Marco Rubio’s war on truth

MIAMI – Chutzpah! There’s no better word than this wonderful Yiddish expression to describe Marco Rubio’s much-ballyhooed speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty. According to the Republican Senator from Florida, the war on poverty has failed and it is high time we adopt a new and more effective Republican approach to the problem.

Rubio’s take on the War on Poverty is so mendacious and full of misleading implications that it would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that he is deadly serious. Worse, his views represents those of the Republican Party, which would implement his three-point “anti-poverty plan” in a heartbeat if and when they have enough power to do so – with devastating results for the poor.

The mendacity starts with the very premise that Rubio invokes to justify the need for his alternative approach. The War on Poverty did not fail. Poverty rates have fallen substantially in the last fifty years as a result of an array of programs created as part of the war on poverty.

The decline has been most dramatic among one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, the elderly, who in spite of Social Security, used to suffer a poverty rate much higher than the national average, specifically around 50 percent. The poverty rate among the elderly is now lower than the national average at less than 10 percent, thanks mainly to War on Poverty programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps, and Supplementary Security Income (SSI). The latter program benefits people whose Social Security checks are much too low to subsist on, including many of the elderly immigrants Rubio represents. Poverty rates also have fallen among other groups, although not nearly as sharply as among seniors.

But the chutzpah really comes in big time in what Rubio fails to say. To the extent that the War on Poverty failed to raise far too many Americans above the poverty line, it is in no small measure because Republicans fought against the War on Poverty every step of the way and finally succeeded, first in stopping its expansion and then in drastically cutting or eliminating the very programs that ensured its success.

It’s like dropping a nuclear bomb on the Golden State Bridge and then blaming its collapse on structural defects. Chutzpah. Gall. Gandinga. In any language, it amounts to the same thing: a surfeit of cynicism.

The truth is that the War on Poverty did not fail. It was, to a great extent, aborted, mainly by Republicans, with an occasional assist from the political opportunistic faction of the Democratic Party, most notoriously by Bill Clinton, who in the guise of reform granted the Republicans a long-held wish, the elimination of the welfare system as it had existed for decades. The damage to the poor from this exercise in misguided bipartisanship is now being felt to its full extent with the dismal job market for lower-skilled workers and the lifetime limits on welfare benefits imposed by so-called welfare reform increasingly running out.

Yet another element of chutzpah creeps in with Rubio’s attempt to portray his plan as novel. As Ana Marie Cox points out in the British newspaper The Guardian, Rubio’s plan is a dead ringer for that presented more than a year ago by another reactionary Republican, none other than Rick Santorum, the senator who lost his seat in his own state and then tried to run for president with pathetic results:

“In 2012, Santorum outlined the exact same three-point anti-poverty plan: promote marriage, eliminate federal poverty programs in favor of block grants to states, and ‘something something America hope-dream-optimism something’.”

This is new? No. Would it be effective. Hardly. Has Rubio noticed that in his own state, among many others, the Republican legislature even refused to take free money to provide medical care for lower income people? Yes, he has, and he knows full well that handing poverty programs to the states would mean much less money for poor people. That, for the Rubios of this world, is the beauty of it, the whole idea of the thing.

But then again it’s not the first time Marco Rubio has been known to mislead for political gain. For years he pretended he was a Cuban exile whose parents fled Fidel Castro. The truth, which Rubio eventually acknowledged, is that he was born in the United States, and his family left Cuba well before Castro ever came to power.

This means that his parents came here as economic immigrants or fleeing Batista’s dictatorship. Either would have been an inconvenient truth, displeasing to those who portray the old Cuba as a kind of Switzerland in the Americas where nobody had to emigrate to make a living or to those nostalgic batistianos still around to cast their votes.

Curiously, Cox, who deserves kudos for exposing Rubio’s plan as anything but new, found the whole thing laughable and sad. Laughable I get, except if you are a poor person targeted by Rubio and his ilk.

But sad? Sad is when an undocumented immigrant in detection dies of cancer despite an amputation because cost-conscious immigration medical system bureaucrats refused repeated pleas by urologists and other doctors to treat a lesion on the man’s penis.

Unlike an unnecessary or unexpected death, Rubio’s act is not sad. It is entirely predictable, vintage Rubio. And I find nothing sad in Rubio’s making a fool of himself once again by trying to be too clever by half.

Moreover, posturing as a friend of the poor is hardly a stretch for Rubio. After all, for some time he has been playing the part of a friend of undocumented immigrants while at the same time winking at his Tea Party fans. Recently, however, he broke the news that he had talked to people in the House of Representatives and found out comprehensive immigration reform has zero chance of being approved. Really? And what people would these be? None other than Rubio’s reactionary Republican counterparts who control the House. Another inconvenient fact Rubio failed to mention.

The truth that Rubio cannot admit is that as long as his fellow right-wing Republicans have their way, there will be a war on the poor instead of on poverty and a war against undocumented immigrants rather than real immigration reform.