DeFede Columns

MIAMI (CBS4) ― During a recent meeting of more than 200 conservatives in Broward County, Marco Rubio, the former Speaker of the Florida Legislature and the man now trying to upend Gov. Charlie Crist's coronation as the state's next United States Senator, explained why he opposed the federal stimulus plan and other spending bills Congress had passed.

"If we were obsessed with spending $2 trillion that we didn't have, if that was the only choice we were given, and I think there were other choices by the way, but if that was the only choice we were given, we should have just suspended federal taxes for a year," Rubio said. "That's $2 trillion right there."

Rubio's comment drew a big round of applause from the crowd – many of whom were active in the anti-tax, anti-spending, anti-just-about-everything Tea Party protests that Rubio hopes will help form the core of his insurgency campaign. On July 4 alone, Rubio attended three Tea Party protests across the state.

The tax line was especially effective since almost everyone in the room knew Crist not only supported the stimulus plan but also literally stood shoulder-to-shoulder with President Obama at an event in Florida urging Congress to pass it.

"Republicans also bought into the notion of spending way too much," Rubio said without mentioning Crist by name.

All night long, whether it was guns or taxes, he had what they considered the right answer. When a woman stood up to complain that Obama was "shredding our Constitution," Rubio offered a lecture on why we need to limit government. "The Constitution is based on the notion that government has no power unless the constitution gives it to government," he said. "That's a unique concept in world history and we need to respect what that means."

A few minutes later, when a gentleman offered the softball question of his stance on Israel, all Rubio needed to say was, "Israel is America's best friend." The crowd cheered.

Rubio also hits all the right chords for conservatives on abortion, touting votes he made against spending taxpayer money on stem cell research as well as a bill requiring women in Florida to view an ultrasound of the fetus before having it aborted. The measure passed the Florida House but failed in the state Senate.

Earlier in the day, Rubio appeared on a local talk radio station where he was hailed for a Tweet he sent out a day earlier regarding the Iranian protests. Rubio's Tweet: "I have a feeling the situation in Iran would be a little different if they had a 2nd amendment like ours."

During the radio interview, Rubio seemed pleasantly pleased his message was creating a stir on both the left and the right. "Well they would have more options that's for sure," he said of the Iranian students. "I do think people have the right to armed resistance eventually if all other options fail."

The one area – really the only area – where Rubio runs into trouble with conservatives is on the issue of immigration. In 2008, while Rubio was Speaker of the House, he blocked six bills that supporters of the bills say would have cracked down on illegal immigration.

"That will be your cross to bear," the radio host ominously warned him.

Among other things, those bills would have required state officials to check the status of anyone applying for government benefits, would have required state contractors to use the federal E Verify program, and would compelled local police to check the status of everyone they arrest and turn over anyone in the country illegally to the federal government.

During his time as Speaker, Rubio, the child of Cuban immigrants, avoided questions on immigration policy, saying, "There is nothing the state of Florida can do unilaterally to solve global warming. And there is nothing we can do unilaterally to solve immigration."

Today Rubio is trying to find a way to placate the far right of his party on immigration without alienating the very constituency he owes his political life to.

"My position has never been any different than it is right now," he said in an interview. "I don't view myself or our movement as an anti illegal immigration movement. I view it as a pro legal immigration movement."

Trying to make that type of nuance palatable to a conservative base may be as big a challenge for Rubio as defeating Charlie Crist.


A GOP DREAM?

On paper, Marco Rubio is everything the Republican Party would seem to be looking for – a smart, young, charismatic Cuban American who could help win back Latinos at a time when the party is demographically moving toward Whig-status.

Rubio's parents came to the United States from Cuba in 1959. His father got a job as a bartender at one of those swanky old Miami Beach hotels. In 1979, with Miami groaning under the weight of a rising immigrant population as well as an increase in crime, Rubio's father decided to move the family to Las Vegas. "My parents saw the direction this community was going at that time and really didn't want their kids growing up here," he said.

Rubio was eight at the time. His father easily found another job bartending while his mother worked as a casino maid at the Imperial Palace on the Vegas strip.

The family returned to South Florida in 1985. By then Rubio was already become enamored with politics. "That 1980 [Republican National] Convention was really what got me interested in politics," he recalled. "And even as a young kid, I was only nine years old, but I could sense this whole malaise the country was going through, this thought that America's best days had passed us."

Can a nine-year-old discern a national malaise?

