02/05/2016
Mickey Kaus in in New Hampshire, checking out Marco Rubio — The Rubio Menace, February 5, 2016:I went to see Marco Rubio’s town hall this afternoon in Salem, New Hampshire. It was only a few miles from my hotel–I really had no excuse. I wanted to find out: Was Rubio really as slick and insubstantial in this setting as John Edwards? Answer: No. He’s slicker. He’s slicker, in part, because he at least seems a bit spontaneous,with a slightly goofy, human quality. I admit this is hard to judge seeing him once — maybe he always lets his 8-year-old son sit on his stool during his stump speech. But it’s hard to deny the appeal.[Emphasis in original.]Rubio is more of a threat than Cruz — he represents what Kaus calls "the K St. Restoration":
Cruz isn’t going to win New Hampshire. Rubio has a chance–certainly a chance to come so close he’s proclaimed the winner by the press. And Cruz isn’t going to destroy the nascent, effective populist insurgency that anti-amnesty activists and trade skeptics, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions, have built over the past three year–and that Trump is demonstrating has substantial, intense support among voters of both parties. Rubio will. Electing Rubio, after killing the Gang of 8 bill, is like marching against the Vietnam War in the 60s and winding up with Richard Nixon running things.Rubio is dangerous because he’s deceptive — he’s claiming he’s learned better on immigration, but he’s claimed that before.
Rubio’s not going to drive Jeff Sessions from the capital. But you can count on the combination of President Rubio and Speaker Ryan to quickly pass an amnesty bill that (like the Gang of 8) contains only the most chimerical guarantees of new enforcement measures. You can also expect them to promote and defend trade, including “trade in services” that involves foreign workers performing those services on American soil. And what about the Sessionsesque suggestion that immigration levels actually be lowered? “We have a better chance of discovering time travel than getting Rubio-Ryan to take up immigration-reduction bill,” one Senate immigration advisor told me. Corporate lobbyists will be in the saddle, and the promising Sessions movement will have effectively been defeated — probably permanently, given how mass immigration creates ethnic lobbies for more mass immigration. Historians will get tenure trying to explain how this happened so suddenly. Was it similar to what happened to the Bimetalists? Maybe Trump can become a columnist for the Washington Examiner. Dave Brat will be a trivia question.Read the whole thing.In short, for the Sessions movement–and a particular vision of America, in which even unskilled, non-bright citizens can work a full day and earn a respectable living–Marco Rubio is a state-of-the art K-Street kill shot, a sudden existential threat. We may have only a few days to recognize this.
By the way, when I said "Rubio is more of a threat" I don’t mean to Trump, or to the Republican Party — I mean to America. That’s what "existential threat" means here.
UPDATE: Uh-oh …
I blogged we "may have only a few days" to wake up to the Rubio threat, but it’s probably more like "a few hours" https://t.co/c8xvqhKA4y
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) February 5, 2016
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