A new front in the Republican primary battle broke out Thursday when two recently-signed surrogates for Marco Rubio — former rival Rick Santorum and GOP Sen. Pat Toomey — didn’t exactly knock it out of the park when asked to name Rubio’s accomplishments.
The episode began on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” when host Joe Scarborough, a former U.S. representative from Florida, described fellow Floridian Rubio as an “empty suit” and “a guy that has been marketed like a bag of potato chips.”
Scarborough asked Santorum, who just last night withdrew from the Republican race and endorsed Rubio, “What do you list as Marco Rubio’s top accomplishment that made you decide to endorse him?”
“I would just say that here’s a guy who’s been able to, number one, win a tough election in Florida and pull people together from a variety of different spots,” Santorum said. “This is a guy who can work together with people.”
Scarborough pressed for a specific Rubio accomplishment. Santorum didn’t name one and later declared the issue “bogus.” “[Rubio] spent four years in the United States Senate being frustrated like everybody else that nothing got done,” Santorum said.
Meanwhile, on CNN, Toomey was asked whether Rubio has made “tough decisions.” “I think he has made some tough decisions,” Toomey answered, citing “Marco’s leadership in trying to make sure we would retain the abilities the NSA had to keep us safe,” a reference to Rubio’s losing opposition to the USA Freedom Act. “He’s been a very important leader on foreign policy generally,” Toomey said.
The not-terribly-substantive talk about Rubio’s accomplishments led the Jeb Bush campaign, desperate to do anything to slow Rubio down, to jump in. “Top Reason Marco Loses HUGE to Hillary; never been tested in crisis,” Bush super political action committee chief Mike Murphy tweeted Thursday morning. “5 year junior Senator. Not ready to be President. #AOneSpeechWonder.”
The Cruz campaign’s top spokesman got into the game, too, retweeting a message from Time’s Zeke Miller: “New Rubio endorser Rick Santorum on Rubio’s record: ‘The bottom line is there isn’t a lot of accomplishments.'”
The Rubio-has-no-achievements meme was picking up steam when Rubio himself went on Fox News Thursday morning. “Rick Santorum backed you,” host Martha MacCallum said to Rubio. “He was asked to name accomplishments that you have made and he struggled a bit with that this morning. What do you think?”
“Well look, Rick just signed on to the campaign,” Rubio said:
So obviously he’s working with us and you know, we’ll have to continue to work on telling our story and obviously Rick’s going to be a big part of doing that. I’m proud of what I’ve done in public service. Whether it was eminent domain abuse in Florida as the speaker, whether it was VA reform, whether it was getting rid of the Obamacare bailout fund, whether it was additional sanctions on Hezbollah, whether it was doing the things we’ve done on the Girls Count Act to deal with human trafficking. Despite the fact that most of my career in Washington, which is only 4 1/2 years long, has involved Democrats in charge, we have achieved some real things.
So that’s out of Rubio’s mouth: 1) eminent domain; 2) VA reform; 3) killing the Obamacare bailout; 4) sanctions on Hezbollah; 5) Girls Count Act.
Rubio mentions most at various times in his stump speech. (Although Bush, reacting to Rubio’s claim of credit on Hezbollah sanctions, said on Thursday that it was “a 93-to-nothing vote that [Rubio] didn’t go to.”)* Certainly the Obamacare bailout matter is a crowd-pleaser, and it is something Rubio played a prominent role in, even if it was not as big a role as some news accounts have claimed.
But the bottom line is, it’s a very freshman senator sort of resume. And perhaps most notably, Rubio left out the signature accomplishment of his five years in the Senate: the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill.
In fact, one difficulty of the Rubio campaign is that he, like Mitt Romney in 2012, has had to retreat from his signature accomplishment. It’s fair to say Rubio spent more time on the massive Gang of Eight bill than he did on any other single piece of legislation. And yet it’s something he rarely mentions, even when he discusses the issue of immigration.
A bigger problem for Republicans is that one of Rubio’s top rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz, doesn’t have a long list of accomplishments to point to, either. What is Cruz’s top achievement? Helping force a partial government shutdown in 2013?
Cruz has faced these questions before. Last year, Fox’s Megyn Kelly asked him, “What have you actually accomplished?” and Cruz said his main achievement was keeping President Obama from implementing some of his agenda. “What we’ve accomplished over and over again, in many instances, is stopping bad things from happening,” Cruz said, pointing to Obama’s unsuccessful effort to tighten gun controls. (By the way, Kelly wasn’t satisfied with Cruz’s answer, telling him, “When you’re the leader, when you’re the president … you just can’t be somebody who stops things, you actually have to be somebody who gets things through.”)
That’s the situation the Republican Party faces with two of its top three candidates being first-term senators. The third, front-runner Donald Trump, has no government experience at all.
Republican governors tend to have more substantive accomplishments they can point to; it’s just the nature of heading the executive branch versus being part of the legislature. But the GOP governor with the biggest and most recent accomplishment, Scott Walker, has long exited the race. The others — Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, John Kasich — are scrambling to get a foothold. As this New Hampshire week goes on, the candidates will continue to take aim at each others’ accomplishments. But there’s not a lot to go on.
*The facts: Rubio did sponsor a Hezbollah sanctions bill, the Rubio-Shaheen bill. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent, not by a 93-0 vote. And no, Rubio was not present when it passed.
