OTTUMWA, Iowa — Marco Rubio says GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump has “tapped into a real frustration” in the American electorate.
Rubio appeared at a town hall in Ottumwa Monday afternoon. A participant asked him what he would do to stop Trump’s momentum.
“I would just say about Donald, I think some of the things he’s pointed to are important,” Rubio answered. “I’m running against him for president, so I’m not in the practice of building up my opposition. But I acknowledge that what he’s tapped into is a real frustration in this country that needs to be addressed, that politics no longer works for people.”
Rubio, in third place in national polls behind Trump and Ted Cruz, said he sees that frustration in both political parties, and attributed it to President Obama. “There’s got to be millions of people listening to that State of the Union where Barack Obama was talking about we’re back, we’ve created all these jobs,” Rubio said. “Yeah — they don’t pay anything. They don’t pay enough.”
“And so I think that frustration is important,” Rubio concluded. “But I just don’t think being frustrated alone is enough. You’ve got to know what you’re going to do. You can’t just say to people, ‘Vote for me, I’m going to get this fixed.’ Well, how? ‘Don’t worry about that, I’ll tell you once I’m there.’ I mean, we can’t do it that way.”
As attacks on Trump go, it was the mildest of stuff. Rubio’s answer suggested that, like others in the Republican race, he is picking his spots on the question of when to take on Trump and when not to take on Trump. The questioner, by the way, was a non-Iowan, a conservative New York lawyer named Adam Warner who traveled to Iowa to see some of the candidates in person. I met Warner Saturday at a Chris Christie town hall in Ames, where he asked Christie the same question, which was essentially, how do you plan to stop Trump and what resources will you devote to it? So far, the answers — Christie didn’t take on Trump, either — haven’t been very confrontational.
