Rubio never talked about Republicans and Democrats. His speech hovered above partisanship. Instead, he talked about “those who haven’t seen it this way. … They think that we need a guardian class in American government to protect us from ourselves. They think that the free-enterprise system is unfair, that a few people make a lot of money, and the rest of us get left behind. They believe that the only way business can make its money is by exploiting its workers and its customers. And they think that America’s enemies exist because of something America did to earn their enmity.”
These other politicians were trying to “redefine our government, our economy, and our country,” he warned. “The leaders with this worldview … have used a severe economic downturn, a severe recession as an excuse to implement the statist policies that they have longed for all this time.”
Rubio isn’t the first politician to use this kind of appeal: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton blended biography and political vision in their successful presidential campaigns. But Rubio has taken their method and used it to promote a very conservative rather than a liberal or progressive agenda. And he has done it in such a way that never really spells out what the specific agenda is. Does he think global warming is a hoax? Does he think the stimulus cost jobs rather than created them? He never said one way or the other, but his conservative audience was somehow led to believe that, like them, he held these views.
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