Marco Rubio to challenge America

The core message of the Florida Republican’s White House campaign is a direct challenge to the candidate most clearly in his way — Jeb Bush.

In choosing the White House over re-election to the Senate, Rubio is shrugging off the naysayers. Some argue he can’t raise enough money to win the Republican nomination with Bush, the former two-term governor, hogging resources and the Establishment apparatus in Florida. Others contend there’s no way the GOP nominates a one-term senator in his mid-forties, over a governor with executive experience, after eight years of President Obama.

Rubio, 43, has surprised the doubters to this point. Though not yet a presidential candidate, he has raised money nationally to compensate for Bush’s lock on Florida, while muscling his way into the top tier of 2016 contenders on the strength of his near-unmatched expertise and fluency in international affairs.

Now, Rubio is readying a presidential campaign that in tone and feel will look beyond the primary, drawing on his universal story as the son of Cuban immigrants who fled to America in search of a better life. The senator will ask all voters to join him in reinvigorating the American exceptionalism that has historically beckoned the politically and economically oppressed abroad with promises of equal opportunity.

“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 Monday during an appearance on Fox News. “Do we want to remain an exceptional country, a land of equality of opportunity, the strongest nation on earth? Or are we prepared to diminish and decline?”

Rubio confirmed that he would reveal his 2016 plans on April 13 in Miami, his hometown, but declined to elaborate.

If Rubio’s message sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In a national campaign, the Floridian is likely to borrow heavily from the rhetoric that he began honing five years ago as he launched his underdog Senate bid, and that has become a staple of his stump speech ever since. Indeed, clues to Rubio’s 2016 approach are available in his the opening and closing general election television ads of his 2010 campaign.

The former, titled “Dream” is about his parents’ journey to America, how his father worked as a bartender, and his mother as a maid, so that their children could have a better life. The latter, “Generational Choice,” is about Americans making a conscious choice, like generations before them, to reclaim the American dream for themselves and their descendants.

Rubio’s focus on American exceptionalism and the American dream is hardly innovative. But his unique presentation connects with conservative activists and GOP primary voters like few of his potential competitors. That could give him a marked advantage with a primary electorate that has been particularly troubled with Obama policies they believe are diminishing the grandeur of the American dream, and the role of the U.S. as the world’s indispensable super power.

“He has the best American dream stump speech out there — bar none,” Los Angeles attorney Robert C. O’Brien, a sought-after GOP donor, told the Washington Examiner. O’Brien, a big booster of Mitt Romney three years ago, is still neutral in the 2016 primary.

Rubio has assembled a lean but well-connected political operation to serve as the foundation of his presidential campaign.

Advisor Todd Harris spent a couple of years working for Bush in Tallahassee in the early 2000s. He helped guide Rubio’s 2010 upset of Gov. Charlie Crist, then a Republican-turned independent, and in 2014 helped lead now-Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa to another unexpected victory. Terry Sullivan, who runs Rubio’s PAC, has South Carolina roots. He ran then-Sen. Jim DeMint’s successful 2004 campaign there. Heath Thompson, another top Rubio advisor, also has Palmetto State ties and in 2014 served as the media advisor for now-Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Advising Rubio in New Hampshire is Jim Merrill, Romney’s Granite State guru.

From the earliest days when Rubio and his team formulated his approach to the 2016 GOP primary, the plan was to run as a unifying candidate who was the first choice of a broad cross-section of Republicans — and the second choice of even more.

Rubio is hoping to grow his base as other candidates run into trouble or drop out. He has no interest in being pigeonholed — whether as a Tea Partier or a member of the Republican Establishment, to name two categories of voters that other potential candidates are hoping to use as launch pad. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that strategy has paid off, at least initially.

Rubio still has obstacles. Not all conservatives have forgiven him for helping to negotiate the Senate’s “gang of eight” comprehensive immigration overhaul. The 2013 bill, which died in the House, included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who qualified over a 10-15 year period. Some Tea Party activists felt betrayed by Rubio, who had run in 2010 as an opponent of “amnesty.” Rubio now says the border must be secured before offering relief to illegal immigrants.

“He’s got a lot of work to do to overcome that objection,” said Steve Deace, a conservative talk radio host who broadcasts from Iowa, host of the presidential primary’s first nominating contest. “Particularly because there are candidates in the race that people can gravitate to.”

On virtually all votes and issues in the Senate, he has been simpatico with the conservative flank of the Republican Party. Rubio has worked closely with Tea Party-affiliated GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah on tax reform; and partnered with House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on health care. Immigration has been Rubio’s only heresy.

But the senator’s willingness to risk his political standing on this hot button issue has had its benefits. It caught the attention of wealthy GOP donors and other party Establishment veterans who want to see Republicans turn the page to a new generation, but are intent on nominating a presidential candidate who knows how to govern and is willing to take on the big national challenges.

Republicans on Capitol Hill say Rubio has set himself apart in other important ways.

Elected in a GOP wave fueled by domestic issues like Obamacare, Rubio nonetheless devoted a large amount of his attention to foreign affairs once assuming office in the Senate. Even as two of his likely presidential competitors, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, flirted with the sort of libertarian national security policies that appealed to a war-weary nation, Rubio remained a more traditional GOP hawk, warning of the dangers of U.S. disengagement.

Last week, he was the only Republican among the three of them to support the Senate GOP budget.

“He’s a strong conservative who does know how to govern and is willing to negotiate,” said Charlie Black, a veteran Republican lobbyist who considers Rubio a friend but is neutral in the presidential primary. “He was something of a prophet in calling for a strong defense and calling for us to beef up our foreign policy — and now people see why.”