Don’t Believe the Hype: Marco Rubio Has No New Ideas
“While other candidates are repeating the formulas of the 1980s and 1990s,” David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column last night, Senator Marco “Rubio is a child of this century. He understands that it’s no longer enough to cut taxes and say bad things about government to produce widespread prosperity.” Oh boy. Anyone who watched the GOP debate on Wednesday knew we were up for a whole bunch of “Rubio rising” articles by end of day Friday. It’s what the media does. But I was not prepared for Brooks’s article, which teeters on the edge of gushing before just falling over into full rah-rah mode. Brooks praises Rubio for being “one of the few candidates who actually gives” policy speeches, although he dampens his own praise with the caveat that “it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans.” But then he gets a little worked up praising Rubio for wanting to “simplify the tax code, reduce rates and move us toward a consumption-based system by reducing taxes on investment.” He also adores Rubio for pushing “a big $2,500 child tax credit” and for calling to “reform the earned-income tax credit and extend it to cover childless workers,” as well as pushing welfare spending to the states. Rubio, he concludes is a “balance of marketing and product.” Okay, first of all: baaaaaaaaarf. Brooks is so smitten with Rubio that his writing has taken on the timber and logic of a mash note. Second of all, I’ve written at length about all the ways that Marco Rubio represents the politics of the past. Don’t believe me? As I said, Rubio is “ against equal pay for women (that’s an issue from 1972,) he’s backwards on marijuana reform (basically lifted from Richard Nixon’s 1971 War on Drugs announcement,) and he blasted Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty exactly 50 years to the day after it was announced. Because he’s timely like that.” But there’s so
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