Strange bedfellows: Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and the Minuteman Project
By
Max J. Castro Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com
Political
scientists used to describe Cuban American political attitudes as
conservative regarding foreign policy and liberal on domestic issues.
Cuban Americans, the thesis went, combined a fierce anticommunism
borne of their staunch opposition to Fidel Castro and the social
democratic principles contained in the 1940 Cuban Constitution.
To
the extent that this analysis was once valid, it no longer is. The
attitudes and actions of the dominant faction of Cuban American
Republicans in the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature belie
it. George W. Bush’s social policies, which the four Republican
Cuban American members of Congress have supported, have been
plutocratic, not social democratic.
No
one represents the Cuban American Republican trend toward a seamless
right-wing posture more aptly than Marco Rubio, the Speaker of the
Florida House of Representatives. Rubio is from the Jeb Bush school
of Republicanism, a more virulent strain even than that represented
by George W. Bush, especially when it comes to systematically waging
class war on behalf of the haves and against the have-nots. Rubio,
like Jeb, has never seen a tax that affects the better-off that he
did not want to cut or a social program which helps the worse-off
that he did not want to slash.
Now,
Rubio seems determined to outdo his mentors on the way to becoming
the complete reactionary. Consider Rubio’s recent endorsement of
former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for the presidency. While
granting his support, Rubio took credit for Huckabee’s shamefully
opportunistic reversal from opponent of the Cuba embargo to
fire-breathing hard-liner, a move that earns both Huckabee and Rubio
points with the hard-line Cuban American sector of the Florida
Republican Party. By backing Huckabee, who does not believe in
evolution, Rubio hopes to ingratiate himself with another set of
fanatics within the Republican Party, the religious zealots. It is no
wonder then that Rubio felt compelled to “enlighten” Huckabee on
the embargo, a failed and inhumane policy now in place for nearly
fifty years, but apparently felt no need to bring Huckabee up to the
level of nineteenth century science.
But
it is on the question of immigration that Huckabee’s position, and
Rubio’s support for Huckabee, is most troubling. If there is one
issue and one issue only on which the Bush brothers and the Cuban
American members of Congress have consistently broken with the
right-wing of the GOP, that issue is immigration. Not so Mike
Huckabee. Granted, Governor Huckabee had taken a moderate line on
immigration. But candidate Huckabee has had an even more radical and
opportunistic conversion on immigration than on the embargo and now
takes the hardest of hard lines.
The
day after gratefully accepting Marco Rubio’s endorsement, Mike
Huckabee accepted another endorsement. It came from Jim Gilchrist,
founder of the Minuteman Project, accurately described in a December
13 Washington
Post editorial
as “a group of xenophobes who spend their time videotaping and
harassing day laborers wherever they find them.” The paper said
that Huckabee, “apparently once fazed by the Minuteman group’s
vigilantism, said he had undergone a conversion and cravenly
apologized for his past skepticism…”
Why
is Minuteman Project leader Gilchrist endorsing Huckabee? It’s
Gilchrist’s way of thanking Huckabee for sinking lower on the issue
of immigration than even the abysmal depths plumbed by the rest of
the Republican candidates. How did Huckabee accomplish this feat?
Here is what the Washington
Post
said:
“The
idea that 12 million illegal residents of the United States can be
induced to quit the country en masse within four months is absurd on
its face — a non-starter in logistical, humanitarian, political,
diplomatic, commercial and economic terms that would leave an
indelible stain on this country for years. Yet that is the wrathful
centerpiece of Mike
Huckabee‘s ‘Secure America Plan,’ which the Republican
presidential candidate issued the other day in the course of his
party’s escalating enthusiasm for nastier-than-thou prescriptions to
deal with illegal immigrants.”
"It
was a plan I myself could have written," said Jim Gilchrist of
the Minuteman Project. Indeed.
But
is the Huckabee immigration plan one that Marco Rubio also could have
written? Has Marco Rubio sunk so low that he is using his support for
Huckabee to appeal to yet another group of fanatics within his party,
the xenophobes?
