Marco Rubio: the man from ALEC

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

MIAMI – Everyone knows that Pinocchio’s nose grew when he told a lie. But who knew before Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech last week that spewing a successive string of lies, half-truths, weasel words, inaccuracies, distortion of facts, malicious omissions, and fallacies can produce irresistible thirst?

In a way, Rubio’s inept attempt to reach for a drink of water during his rebuttal of Obama may have been a lucky break for the former Speaker of the Florida House. Because the video of the flub is funny in a lowbrow, three stooges kind of way, it quickly went viral on the Internet, unintentionally creating a diversion that sparked more commentary than anything Rubio actually said. That spared the Senator from at least a portion of the sharp dissection his words, his silences, and his persona richly deserve.

Let’s not start with the low hanging fruit and petty distortions, although we will get to those. Rubio’s main argument was nothing more than the discredited Republican dogma that all that is evil in the world, bad for the economy, and wrong with Obama’s policies comes down to two words: government and taxes.

If only government got out of the way, lowered taxes, and cut government entitlements –read social programs – we could overcome a sluggish economy and grow our way out of the deficit. Indeed, if we could increase our growth rate to “just four percent” everything would be right with the world, or at least with the indispensable nation, the United States.
But here is an inconvenient fact: no occupant of the White House since the 1960s has presided during his term over an economy with an annual growth rate of four percent or more.

The last two who did were Democrats, John Kennedy (5.4 percent) and Lyndon Johnson (5.0 percent). The one who came closest after that was another Democrat, Bill Clinton (3.8 percent).

The Republican President who came closest was Ronald Reagan (3.5 percent) followed by Richard Nixon (3.0 percent). But even the much and unjustly maligned Democrat Jimmy Carter (3.2 percent) did better than Nixon.

Republicans Dwight Eisenhower (2.5 percent) and Gerald Ford (2.2 percent) didn’t even come close to three percent, never mind the just four percent Rubio implied could easily be achieved if only Republican ideas were implemented.

As for the two last GOP presidents, George H.W. Bush, with 2.1 percent average growth and George W. Bush (1.6 percent) together achieved less than half Rubio’s target rate.

Thus no Republican, not even the sainted Ronald Reagan, has come within striking distance of a 4 percent annual rise in the GDP. Two Democrats reached 5 percent or higher, and they did it at a time when taxes on the rich were very high. And Johnson even pioneered a plethora of social programs which constituted his Great Society. Yet under Johnson, the economy grew more than three times faster than under the tax cutting, small government touting regime of George W. Bush.

During Clinton’s tenure taxes were higher than under George W. Bush but the growth rate under Clinton was more than twice what it was under W.

Before anyone mentions that GDP growth under Obama (1.2 percent) has been even more anemic than during the Bush presidency, it’s essential to remember that Clinton handed Bush a robust economy and Bush in turn gifted Obama an economy in free-fall. And, while Congress gave Bush the tax cuts he said would spur growth but didn’t, Republicans on Capitol Hill have blocked every attempt by Obama to enact a program anywhere near the size and scope needed to reverse the economic disaster he inherited from his predecessor.

In short, Marco Rubio’s main point is bunk, as was virtually his entire speech.

There are too many other untruths in the speech to detail here so I will only touch on a couple. Rubio trumpeted the usual stuff about America being virtually the only land of opportunity and compared it to countries where only a tiny minority monopolized the wealth. He forgot to mention that every recent study has found that climbing the social ladder is easier today in Western Europe than in the United States or that economic inequality in this country is approaching levels previously seen only in the much-derided “banana republics.”

Then there is Rubio’s statement, directly addressed to the president that he (unlike Obama, who lives in a big house on Pennsylvania Avenue) still lives in the same working class neighborhood in which he grew up. The diligent but often too literal-minded and less than judicious “fact-checkers” of PolitiFact rated the statement as “mostly true,” as The Miami Herald reported. Yes, Rubio still lives in West Miami, not one of the fanciest areas in the city, but hardly a slum.

Moreover, Rubio doesn’t live in his old family home. His own pad cost him a cool $550,000, probably ten times what the real working class folks paid when they bought theirs years ago. It’s a 2,700 square-foot residence with a pool, among other amenities, scarcely the kind of home a working stiff can afford. Rubio’s intent to mislead is so obvious even PolitiFact should have realized it, but they just don’t get it.

Then there is the fact that after taking out his mortgage, Rubio got an undisclosed $135,000 line of equity from a bank owned by political pals.

Now Rubio wants to sell his house and buy one in Washington. The asking price on his home is $675,000. I wonder how much more the DC property will cost. Then again Rubio’s political supporters in Washington have deeper pockets than those in Miami. No doubt he hopes his new digs will be a mere stepping stone, before he moves into the really big house in the city. This is all too working class for words.

The fact that Marco Rubio is a fraud is not news. I remember the time when a friend of mine went to the big working class advocate Rubio, then a rising Florida state legislator, to ask him to support a bill to provide health insurance for uninsured Florida kids, mainly those whose families were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but not well-off enough to afford private insurance. You can’t get more working class than that. This would be an initiative that would be mainly supported by the federal government and only partly by the state. Rubio’s comment: “We don’t want to create another entitlement.” What, kids are entitled to health care? What a concept.

Before he masqueraded as a working class type of guy before a national audience, Rubio pretended to be the child of Cuban exiles to curry favor with Miami Cubans. Only one problem: his family came to the United States from Cuba in 1957 when Cuba was ruled by Fulgencio Batista, Castro’s nemesis. They were economic refugees, fleeing that paradisiacal nation of exile memory.   

Now Rubio wants to square the circle by continuing to be a darling of the immigrant-loathing Tea Party and the Republican Party’s “Great Latino Hope.” That’s a bridge too far, even for Rubio, who is as slick as they come. The Tea Party is falling out of love with Rubio. Latinos, except for some Cubans, see right through him.

So who is Marco Rubio? The content of the speech provides an answer. It was generic.

Early on Cubans came to the Republican Party via anti-communism and not necessarily because of reactionary socioeconomic convictions. They were quirky Republicans.
Marco Rubio, in contrast, is a generic Republican with a thin ethnic veneer. If you go to the web page of ALEC, the right-wing organization funded by big money which has been churning out cookie-cutter, ultra-conservative legislators by the dozens, you will find Rubio’s name prominently displayed among a handful of heavyweight conservative Senators. Rip off all the masks, and that is who Marco Rubio really is, the generic right-wing Republican, the man from ALEC.