On Miami-Dade politics and Marco Rubio ... by gimleteye

As though Marco Rubio has free will. The New York Times, in a shallow piece on Rubio, wrote this week, "The political advisers working for Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, had always envisioned that he would eventually speak out forcefully in Washington on the issues that animated his campaign: the debt, government spending, entitlements and taxes. They just didn’t think it would happen so soon."

"The sudden nationwide visibility immediately stoked speculation that Mr. Rubio, a 39-year-old star in the Republican Party, was positioning himself to be a vice presidential pick next year." Earth to New York Times' Michael Shear: Rubio is not "positioning himself" so much as being positioned, the same way that George W. Bush found himself positioned to be the GOP candidate in the 2000 presidential campaign. They were embraced long before they embraced the office.

Rubio was teed up for the US Senate just like Alex Penelas was, more than a decade ago, as the future of the Democrats in Florida. Like Penelas, Rubio is made-for-TV handsome, Cuban American, and carries a good sound bite. Somehow he glided through the slime of local Miami Dade politics to emerge as Jeb Bush's knight-at-arms in the walled castle of the state capitol. Somehow not even proximity at the time to David Rivera rubbed off. Somehow, an insider mortgage from US Century Bank was overlooked, buried in the crack cocaine of the housing boom. And somehow, Rubio had the massive fortune of being able to tag team his US Senate campaign behind the inchoate anger of the Tea Party (and the vanities of Kendrick Meek), avoiding the fallout of the housing crash and the economic catastrophe that Florida developers, homebuilders, and lobbyists who funded his campaign helped create. Poor Penelas got tangled up in the weeds of the failed Homestead Air Force Base fiasco. In the late 1990's, having won the position as Miami-Dade's mayor, Penelas was teed up to be Bob Graham's successor, drawing support from the same financial donors who flooded Rubio's campaign ten years later. Penelas (and Graham) pushed too hard on the air base (the plan was to turn the base into a privatized commercial airport, secured by Ramon Rasco, a founder and now chairman of US Century Bank, and board members of the LBA configured as HABDI, in a no-bid deal pushed by then county commissioner Natacha Seijas) figuring they could pin down Al Gore before the November election. They counted their chickens before the eggs hatched and when the whole farm blew up in the most spectacular presidential political fried chicken mess in US history, scattering bits and parts, feathers and gizzards all over the nation, Alex Penelas took a powder to Spain "for a business trip". Dick Armey's loafered GOP Anglos shut down the recount in Miami Dade, Greenspan snuffed out common sense at the Fed lighting the fuse on the housing bubble, and the rest-- alas!-- is history.

American voters are too dim-witted to even pick up the thread of the disaster. If we have proven anything, it is that orthodoxy serves the purposes of the powerful here the same way it does in Iran, or China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to name a few places where strict interpretation of the law accrues to the few, the powerful, and the rich. Marco Rubio is following a script. Karl Rove and Kochs (the anti-Newt Gingrich's) have planned all along for Rubio to take the GOP brand of "fiscal responsibility" straight to Obama once he mastered those sound bites. The Times is wrong when it writes, "... even before Mr. Rubio’s victory in Florida’s three-way Senate contest last year, aides had mapped out a plan for Mr. Rubio to lie low in Washington." Marco is the annointed one. He has the Jedi warrior sword and we have the photo to show it.

The aides? Who are they, if not Rove et al? "They knew that getting used to the ways of the Senate can take a while." Baloney. These days of unrestricted campaign contributions and corporate welfare, learning the ways of the Senate for the GOP means getting the right haircut and media training. It means mastering sound bites to be the first on Fox News with the rest following, saying 'how smart that Marco Rubio is"; neat as pins, American flags on their lapels, and organized as synchronized swimmers.

That's how to understand Senator Marco Rubio when he is on your television set delivering with the earnest demeanor of a self-made man with practically zero net worth; calm and poised from the waist up while legs churn in the figurative water to the command of the coaches walking up and down the sides of the training pool. That's where you will find Jeb! these days, not with the whistle in his fingers, but his cell phone to his ear calling commands. Given the lasting damage to the Bush brand-- the only thing better than being King, is being the oligarch who tells the King what to do.