In the media you hear about Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush.
But from conservative policy wonks and Republican insiders, you hear a lot right now about Marco Rubio.
He hasn’t caught fire, not exactly and not yet. But he has very much caught the interest of serious people, who are impressed by the earnest way in which he has readied himself for a possible campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
While rivals and their aides have concentrated on publicity (and of course on fund-raising), he and his have spent a laudable amount of time on policy, churning out proposals for changing the tax code, making higher education more affordable and accountable, reforming Social Security and more.
And he stands ever taller as Republican strategists and donors realize that many of the other potential presidential candidates on the party’s supposedly “deep bench” might best be left sitting there.
Those arbiters have long been concerned about Scott Walker, for reasons made clear in his cringe-inducing comparison of Islamic extremists and Wisconsin supporters of organized labor. This pony may have only one trick — union busting — to go with a gait that’s less than graceful.
They roll their eyes at Rand Paul, who prevailed in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll but was bizarrely bucking up the anti-vaccine crowd not so long before that. This physician has a nutty layer in his cake.
They’re befuddled by Juggernaut Jeb — or, more accurately, by the way in which Jeb Bush’s big money, big media profile and big team of all-star advisers haven’t yet translated into big support among voters.
They’re starting to ask themselves who else they’ve got, a question also fed by their awareness that if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and they put Bush up against her, they lose several lines of attack. They can’t deride her as entitled political royalty without him being similarly disparaged. They can’t call her yesterday’s news when the tag fits him, too.
It doesn’t fit Rubio: Hispanic, the son of immigrant parents, reared in a home without great material advantages. The Republican Party has never nominated anybody like him.
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