Marco Rubio is our man today, this should have been obvious because the only other candidate with Cuban ancestry is neither attractive nor charming, to humans at least.
Position: Senator from Florida
Announcement Date: April 13, 2015
Withdrew: March 15, 2016
Accomplishments: Flamed out dramatically at the hands of Chris Christie at the Feb 6, 2016 debate.
Actually a tiny robot?: Probably
Seriously, the guy seems like a perfect candidate, young, energetic, rock solid conservative credentials, just soft enough on immigration to not terrify most of the Hispanic population, a minority himself, but the good kind, Cubans obviously being here only to escape communism and historically a fairly red segment of the population.In this primary though people like Cruz, Huckabee, Fiorina, and of course, Trump exist and gained popularity by riling up the (long thought safely suppressed) racism and idiocy of the Republican base, see, as long as the bigotry is confined to dog whistle racism and not overtly stated racist platforms, the base could be relied upon to choose the establishment pick without thinking too much.
This year they didn't need to think either, but for different reasons, now there were multiple candidates outright saying the hateful things the party has relied upon to keep in power for years, and suddenly anyone who didn't join with that was not a real Republican and not worth paying attention to.
He still had his support of course, the financial oligarchs and the Fuck You Got Mine portion of the base liked him just fine, but they had JEB! and Kasich as well to pick from if they wanted an establishment pick, and so their support was split, in an ideal world for the GOPe, those three would have been the only ones running, and JEB! would probably have taken the lead, but they would have been happy if Rubio jumped the line with an unexpected showing. No one really wanted Kasich.
It also turns out that Rubio can't actually sound convincing when giving stump speeches or debating, Chris Christie basically suicide bombed him at the debates, his attacks leading Rubio to repeat virtually the exact same statement about three or four times in a row. That was by far the worst thing that happened to him, but he never showed a lot of passion in his talking, this is not a big deal, Hillary Clinton doesn't give the greatest speeches, but while she can fall back on a massive amount of knowledge and ability to speak authoritatively on the topics at hand, Rubio never showed a command of policy or knowledge of the minutia of politics that demonstrated a command of the material.
Trump managed to stick the label of "little" on him as well, which stuck in peoples heads a little bit.
Basically he is an empty suit, and in an election full of people that were essentially the opposite of that, he couldn't stand out and dropped out after losing his home state of Florida, shortly after the Pulse nightclub shooting Rubio decided to attempt to run for reelection for his Senate seat, despite having said previously he wouldn't.
Rubio is young and has a long career ahead of him if he can get people to forget his terrible performance during this run, which shouldn't be hard, theory is that he wasn't supposed to be a serious contender anyway, this was mostly for name recognition and after he puts his time in the trenches for another couple terms we will likely see him again, and he might have a good shot assuming the Republican party manages to surprise us all and survive the next few years.
Don't feel bad for him though, Rubio may be among the least overtly evil people who ran, but he holds all the same beliefs that the Tea Party wave has forced into the party, he is absolutely anti abortion, gay rights, and Muslim while being a big fan of foreign wars and tearing up treaties, including the extremely successful Iran nuclear treaty which is now over a year old and hasn't gotten anyone incinerated in nuclear fire yet. He's a shithead that hides it well and nothing more.
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