The Republican Party has a tendency to throw its heroes under the bus (often without realizing it). It’s like the satirical tribe in a far off land who always throws its gods into the raging volcano. Theirs is the bus of lost hope. A volcano of dreamed goals motivated by their own paranoid nightmares. When you’re stuck on an island – far, far away from the rest of civilization – you tend to lose a lot of political heroes to the volcano. Par for the course.
No one denies (Rush Limbaugh included) that the GOP is a total mess and in political disarray, but they continue the distinct managerial problem of throwing all the ideological eggs (unfertilized, of course) into the proverbial political basket. The basket this gestational cycle: Senator Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio has a lot of issues. He is an issue. Issue politicians rarely last long.
I’m certain he’s an OK guy, but as is the truth with most people who go into the business of acquiring more power… the man seeks too much power too quickly, and doesn’t spend much time thinking about a smart and responsible to maintain it. Rubio is a politician born and managed entirely of and by opportunity. Marco Rubio is not the savior of the Republican Party. Marco Rubio will not find the golden goose that will suddenly make minorities in this country forget about the decades of racist policies enacted by the GOP. Senator Rubio is a face who, just as Karl and the Koch brothers seek, will sign anything that the leaders of the party put on his desk. He seeks power via the notoriety of being a Latino republican. He was carried into office by the Tea Party wave, and the wave of hope from a lost GOP will wash him out from whence he came.
Don’t get me wrong, Rubio won’t necessarily disappear next election cycle, but he will never be presidential material, and clearly isn’t the savior of the GOP as so many magazines have cover-storied him. Too many blind missteps, too many open questions, too many interviews in which he sounds good, but 10 minutes later we realize the man didn’t say a damn thing! (It’s a nice talent, but not one that can make it on a national stage.)
Climb and climb and climb as he might, Marco Rubio is destined to be a party player, not a party leader. He’s not brave enough to chop down the beanstalk. All he’s programmed to do is climb to retrieve the prize… then bring it back down again to his metaphorical mother. Similar to Paul Ryan, really, who is a political party player more than an actual leader – but poor Congressman Ryan doesn’t even know it! Just as Paul Ryan repeats the talking points and puts them in every policy document he can find to prove his ultra-conservative stature, so too does Senator Rubio.
For the duration of his career.
Just look at his eyes. That’s the same look a young boy who has a boyhood crush on his third grade teacher gives her when she stands by his desk (arms folded, smells faintly of oranges), points to a problem, and tells him he got the answer wrong; then points to the correct answer with a comforting and encouraging look. Ultimately, the kid writes in the answer he’s told because he’s seeking approval from the teacher more so than from a desire to know the answer. Marco Rubio wants to please the teacher. He’ll always have that slight, puppy-dog-need-to-please-the-teacher look in the back of his eyes. Eyes like that are not the eyes of the savior of the Republican Party. (Nor are Rand Paul’s, by the way… but that requires a level of psychology that is currently well beyond my interpretive means.)
Senator from the great state of (what-the-hell-is-wrong-with) Florida… you’re a good man. You’re a good husband and father, and probably not bad to hang out with at a BBQ on a sunny day, but…
… and then you say, but what?…. But you’re not a national leader…. Sorry kid… you got some of the gift… but you ain’t Neo. The republicans had you programmed long before you even had a chance to become anything more than what they want you to be. When you won your seat in the Senate, you were already being carried half-way up the volcano. It’s not your fault… it’s just the republican way on that isolated island.
