Marco Rubio, 2016's young fogey

Rubio is a very talented politician — smart, hard-working and easily commanding respect. He is also kind of a bummer — dour, dutiful and repressed. 

It was Rubio the Bummer who this week mounted the barricades to demand the continued isolation of Cuba, an exhausted policy birthed many years before the senator himself. Rubio’s determined embrace of a U.S. sanctions regime with roots in the Sputnik era casts him as a young man clinging to the woolly past of his elders.

A son of Cuban emigres, Rubio’s anti-communist fervor no doubt comforts the aged, displaced Cubans of Miami, whose “trauma of exile — disbelief, guilt, a sense of loss — had shaped their lives and my own,” he wrote in his autobiography.

But it must puzzle his peers. Senator Rand Paul, who is almost a decade older than Rubio, is striving to be the Republican ambassador to youth. He called normalizing relations with Cuba “probably a good idea.” Rubio, who seems to cherish the role of favored grandson, called it “disgraceful.”