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It Might Not Be So Easy to Rally Around Rubio
It Might Not Be So Easy to Rally Around RubioBy Margaret Talbot at the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/it-might-not-be-so-easy-to-rally-around-rubio
"SNIP............
One thing Rubio is not, however, is moderate, or even close to it. And to the extent that far-right politics are actually off-putting to voters in a general election—to Democrats but also independents and younger voters, who are instinctually liberal on social issues—that poses a bit of a problem for the scenario in which Rubio is the savior of reason and the G.O.P. He ran for his Senate seat in 2010 with Tea Party support. He is firmly opposed to same-sex marriage and to abortion, with no exception for cases of rape or incest or the health of the mother—only for the mother’s life. In an article in National Review, in which Jim Geraghty lays out the case that “Marco Rubio Is Plenty Conservative,” he quotes Rubio in the first Republican debate: “Future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”
Rubio has a perfect record from the N.R.A. and a lifetime rating of ninety-eight per cent from the American Conservative Union. He is opposed to raising the minimum wage. As Geraghty notes, he “contends the legislative efforts to fight climate change are economically self-destructive and expresses skepticism that human behavior is driving climate change.”
The one issue on which Rubio showed some bipartisan flexibility was immigration: in 2013, he worked with the so-called Gang of Eight group of senators on an immigration-reform bill that would have opened a path to citizenship for the undocumented. But, during the Presidential campaign, Rubio has renounced his support for such policies. His new partisans likely believe that Rubio’s ethnic identity will neutralize his defection from immigration reform, and win Latino voters over. But that seems like wishful thinking, too—especially after a Republican primary campaign in which the tone of anti-immigration rhetoric has been so harsh. It’s true that Latino voters care about issues besides immigration: in polls, they often rank education or the economy before it as a top priority. But, on those issues, they are generally more in line with Democratic values. (Latinos support a bigger role for government, for example.) In a dispatch last month from Nevada, one of the swing states where Latino votes may be especially important, Mary Jordan, of the Washington Post, spent two days interviewing Mexican-Americans in Las Vegas and could not find a single person who planned to vote for Rubio or Cruz. “Rubio says things that are not good for Mexicans,” a sixty-two-year-old retired casino housekeeper named Maria Herrera told her. “I would never vote for him just because he’s Latino.”
Telling moderate Republicans that Rubio is the obvious, joyous choice for them means asking them to ignore who Rubio is—or, perhaps, to abandon their notions of moderation. What Rubio’s anointment as the establishment candidate really shows is how far rightward the Republican Party has moved. And, maybe most striking of all, in his case, how intolerant it has become on immigration. In 1984, in a Presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan said the following: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” The last comprehensive immigration-reform bill that granted such amnesty to undocumented immigrants—nearly three million of them—was in 1986. Reagan signed it.
.............SNIP"
48 replies
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Not so fast. Not all Latinos are created equal. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans and more are quite distinct. Even the Spanish they speak is at least as distinct from one another as, say, a New England accent is from a Southern drawl. Rubio is Cuban, and Cubans are politically relevant in only two states: Florida and New Jersey. Being Cuban helps him about as much with Mexican and other non-Cuban Latino voters about as much Jeb! being a WASP helps him in heavily Scandinavian Minnesota. 
Jeb is the elephant in the room. And no one is paying attention.
Wall Street wants another Bush presidency. 
Wait, whut?
