MIAMI — Sen. Marco Rubio is poised to announce for president Monday from the “Ellis Island” of South Florida in a lofty talk that asks Americans to break with the past and join him in reclaiming America for the next generation.
Rubio’s carefully crafted 2016 rollout is set for downtown Miami’s Freedom Tower, which once processed Cuban refugees and is now a museum honoring their flight from Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. The senator is to speak from the 90-year-old building’s ornate second floor, flanked by red, white and blue banners and digital screens proclaiming “Marco Rubio: A New American Century,” with a map of the continental United States dotting the “i” in “Rubio.”
“The symbolic value of [Freedom Tower] is enormous,” said Nelson Diaz, chairman of the Miami-Dade County GOP. “Everyone in Miami recognizes that that is our Ellis Island. That’s where our parents and grandparents were processed. It symbolizes dreams and the beginning of a new world for many people when they got here.”
The backdrop and timing of Rubio’s White House kickoff, long planned by his team, comes within days of President Obama’s historic handshake with Castro’s brother and successor, Cuban strongman Raul Castro, during a Latin American summit. Rubio, 43, also begins his quest one day after the launch of presumed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, 67, Obama’s former secretary of state.
The collision of events sets up the first-term senator as the voice of the Republican opposition to Clinton and Obama policies, as simultaneous wall-to-wall political media coverage and presumably voters’ attention, shift in their direction.
Rubio is an outspoken hawk and opponent of Obama’s velvet foreign policy — to say nothing of his abandonment of the Cuban embargo and détente with Havana, pitching himself as next-generation change versus the exhausted past. It’s almost inconceivable that Rubio wouldn’t address these themes, given the venue he chose to launch his presidential campaign, his strong views on international affairs, and the generational and substantive contrast he presents with Clinton and her role in promoting Obama’s foreign policy.
Ari Fleischer, a GOP public relations consultant who served as press secretary to President George W. Bush, predicted that Rubio would be the “go-to person for Hillary” on Monday, at the very least, as the media begins to frame the emerging 2016 fight between Obama’s heir apparent and a Republican Party that aims to take her out.
Rubio has billed his Freedom Tower reveal as simply a “big announcement” about his 2016 plans. He almost certainly will say that he is forgoing re-election to the Senate to run for president. Tickets for the event were sold out, but Rubio’s team was planning an overflow viewing area with a jumbtron in the adjacent parking lot. The venue only holds 1,000, and Rubio’s team received ticket requests from 3,512 people, including at least one from every state in the union except for Vermont.
The program is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. local time. Rubio’s team has informed reporters that Rubio would announce his intentions at exactly 6:03 p.m. Team Rubio received requests for more than 190 media credentials from more than 65 entities.
Rubio will presumably confirm his plans before the event through social media. He could tip his hand in a few planned events in Miami for donors and key supporters that were scheduled for Sunday and Monday. The senator could give the “go” signal for a presidential race Monday morning when he addresses campaign contributors during a “national investor” conference call.
Clinton, the former first lady and ex-New York senator, launched her second presidential bid Sunday afternoon via a glitzy video dispersed through social media. The theme was a decidedly domestic focus on kitchen table issues like jobs, the economy and upward mobility. There was nary a mention of foreign affairs or Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. She hits the trail in Iowa on Tuesday.
“Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion — so you can do more than just get by, you can get ahead and stay ahead,” Clinton said in the video. Several Republicans eyeing the Republican presidential nomination wasted no time in attacking Clinton upon her entry into the race.
Rubio has been preparing to run for president for at least a year. Not long after President Obama’s re-election, he told his political team to lay the groundwork for a 2016 run, so that if he decided to retire from the Senate after one term and seek the White House, all they’d have to do is flip the switch. Heading into late 2014, Rubio supporters assumed that that’s exactly what he would do.
But when Jeb Bush made moves toward the presidency in December, many assumed Rubio would be forced to change course.
The former two-term Florida governor, who mentored Rubio earlier in his career, is a Sunshine State political juggernaut. He quickly scooped up much of Florida’s political talent and is assumed to have a clear advantage among the state’s wealthy GOP donors. Without Florida GOP money squarely behind him, Rubio wouldn’t be able to adequately resource a national campaign, so the conventional wisdom went. Rubio saw things differently.
The former speaker of the Florida state house, who has been successful enough on the national fundraising circuit to satisfy his concerns about resourcing, plans to prosecute a campaign for the GOP nomination that argues that the older generation of Republicans’ time is past. Rubio has been respectful of Bush. But the senator’s pitch implicitly targets the 62-year-old, perhaps more so because he is the son and brother of the two most recent Republican presidents.
It’s no accident that the first word in Rubio’s 2016 slogan, “New American Century,” is “new.”
“What’s at stake in 2016 is not simply what party’s going to win or what candidate is going to run. The fundamental question in 2016 is, what kind of country do we want to be in this new century?” Rubio said two weeks ago, during an appearance on Fox News.
