The Republican Obama?

That’s why Jeb Bush, a onetime establishment favorite and Rubio’s former mentor, has deployed a potentially more effective attack on Rubio—that the Florida senator is simply the Republican Obama. “Look, we had a president who came in and said the same kind of things [as Rubio],” Bush told CNN on September 30. “ ‘New and improved,’ ‘hope and change,’ and he didn’t have the leadership skills to fix things.” When asked on MSNBC the next day if Rubio had the leadership skills to be president, Bush replied: “It’s not known. Barack Obama didn’t end up having them, and he won an election on the belief that he could.”

Over coffee on October 8 in Boston, Rubio brushed off Bush’s criticism. “When someone’s running for president and your staff tells you that you need to say this this morning in order to gain an advantage, people are going to do that, and I understand that,” Rubio told me. “It’s not going to change how I feel about him. I have tremendous admiration and affection for him. I think he was a great governor of Florida.”

“I’m not running against Jeb Bush, and I have nothing negative to say about him,” Rubio said, before implicitly criticizing the dynastic former governor who last held office nearly a decade ago. “I just think it’s time for the party and the country to move ahead to a new generation of leadership with new ideas that are relevant to the times in which we live and the century that awaits.”

It remains to be seen whether Bush’s argument about inexperience will resonate with voters. “Certainly, you have the example of that [problem] in the White House right now,” undecided Republican voter Phil Richardson of Dover, N.H., told me after a Rubio town hall meeting. “However, there are some examples of some excellent people with little experience who became our greatest presidents, like Harry Truman.”

“Well, unfortunately, he has that baby face,” said Sidney Temple, a Rubio supporter, following the event in Bedford. “But you know, isn’t he older than Kennedy was?” (Indeed, Kennedy was 43 when he was elected, and Rubio will be 45 on Election Day 2016—just a year shy of Bill Clinton’s age when he was elected in 1992.)

For now, the polls don’t indicate that voters are putting a premium on governing experience. Candidates who have never held elective office—Trump, Carson, and Fiorina—now garner a combined 51 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls. A YouGov national survey conducted in October found that Republican voters back Rubio over Bush 69 percent to 31 percent if forced to choose between those two. Perhaps more troubling for Bush was the poll’s finding that he would be a poor leader of a “Stop Trump” movement. Bush trailed Trump by 18 points—

41 percent to 59 percent—in a head-to-head matchup. Rubio led Trump by 6 points—53 percent to 47 percent. 

When Rubio is asked directly about the Obama comparison on the campaign trail, he responds by pointing out that Obama has been president for seven years, so inexperience cannot explain what’s wrong with his policies today. It’s Obama’s ideas, says Rubio, that are the problem.

In many important ways, of course, Marco Rubio is the Republican Obama. Each man is the best communicator in his party. Each has a life story—the son of poor anti-Communist Cuban refugees and the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya—that proves the American dream isn’t dead (and appeals particularly to his party’s self-image). 

If Rubio loses the nomination, it will more likely be because of the ways his career differed from Obama’s than any similarities to it. As a senator, Obama assiduously avoided taking a stand on any issue that might keep him from winning the Democratic nomination. By contrast, Rubio has taken detailed and controversial positions within the Republican party on a wide range of issues—chief among them being immigration reform. Whether he can withstand attacks on this issue may be the biggest factor determining whether Rubio can go all the way.

After running strongly in his 2010 Senate campaign against a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and the comprehensive approach to immigration taken by the McCain-Kennedy bill in 2006, Rubio publicly evolved on the issue following the 2012 election. He joined the bipartisan “Gang of 8” to craft a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would open up a pathway to citizenship after a series of requirements were met. The bill passed the Senate, but, following a conservative backlash, John Boehner declined to bring it up for a vote in the House. Rubio hasn’t backed down from immigration reform, but he now favors breaking up the bill in a three-step approach.

“You cannot deal with this all at once. You can’t. There is no way to solve these problems in one big piece of legislation,” Rubio told voters at a town hall event in Dover. “It’s too complicated, it’s too politically controversial, and the American people have had bad experiences with massive pieces of legislation.”

“Step number one, and that’s the key that unlocks everything else, you must prove to everyone that illegal immigration is under control,” Rubio said. “You don’t just pass a law that says we’re going to bring illegal immigration under control. Prove it. Show us that you’ve done it. Show us the mandatory E-Verify system. Show us the walls on the border and the personnel and that you’re in fact stopping the flow.”

