Scott Powers
In a speech at The Villages on Sunday Marco Rubio tried to harness the anger many Republican voters are expressing with their support of Donald Trump. Florida’s junior U.S. senator said their wrath must be channeled, not fostered and exploited.
“This election is really a referendum on America and its identity. It’s a referendum on our identity as a nation and as a people,” he said.
“Do you really want to live in a country where people hate each other?” he said.
The speech, coming less than 48 hours before Florida’s primary, was part appeal to all those angry Republicans supporting Trump, leaving Rubio staring at a probable loss in his home-state presidential primary.
In an hour-long speech to about 600 people at a recreation center, Rubio didn’t mention Trump by name until near the end. However, for most of the speech her deploring the anger and hatred many are associating with Trump’s rhetoric and those attending his rallies.
“You have a leading contender for president telling his audience ‘go ahead and punch someone in the face and I’ll pay your legal bills.’ That’s not an excusable attitude,” Rubio said. “That is wrong if our kids did it. It is disastrous if our president did it.”
At the same time, Rubio tried to embrace the people who are angry. He insisted he knows why they are angry, saying they must be assured, not incited.
He joined Trump in blaming some of the protests on professional activists or Democratic plants, but said that was not what he was talking about.
Rubio’s speech was interrupted early by one of the more bizarre protests of the campaign season. A man stood up and angrily accused Rubio of trying to steal his girlfriend. At first, many in the audience – and Rubio himself, he said later – thought maybe the incident was a practical joke. But the man, who said he was from New Hampshire, was insistent, and angry, still yelling that Rubio stole his girlfriend as Sumter County deputy sheriffs led the man away.
Rubio still tried to shrug it off with a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Rubio said. “I’m still looking for the hidden camera.”
He turned back to trying to reach out to angry people, acknowledging that the anger many people express while flocking to Trump’s campaign is real and legitimate, but he stopped short of condoning how it is being expressed.
“At a time now when a lot of Americans are hurting, I understand they are. You know why I understand why they are frustrated and hurting? Because these are members of my family. These are people I know, not just people I read about in a book,” Rubio said.
He described the financial uncertainty faced by teachers, firefighters, nurses, employees and others whose incomes have not kept up with costs of living, and who find themselves perilously close to financial disaster.
He added that American institutions, including political parties, the political process, the media, big businesses, corporate leaders, and education all have failed Americans.
“They get frustrated and they say enough is enough. And that’s when leadership matters,” Rubio said. “That’s when leadership steps forward and says, ‘yes, you have a right to be angry about all of that.’ And we’re going to fix it. What we see instead is a new brand of leadership which is no leadership at all. Which says to people, ‘yes, get angry, get even angrier. And let’s take it out on these people. And let’s do this and it’s everybody’s fault that things are going wrong in our country.’
“And the result is we are now a nation where people hate each other. We are now a nation where we are no longer apparently capable of debating serious public policy without immediately concluding that the person that (disagrees) with you is evil.”
Rubio said it’s good to be passionate about political beliefs and policies, but he called for control of passions and said that is not what he is seeing right now. He said it must be stopped.
“If we continue on the road we are on right now we are going to fracture at the seams,” he said. “We are now seeing images on television we haven’t seen in this country since the 1960s.
As he has often done, Rubio mentioned Ronald Reagan as his inspiration for conservatism.
“Here’s what he didn’t do: He didn’t go to Americans and say ‘I know you are upset with the direction of our country, and I’m going to make you angrier and I’m going to make you even more frustrated, so that you’ll vote for me,’ ” Rubio said. “He didn’t do that.
“Now we’re being asked once again what it means to be a conservative. I’m here to tell you the troubling trends: First of all, there are those who believe conservatism has nothing to do with principle, it’s about attitude. How angry can you get? How offensive can you be? How loud can you speak? That is not conservatism.”
Rubio defined conservative as the principles of small government, a constitution that limits government and guarantees government exists not to decide our rights but to protect them, of free economy and free enterprise, and of strong national defense.
Still, Rubio got his biggest applause and almost all his standing ovations whenever he attacked President Barack Obama, vowing to repeal executive orders, repeal ObamaCare and repeal the Iran treaty, accusing him of failing veterans and making America less safe.
