Death of a Mannequin: Marco Rubio’s Last Day
Better things were supposed to be in store for Marco Rubio. The people paid to tell you that couldn’t stop telling you.
He was young and good-looking and told inspiring stories that made the hairs stand on the backs of the necks of people who can be inspired by American conservatism. He stood a generation apart from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and he could deliver a new way forward, for the American people. He was the one candidate that the Beltway chattering classes knew the Democratic establishment most feared, and some Democrats agreed with them. He could make his voice warble when saying “America” emphatically.
Understanding the stupidity of this reasoning isn’t difficult. If Washington narrative meant anything, we’d be entering year eight of the Rudy Giuliani/Fred Thompson administration. If looks and charm and stirring speeches determined elections, Democratic nominee Martin O’Malley — a soft-voiced, sweetly accented governor with a gift for taut but idealistic oratory and looking ridiculously fit either shirtless or with an acoustic guitar — would be waiting for Rubio to finish crushing Ted Cruz, a man whose face looks like it was assembled from the spare parts of factory-reject heads.
And of course, Donald Trump would never have entered the race, because he was just flirting with running to sell books or steaks or mattresses. He would have been scared off by financial disclosure requirements. And even if he’d gotten that far, the American people would have rejected a pathologically dishonest, gauche braggart indistinguishable from what happens when a Doug Exeter wig grafts onto a hunk of Velveeta that’s been left too close to the radiator.
But you didn’t need to look at the rest of the field to know that the pundits’ Marco Narrative was just as absurdly committed to seeming inevitable and as tautly and plausibly plotted as a Star Wars prequel. You could’ve just asked the sort of person who knew and loathed him best: a Floridian.
The fatal streak running through the Rubio narrative was the same one that runs through so many conservative candidates. For someone bound by blood to the cult of the self-made entrepreneur as the only non-cop/soldier of any value as a citizen, Rubio merely spent two awkward belches in the private sector amid a career built on taxpayer dollars, donor largesse and patronage. He was a career politician and glad-hander calling out government cronyism with a sense of self-awareness so broken that he couldn’t weather the barest standards of his own ideology.
Rubio started making his political connections in 1991, volunteering on campaigns for Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (who subsequently wrote him law school recommendations) and later on Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign. A little over a year out of law school, he was running for West Miami Commissioner, where he settled into the job for a full year before running for the Florida House.