoiled when they realized that the TEA Partiers wanted closed borders and more immigration limitations and enforcement.
In short, the TEA movement was proto-Trumpist.
Rubio came in as a TEA favorite, but when he either voluntarily joined the Go8 or was roped into it (some people think Schumer made a point of including Rubio to destroy his future political viability), he was doing _precisely_ the opposite of that his TEA Party supporters wanted from him. I’m not sure he fully realized it, though, until a New Hampshire straw poll of TEA Party types saw Rubio come in eighth out of eight options in a poll of preferred Presidential candidates. Dead last, not even 2 years after his initial big win.
That’s hung over him ever since.
If he has Presidential aspirations still, Trump has thrown Rubio a lifeline, because the sort of performance he’s been putting in as Secretary of State is just the sort of thing that _might_ offset some of the bad memories and cause hardcore conservatives and MAGA types to take a second look.
@ Gringo > “Trump hasn’t selected dolts who cannot speak without a script. Trump can be confident that they will give impromptu articulations of administration policy–and expose MSM people for being partisan dolts. Trump hit it out of the park in his second term selections”
Agreed.
I saw an article discussing whether or not Trump was a narcissist, and the author cited this as a reason for concluding “not.”
Yes, he has an enormous ego and a yuge mouth, but he chooses to work with competent people* and isn’t afraid that they will show him up.
Compare and contrast to Obama and Biden.
* That is, when he’s doing the picking, as opposed to being misled by the GOPe in his first term — and even then many of them were competent in their field, just not in agreement with his agenda.
I am 5’7″, so he is taller than I am.