The Republican candidate’s youth may be one of his key assets but as rivals seek to turn it into a liability, the Florida senator remains unfazed
Marco Rubio recognized the question immediately – a knowing expression overtaking the young senator’s face as a voter nearly twice his age began to draw the comparison.
“One of the concerns that I have is that eight years ago, I heard the same kind of articulation … an element of hope and youth coming forward, an attractive family,” said 78-year-old Bill Doherty, teeing up a familiar query for Rubio that would close out a three-day swing through New Hampshire.
“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Rubio deadpanned, as laughter spread across the crowd of around 150 who had packed into a room on the day before Christmas Eve for a pancake breakfast with the Republican presidential candidate.
“My concern is, we have heard this before from someone who had no experience but yet had a great story and was very articulate in getting it across,” Doherty continued.
The comparisons to Barack Obama are anything but new. They have loomed over Rubio, who if elected president in 2016 would be the first Latino to occupy the White House, ever since the 44-year-old Florida senator launched his campaign as a “candidate of the future”.
Just the day before, Rubio fielded the same question twice in the town of Littleton, from both an older couple who approached the senator during a retail stop and from a much younger voter at a town hall.
Danielle Matteson, 29, asked Rubio for his response to those “who question your ability to hold this nation’s highest executive role, given that many of your competitors have had previous executive experience either at the private sector or at the state level”.
In that exchange, it was Rubio who raised the Obama analogy of his own volition.
“That question often comes up in the following context,” Rubio, the youngest candidate in the race, explained to his audience. “Obama was a senator, you’re a senator. He was there for two years, you’ve been there for four years. Explain to us how it’s going to be different.”
In New Hampshire, Rubio provided an answer consistent with what he has told crowds across the other early voting states, from Iowa to South Carolina to Nevada.
“The reason why Barack Obama failed is because his ideas don’t work,” Rubio said. “It’s not that he didn’t have the experience. It’s that his ideas were the wrong ones.”
He then drew a contrast between their parallel career trajectories: Obama had been a “backbencher” in the Illinois state legislature, Rubio said, whereas he had been speaker of the Florida House. Obama had served just two years in the US Senate, while he would close out a full six-year term if inaugurated in 2017.
Rubio also noted that Obama had been successful in pushing through “liberal” priorities – such as the Iran nuclear accord, Wall Street reform and the healthcare law – suggesting he would accomplish the same for conservatives.
Doherty, while still preferring a more seasoned candidate, said he found Rubio’s response to be effective – as did the applauding crowd.
Rubio’s Republican rivals have nonetheless sought to turn what he views as a key asset into a liability: his relative youth.
Much like Jeb Bush, New Jersey governor Chris Christie criticised the first-term senator’s leadership skills, as he seeks to infringe upon Rubio’s standing in New Hampshire, where the Floridian is polling in second place behind frontrunner Donald Trump.
“There are a bunch of shiny new trucks in this race but they haven’t been in the mud,” Christie said at one stop last weekend after criticizing Rubio. “They haven’t been tested.”
Despite the efforts by Rubio’s opponents to question his experience, it’s the governors in the race who are laboring to break through. Christie, Bush and Ohio governor John Kasich stand behind Rubio in both the early states and nationally. The first three candidates to drop out of the race – Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal – were all governors.
Rubio’s main competition has come not from the chief executive of a state, but from another first-term senator – Ted Cruz, of Texas, who is just a few months his senior. Trump, the real estate mogul who has commanded the polls for six months, is older in age, at 69, but has never held public office.
Pushing back on the governors, Rubio echoed a line from his stump speech at his town hall in Littleton: “Anyone who tells you ‘When I was governor, we created a million jobs,’ I would be concerned,” Rubio said. “Because if they’re telling the truth, that means they grew government by a million jobs. That’s the only way a politician creates a million jobs.”
When a voter in the riverside city of Berlin asked the fresh-faced senator if he was essentially old enough to sit across the table from Vladimir Putin and the “mullahs in Tehran,” Rubio touted his foreign policy bona fides, a core argument of his candidacy.
“It is true that there are people running for president that have lived longer than I have,” he said. “What is not true is that anybody running for president has a better understanding or shown better judgement on the issues we face than I do – particularly foreign policy.”
“I’m the only one running for president that has carefully and repeatedly, for a long time now, explained what Vladimir Putin is doing. I’ll go in knowing exactly who he is, and he’ll know I know exactly who he is.”
Christian Burnett, a 30-year-old from the defense industry who grilled Rubio on military spending after his last event, said he did not view the senator’s youth negatively.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/25/marco-rubio-barack-obama-youth-analogy-campaign-trail