If you believe the hype, the 38-year-old Rubio has the potential to be a conservative doppelganger to Barack Obama. Like Obama, Rubio has the gift of speaking in soaring principled themes without getting bogged down in details. His demeanor is cool. He does not raise his voice or become overly emotional. He has never been someone who hides from the press to avoid talking about an issue. And although when he was first coming up in the Legislature, he was known to be thin-skinned, he doesn't bristle as noticeably to criticism as he did just a couple of years ago.

Shortly after graduating from law school at the University of Miami, he was elected to the city commission of West Miami, a small middle-class largely Cuban-American enclave in the heart of Miami-Dade County. He was 27. Two years later entered the state legislature, rising to be the state's first Cuban-American Speaker.

"Marco Rubio has already shown he's articulate, he's photogenic he's been at a very young age the leader of our Florida House, so he's got the leadership skills," said Sharon Day, the secretary of the Republican National Committee who also attended the Broward meeting. "He is our party's future."

A Jeb Bush protégé, Rubio has picked up endorsements for his Senate bid from Mike Huckabee, who Rubio endorsed during the Republican presidential primary; and South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who said on Fox News, Rubio "should be a part of our present, not just a part of our future. I think this Florida race is going to help define what the Republican Party really is."

When Rubio first entered the Senate race, The Club for Growth hailed his arrival as "good news for Florida's families and businesses" adding "his fiscally responsible, pro-growth approach in the State Capitol stands in stark contrast with other elements of the state government, led by Charlie Crist." The National Review has championed him thoughtfulness, and Fox News has offered him prominent play on the network.

Yet despite the love from the right, Rubio is still a bit of a right-wing mirage, more fantasy than reality. In his most recent campaign report he raised a paltry $340,000 compared to the $4.3 million raised by Crist in just two months.

While Rubio was speaking to Broward Republicans, Crist was in Atlanta where both of Georgia's senators, as well as the state's governor, were hosting a fundraiser for him. Twenty-four hours earlier, no less than eight senators – including John McCain, John Cornyn, Lindsay Graham, and the man Crist hopes to replace, Mel Martinez – were on hand for another big money event for Crist.

No one expects Rubio to come close to the fundraising machine that is Charlie Crist, who has the benefit of not only being the perceived heir apparent but who also has the advantage of being a sitting governor with line item-item veto power over every dollar in the state budget. There are very few people power brokers in the state who can say no when Crist asks them to raise campaign cash.

But if Rubio continues to get crushed 12-to-1 or even 8-to-1 in fundraising, than the national conservative fundraisers might just find Rubio a bit too quixotic for their liking.

Rubio said he's not worried. "People who give money because they are conservatives are giving money because they want to see a certain public policy be implemented," he said. "Not because they want to be on the winning side."

While Crist barnstorms Florida on his state plane for bill signings and well-orchestrated town hall meetings, Rubio has been logging hundreds of miles a week alone in his pick up truck or, when money allows, catching the cheapest flight he can find on Southwest Airlines.

"Is it frustrating to me? No. It's irrelevant to me," Rubio said of the money and support that has flowed to Crist. "I never expected to be the candidate of Washington DC and quite frankly I didn't seek it and I wouldn't have embraced it. When you run against the status quo to change it you can expect the status quo to fight back."

Last year, as he was entering his final term as Speaker, Rubio told me he was glad to be stepping away from politics. "I don't think human beings were built to be in power for 30 or 40 years," he said in 2008.

Married for eleven years and the father of four young children, Rubio said he was concerned that his non-stop political life was affecting his family.

"I've come increasingly to the notion that I have obligations that are more important than just my political steps that have to be taken into account," he said in 2008. "What good does it do me to continue in politics and rise to a statewide office if my son is in the juvenile justice system because dad's not around or my daughter's doing poorly in school or something along those lines? My kids are starting to be affected. My wife has been married to a politician every day of our marriage. Our entire family's schedule has to be built around the political world."

A year later all that changed and he said he felt compelled to give the open Senate seat a try, "for the future of my children."

His message is largely economic: bringing down the deficit, passing a balanced budget amendment, overhauling and simplifying the tax code, and driving home the belief that the next generation will be imperiled if fiscal discipline is not restored. He argues both parties cannot – should not – be trusted.

And where did the Republican Party go wrong?

"When it no longer stood for anything," Rubio said. "When it no longer could identify itself as a movement, it just became an organization dedicated to smearing people and winning elections. I think that is when it went astray. When it lost its vision as a movement behind specific ideas that were relevant to people's lives. Republicans are in the wilderness because they campaigned as one thing and then governed as another. Until we find our voice and are an authentic movement in America again, that's where we will be, in the wilderness."


