Eleven months ago I wrote a piece which I’ve linked to often explaining why the junior senator from Florida would be a calamitous president. As he prepares to lose his home state, I want to address the number of Miami Dade County residents whose yard signs, casual conversation, and turnout in recent days bespeak their panic about Trumpism: you’ve been suckered because he doesn’t yell as loudly as the Republican front runner.
Filing post mortems and political obituaries is fun for reporters and delicious for amateurs like me disgusted by passages like this from the Washington Post, America’s premier establishment/Beltway publication. Thanks to the behavior of the Lord of the Orange Rinse, whose endorsement of physical violence on opponents has upset noted moderate publications like Breitbart and National Review, reporters are looking for any hint of a pulse, thus passages like this:
Rubio spent much of the news conference discussing how Trump’s refusal to condemn violence — and his language that could be inciting it — is not leadership. “The job of a leader is not to stoke that anger,” Rubio said, referencing the pent-up frustration shown at Trump’s rallies. “The job of a leader is to address the causes of that anger and try to solve it.”
A bit later, he said “leadership has never been taking people’s anger and using it to get them to vote for you” — the very definition of demagoguery, by the way. “If it is, it’s a dangerous style of leadership,” he said. “Leadership is about acknowledging people’s anger, but as a leader, trying to address why it is they’re angry instead of manipulating their anger so they become your voter, your donor, your supporter.”
Agree with him or not, he did a masterful job of acknowledging the anger Trump’s supporters feel without inflaming it. “Every major institution we once relied on is failing us,” he said, ticking through how religious organizations to higher education to politicians have all given people reason for frustration. What Trump is doing, Rubio said, is telling his supporters “give me power so I can go after them. That’s what he’s feeding into.”
Marco Rubio wants no fly zones over Syria. He wants to rescind the Iran deal. He calls for shutting down anyplace Rubio suspects radical Islamists gather. When the immigration reform bill that caused the Beltway press to coronate him prematurely (as is its wont) collapsed, he skedaddled. He supports torture. In every attempt to show “leadership” and to distinguish himself from the competition, he has been distracted, jejune, craven, and impulsive. He has in short acted like Donald Trump except that Rubio sits in the Senate. He will lose the Florida primary, becoming in a year a handsomely paid lobbyist who will frequent Sunday talk shows giving advice on how to deal with people whom he didn’t give a shit about.
Humanizing The Vacuum 