New York Times (Opinion)
By Lawrence Downes
April 14, 2015
Marco
Rubio announced his presidential campaign on Monday evening in Miami,
in a speech that was supposed to be all about the future, about the 21st
century, about the
triumph of young energy over old ideas.
In
other words, as they said back in 1992, Bill Clinton’s day: Don’t stop
thinking about tomorrow. Don’t stop – it’ll soon be here!
Yes,
it will. But will it be better than before? Mr. Rubio insisted that it
would, with a disdainful remark about his elder rival Hillary Clinton:
“Just yesterday, a leader
from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us
back to yesterday. But yesterday is over, and we are never going back.”
While
he was saying that I was looking over Mr. Rubio’s shoulder, at his
campaign logo. “Marco Rubio: A New American Century” has a 48-state map
of the United States dotting
the “i” in “Rubio.” It’s too bad for Alaska and Hawaii, but that’s the
map you have to use if you’re going to turn the country into a graphic
element.
It’s
the map from 1958, which, on reflection, seems to be pretty close to
the era on which Mr. Rubio, for all his talk about looking forward, was
trying to pin the country’s
hopes and dreams.
His
speech was mostly an anthology of Republican applause lines – pro-God
and liberty, anti-tax and anti-Obama — grafted onto a gauzy recollection
of his family’s story
and his humble roots as the son of a bartender and maid. When he talked
about a country that “no longer graduates students with mountains of
debt and degrees that do not lead to jobs, and that graduates more
students from high school ready to work” – that
was definitely the late ’50s he was summoning. It was the time when
women’s reproductive rights were not protected, when universal health
care was a liberal fantasy, and when nobody, but nobody, thought of
“being passive in the face of Chinese and Russian
aggression.”
There
was more in that vein, but, to be fair, it was just one speech with an
unfortunately faulty theme. (Not as flawed as Senator Ted Cruz’s
campaign announcement, where
he oddly and endlessly channeled John Lennon.) Mr. Rubio looked young
and nervous, as if he were running for high school class president, and
seemed utterly relieved to get to the end, when he could do the (very,
very dated) political ritual of the
song-plus-the-wife-and-kids-waving-at
the-crowd, with everything but the balloons.
Mr.
Rubio gave a canned speech, trying, with the canny desperation of an ad
campaign from the “Mad Men” era, to inject some freshness into a tired,
wrinkly G.O.P. brand.
For that he deserves some credit, at least. He does not seem driven by
an unseen madness, as many in his party are. And he has been courageous
before, when he helped to draft a sensible immigration law that enraged
his party’s nativists. Mr. Rubio has spent
years trying to live that down, to deny that he was once smart,
thoughtful and sensible on immigration. In the months to come, on that
issue and so many others, Mr. Rubio may be scrambling to find a message
that sells and an identity that fits in a party that
has lost its mind. Here’s hoping that when his head finally stops
spinning, it’s facing forward again.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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