IMMIGRATION AN ISSUE

If there is one area where Rubio can, at times, seem a bit lost in the woods it is on immigration. Discuss the issue with Rubio for any length of time and you can tell he is torn. His parents were born in Cuba, his wife is Colombian, and he lives in Miami-Dade County where more than half of the 2.4 million residents were born outside the United States, many of whom are in this country illegally because they either snuck into the country or simply over-stayed their visas.

Politically, immigration is a high-wire act for Rubio. He needs to reassure conservatives that just because he is Hispanic, he won't show – dare I say it – empathy to those Hispanics who are here illegally, the way Mel Martinez, did when he strongly supported earlier efforts at immigration reform.

Rubio's decision to block the six bills last year in the Florida Legislature on illegal immigration, only serves to fuel the right's uneasiness toward him.

Karen Moore, the woman at the Broward event who asked Rubio the question about Obama "shredding" the Constitution, left the meeting saying she liked what Rubio had to say on everything except immigration. "I still hold against him the fact that he would not let those immigration bills come up for a vote," she said.

"There is a segment of folks out there who harp on [the six bills]," Rubio told me later, "but it is really not something I am being asked all over."

Nevertheless, while Rubio needs to be tough enough for the wigwam wing of the party (think small tent versus the moderate's big tent), he also doesn't want to come across as someone heartless enough to sell out his own people for a U.S. Senate seat.

The Sonia Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court presents a simlar challenge. At the same time Senator Martinez announced he would be voting to confirm Sotomayor, Rubio declared that he would have voted against her nomination – but only because he did not like her answers on the Second Amendment and the privacy clause. He praised her as being "eminently qualified from an academic standpoint" and said he was not unduly bothered by her "wise Latina" comment. He said he just wanted a strict constructionist on the court.

Additionally, it is difficult for a Cuban American to take an overly strident stand on immigration given the special status Cubans have enjoyed as a matter of law for decades. Simply setting a foot on dry land makes a Cuban immigrant legal. Cuban American politicians run the risk of coming across like hypocrites when they chastise Mexicans and Haitians for entering the country illegally but welcome Cubans who arrive here.

Asked about the perception of a double standard, Rubio said: "I get your point."

Which may explain why Rubio consistently tries to pivot immigration questions to border security saying Americans are not willing to discuss anything regarding immigration reform until the border is secure. Rubio said he would have voted against the McCain-Kennedy bill granting a pathway for illegal immigrants to become legal and said he opposes all forms of amnesty.

But when you get past the clear, crisp bullet points of his speech, and start talking details, it becomes a lot fuzzier.

"I don't believe you can grant them citizenship or even to create a path for it," he said. "It would send a message that if you come into this country and you stay long enough we'll allow you to stay in. On the other hand I also don't think you can round them up. First of all I don't think you can do it, second of all you would have to create a police state, and third of all I don't want to live in a country where police and law enforcement are pulling people over because they think they might look like an illegal immigrant."

Rubio opposes driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, saying he does not think illegal immigrants should be allowed to "interact freely with government." But then, without any prodding, he argues the other side of the case saying, "We have a lot of uninsured drivers in areas where there are a lot of illegal immigrants because they can't get insurance even if they wanted to."

On the issue of food stamps and other benefits for illegal immigrants: "This is a humane country, we're not going to starve children, we're not going to watch people go hungry just because they are here illegally. On the other hand, it can't become permanent. Once somebody interacts with government and it is verified they are here illegally that person's days are going to be numbered in America."

Should children of illegal immigrants be permitted to go to public school?

"The kids are illegal too, just like their parents," he said. "I'm not here to hunt the kids down. I don't think kids are the people we're going to go after." But he added, "Kids are attached to their parents. Once their parents status is verified their days should be numbered so that really shouldn't be a problem."

Essentially, Rubio's answer is to leave them in the shadows, go after their employers, and hope life becomes so untenable for anyone here illegally that they will simply leave. The problem of what to do with those 13 to 20 million people here illegally, he said, "will solve itself through attrition."

But even on employment, Rubio struggles. He supports the federal E Verify system "in concept," but isn't sold on the idea of a national database for employers to check the immigration status of emplyees has been perfected to the point where it should actually be used today.

He wants increased border security, but isn't sure about a wall. "I don't know if the wall is the best way," he said. "I'm not a border security expert."

He may need to become one before the campaign is over. If Congress takes up immigration reform this Fall, as many people believe it will, it could become a central issue in the campaign.

Rubio does have one advantage. If the far right is wary of Rubio on the issue, Charlie Crist, who is seen as being "soft" on illegal immigration, infuriates them.

"I despise Charlie Crist," said Karen Moore, the woman who attended the Broward meeting. "I may not be completely sold on him, but I am going to fight to get Rubio elected so that Crist won't be elected."

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