Step two, Rubio said, is to modernize the legal immigration system to make it a merit-based system, rather than a family-based system that currently admits one million immigrants legally each year. When asked later if the number of immigrants admitted legally should increase, decrease, or stay the same, Rubio told me: “It depends. What we have to do is to have a merit-based system of immigration and that will determine the number.”

“After we’ve done these two things,” Rubio said in Dover, “I honestly believe the American people are going to be very reasonable about what do you do with someone who’s been here for 20 years that’s not a criminal, .  .  . that has not otherwise violated the law, who’s willing to pay taxes, who’s willing to pay a fine, who’s willing to learn English, pass the background check. I think people would say for someone like that, we’ll give them a work permit. That’s all they’ll have for a long time, at least 10 years. Then after that, I personally am open to allowing them to apply for a green card, not through a special pathway.” 

So Rubio hasn’t reversed himself on any major substantive element of the 2013 immigration bill, but backing away from a comprehensive approach he once favored has lent more credence than anything else to the argument that he’s not ready to stand up to pressure. 

Can Rubio point to a time in his career when he’s withstood political pressure? “When I called for us to be more aggressive in Libya, there were a lot of people in the base of my party who were against that,” he said in our interview. “I wouldn’t call it isolationism per se, but there was a growing movement in that direction in 2011, 2012, and 2013 that really didn’t end until ISIS beheaded two Americans.” The party has certainly moved toward Rubio’s more hawkish foreign policy stance, but Republicans are still fairly divided on what the proper response would have been to the Arab Spring. 

Was it a mistake, for example, to intervene in Libya without identifying moderate forces that could take control after Qaddafi fell? “That’s an argument that people could make if the question was do we want to start a civil war. It had already started,” Rubio replied. “Qaddafi was going to fall with or without us. It was clear he could not sustain his grip on power. He was going to massacre half a million people. He was going to Benghazi to carry that out. And then the pressure would have really been on to do something.” Rubio blames the current chaos in Libya on Obama’s failure to help quickly bring the civil war to a decisive conclusion.

Rubio has also courted controversy within his own party on matters of economic policy. Rubio earned praise from many leading conservatives for proposing a tax reform plan with Utah senator Mike Lee that would create two federal income tax brackets—15 percent and 35 percent—and provide targeted relief to families by expanding the child tax credit to $2,500. Some supply-siders, particularly at the Wall Street Journal, have criticized Rubio’s plan for failing to bring the top rate down even further (Rubio’s plan lowers the rate for corporations and small businesses to 25 percent). 

On the other hand, one of the primary features of the Rubio plan designed to promote growth—zeroing out taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest in order to spur investment—has been criticized as politically toxic in a general election. The proposal would bring federal tax bills of people like Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney close to zero. The Democratic attack ad writes itself. So how would Rubio respond? 

“It’s not about Warren Buffett or Mitt Romney. It’s about people like my father. My father was a bartender. He worked in a hotel. And that hotel existed because someone invested money to build it, operate it, and maintain it,” Rubio said. “We need more investment. The more you tax investment, the less investment you’re going to get. I want to make America the most attractive place in the world to invest, so millions of people like my father have jobs.” 

This argument, made at a time when the stock market is up more than 150 percent since its 2009 low, does not strike Henry Olsen, a political analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as persuasive. “Particularly it’s damaging for Rubio because his essential campaign appeal is that he’s everything that Mitt Romney is not,” Olsen says. “I think elections are fought at a personal and a moral level, and what you have here is a very easily understandable moral message.”

Of course, a timid and calculating approach to politics at a time when voters are deeply discontent carries its own risks. Any Republican presidential candidate is going to face charges of cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare in order to fund tax cuts for the rich. The case for Rubio is that he’s still the most appealing candidate and best communicator in the party—an original Tea Party candidate with establishment credentials who could unite the GOP. 

He won his 2010 Senate race by 19 points while running on a platform of entitlement reform, and he’s been honing that message ever since. “Now I’m from Florida,” Rubio says in his stump speech in Bedford. “You may not know this, but there are a lot of people in Florida on Medicare and Social Security. One of them happens to be my mother. And I can say this to you right now unequivocally: I am against anything that is bad for my mother.” Rubio goes on to explain how Social Security and Medicare are driving the national debt, “not foreign aid, which is less than 1 percent of our budget,” and how modest changes for his generation can save the programs and balance the budget. “These aren’t unreasonable things to ask of my generation after all the things our parents and our grandparents did for us.”

In normal times, one would expect the party to nominate the most compelling spokesman with the best chance at uniting the party. But we may not be living in normal times.

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.