Drink In The Hypocrisy
Now that Jeb! Bush insists on illustrating almost on a daily basis that he is indeed NOT the smart Bush, Marco Rubio is quietly waiting in the wings as the beltway press begins their now stale "Rubio fresh face" narrative all over again. Rubio, who once saw Jeb! as a mentor, is happily waiting to stab him in the back to make his move with aid from the press.
But one problem for Rubio is that, as Jeb! exposes himself as just another establishment GOP shill, there's little daylight between the two. Rubio is just a dumbed down version of Jeb! Bush. Policy-wise, they're the same guy. And while Rubio may look good on paper to some, sooner or later he'll be forced to go off script. Once he opens his mouth without one, the wheels on the Rubio boy genius campaign will come off, leaving just another casualty among the ever so slowly diminishing clown car candidates forced out of the race. (I've chronicled Rubio's views and many of his extreme policy ideas here and here.)
Rubio rose to national fame in 2010 when he sold himself as a Tea Party outsider, and just like everyone else before him, claimed he was just the change establishment D.C. needed. When he ran in 2010, Rubio proposed shutting down the government for two years, because "job creators and too many regulations!" You know, the same kind of things both he and Jeb! say now. And while Rubio wasn't able to fulfill his wish to take two years off as soon as he won his Senate seat by shutting the government down, he still managed to find a way to fulfill that for himself by holding the record for the most missed votes in the Senate. Your taxpayer dollars at work.
I've written numerous times that Rubio has spent more time running around making speeches, setting out on trips around the world pretending to be a foreign policy expert, and basically pretending to run for president virtually since day one, but Rubio himself all but admitted that recently when he was confronted by questions about his 60% missed voting record. He's missing votes because he's running a Presidential campaign. It's almost as if he's echoing Mitt Romney, saying: I can't do my job in the Senate, I'm running for President for Pete's sake! Unfortunately for Rubio, that doesn't explain all the missed votes before he began that presidential campaign. But I digress.
So now that Rubio sees an opening, thanks to Jeb!'s floundering campaign, he's recycling his old "outsider" talking points from 2010.
"Yes, I've worked in the Senate for four years. But I'm not of the Senate," Rubio told Sean Hannity last night. Rubio said he went to the Senate because "I didn't like the direction of this country" and that's why he's dumping the Senate and running for president.
"I didn't like the direction of this country." That's virtually the same argument he made when running for the Senate.
Did he change the "direction of this country" once he got the Senate job? No, of course not. He became an absentee politician in pursuit of yet another political office. You know, what one refers to as a "career politician." Rubio knows the term well, because that's what he and his party called Charlie Crist when Rubio ran against him in 2010, and what they called Crist again when he ran against Rick Scott for governor in 2014.
There are those who say that Rubio will consider running for governor later on if his Presidential campaign fails, as it almost certainly will once he's forced to talk unscripted. So he's already planning for his next campaign before this one has run its course.
But sure, he's just another outsider, not a career politician.
Right Marco?
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