New York Times
By Jeremy Peters
May 22, 2015
They
use words like “historic” and “charismatic,” phrases like “great
potential” and “million-dollar smile.” They notice audience members
moved to tears by an American-dream-come-true
success story. When they look at the cold, hard political math, they
get uneasy.
An
incipient sense of anxiety is tugging at some Democrats — a feeling
tersely captured in four words from a blog post written recently by a
seasoned party strategist
in Florida: “Marco Rubio scares me.”
What
is so unnerving to them at this early phase of the 2016 presidential
campaign still seems, at worst, a distant danger: the prospect of a
head-to-head general-election
contest between Mr. Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, and
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Yet
the worriers include some on Mrs. Clinton’s team. And even former
President Bill Clinton is said to worry that Mr. Rubio could become the
Republican nominee, whittle
away at Mrs. Clinton’s support from Hispanics and jeopardize her
chances of carrying Florida’s vital 29 electoral votes.
Democrats
express concerns not only about whether Mr. Rubio, 43, a son of Cuban
immigrants, will win over Hispanic voters, a growing and increasingly
important slice of
the electorate. They also worry that he would offer a sharp
generational contrast to Mrs. Clinton, a fixture in American politics
for nearly a quarter-century who will turn 69 before the election.
As
her supporters recall, Barack Obama beat Mrs. Clinton for the
nomination in the 2008 elections after drawing similar contrasts
himself.
Patti
Solis Doyle, who ran Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign for most of
the 2008 contest, said Mr. Rubio “could have the ability to nip away at
the numbers for the
Democrats.”
Ms.
Doyle, the first Hispanic woman to manage a presidential campaign,
added that Mr. Rubio could allow Republicans to regain a “reasonable
percentage” of the Hispanic
vote. In 2012, just 27 percent of Hispanics voted for the Republican
candidate, Mitt Romney.
Mr. Rubio “is a powerful speaker,” Ms. Doyle added. “He is young. He is very motivational. He has a powerful story.”
Recognizing
how essential it is to win Hispanic support, Mrs. Clinton has gone
further in laying out an immigration policy than she has on almost any
other issue, saying
that she would extend greater protections to halt deportations of
people in the United States illegally. She has also hired a former
undocumented immigrant to lead her Latino outreach efforts.
Her
own strategists, their allies in the “super PACs” working on her behalf
and the Democratic Party all say they see plenty of vulnerabilities in
Mr. Rubio’s record and
his views. And they are trying to shape the perception people have of
him while polls show that he is still relatively unknown: Yes, the
Democratic National Committee said in a recent memo, Mr. Rubio was a
fresh face, but one “peddling a tired playbook of
policies that endanger our country, hurt the middle class, and stifle
the American dream.”
So
far, Democrats who have combed over Mr. Rubio’s voting record in the
Senate have seized on his opposition to legislation raising the minimum
wage and to expanding college
loan refinancing, trying to cast him as no different from other
Republicans.
The subtext: He may be Hispanic, but he is not on the side of Hispanics when it comes to the issues they care about.
Democrats
will try to use Mr. Rubio’s youth and four-year career in national
politics against him, depicting him as green or naïve — a liability at a
time when unrest
abroad is a top concern. “A Dan Quayle without the experience,”
suggested Christopher Lehane, a veteran strategist who has worked for
the Clintons.
Bill
Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, who is of Mexican
heritage, said Democrats would also make an issue of Mr. Rubio’s mixed
record on how to overhaul
the immigration system: He initially supported a Senate bill to grant
people in the United States illegally a path to citizenship, but he
later backed down.
Mr. Richardson said that would poison his chances with Hispanic voters. “His own Hispanic potential would defeat him,” he said.
It
is also unclear how much Mr. Rubio would appeal to Puerto Ricans,
Mexicans and other voters with Latin American ancestry who may not feel
much cultural affinity with
a Cuban-American.
Still,
when many Democrats assess Mr. Rubio’s chances, as nearly a dozen of
them did for this article, they put him in the top tier of potential
candidates who concern
them the most, along with former Gov. Jeb Bush, another Floridian who
is courting Hispanics, and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Mr.
Rubio’s heritage and his youth could be particularly dangerous to Mrs.
Clinton, they said. Each of those points could help neutralize one of
her biggest strengths:
the opportunity to help elect the first female president, and the
experience Mrs. Clinton gained as secretary of state.
Mr.
Rubio already appears to be pursuing that strategy. By calling himself a
candidate of the “21st century, not the 20th,” he seeks both to turn
Mrs. Clinton’s long career
against her and to entice voters who may desire a change of direction.
In Florida, Democrats who have watched Mr. Rubio’s rise warn against playing down his strengths.
Former
Gov. Charlie Crist, who lost to Mr. Rubio in a 2010 Senate race after
dropping his Republican Party affiliation, said he admired how Mr. Rubio
told the story of
his immigrant parents — his mother a maid, his father a bartender — and
how they worked hard so that he could succeed. “It’s hard to get more
compelling than that,” Mr. Crist said.
John
Morgan, a major Democratic donor in Florida who will hold a fund-raiser
for Mrs. Clinton next week, said he planned to raise the issue of Mr.
Rubio’s strengths with
her.
“Jim
Messina talks about how elections are about where we want to go from
here,” Mr. Morgan said, naming the strategist who helped President Obama
win two national elections.
What is problematic about Mr. Rubio, he said, is “his theme will be,
‘We don’t want to go back; we need to go forward.’ ”
“I
think they do underestimate him,” Mr. Morgan added. “He’s energetic,
he’s photogenic, and he will say whatever you want him to say.”
Steve
Schale, the Florida strategist who wrote the “Marco Rubio scares me”
blog post, said that when he worked for the Democratic leader of the
Florida House of Representatives,
his boss, Dan Gelber, had a saying about Mr. Rubio’s effect on crowds,
and about his sincerity: “Young women swoon, old women pass out, and
toilets flush themselves.”
And
Mr. Gelber himself recalled the day in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2008 when
he and Mr. Rubio, then the speaker of the State House, gave their
farewell speeches. He spoke
first, followed by Mr. Rubio, as Mr. Gelber’s wife looked on.
“She’s sitting there weeping,” Mr. Gelber recalled, still incredulous. “And I look up, and I mouth, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
Mr.
Gelber praised Mr. Rubio’s ability to use his family’s story to convey
compassion for people marginalized by society, but he said he believed,
as many Democrats do,
that this was disingenuous.
“It’s a little maddening when his policies are so inconsistent with that,” Mr. Gelber said. “My head would explode.”
A
Rubio-Clinton contest could ultimately come down to Florida.
Republicans can ill afford to lose the state if they hope to win the
White House. And bleeding Hispanic
votes could make Mrs. Clinton’s path much harder.
“Losing
a point among whites means winning Hispanics by about 5 percent more
just to make up that loss,” Mr. Schale wrote in his memo on Florida’s
election demographics.
If Democrats continue to lose white voters, he added, Mr. Rubio’s place
on the ballot would only complicate matters.
“He should be the one you don’t want to face,” Mr. Schale wrote.
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