Marco Rubio was forced to stretch for the tiny bottle of Poland Spring. (photo: ABC News)
19 February 13
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with assistant editor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the State of the Union address and Marco Rubio's watered-down rebuttal.
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his State of the Union address, President Obama rolled out a strongly
liberal second-term agenda that included raising the minimum wage,
spending more on infrastructure, and enacting more stringent
climate-change regulations. We've seen the president make big proposals
to joint sessions of Congress before, some of which have become laws,
many of which have not. What parts of this speech do you expect to
become reality? Very few, as is usually the case with the
focus-group-tested laundry lists enumerated by modern American
presidents in this annual ritual.
Besides, the divided Congress assures
that much of what Obama wants is DOA. What was notable about his speech
is that it reaffirmed the bolder, second-term Obama also present in his
Inaugural address. And then there was that final, soaring passage in
which the president argued that the families of Newtown and Aurora - not
to mention Gabby Giffords, also sitting in the audience - "deserve a
vote" on new gun legislation. While Obama may not get any such
legislation through this Congress, he did hand a gun to the GOP to shoot
itself with. If Republicans seem completely intransigent about guns -
to the point of blocking even those few restrictions favored by the vast
majority of the public post-Newtown - it's a political loser for them
nearly everywhere except in the solid red states they already have
locked down.
Marco Rubio's rebuttal to Obama's address
seemed an effort to claim some part of the populist mantel for the
Republicans. Not only did Rubio deliver the speech in both English and Spanish,
but he talked up the fact that he grew up as a working-class kid and
still lives the blue-collar neighborhood in which he grew up.
What did
you think of Rubio's speech? Rubio was there to "put a new face
on the party" said David Gregory on NBC before his address. Rubio is
the Republicans' "savior" according to this week's already dated Time cover.
Well, so much for that.
Rubio's new face was so garishly lit he looked
like a jack-o'-lantern. His oleaginous delivery was that of an
infomercial pitchman. And what was he selling, exactly, besides his own
canned son-of-immigrants biography? (Even that has now been downsized to
a flat generic spiel, since he was previously caught fictionalizing and
hyping the circumstances of his parents' departure from Cuba.)
Rubio
didn't even try to broaden the GOP's appeal, his bilingual stunt
notwithstanding. It was a lot of Obamacare, Solyndra, "job-killing"
laws, small business blah blah blah - recycled 2012 GOP campaign talking
points. (Only Benghazi was missing in action, no doubt through an
oversight.)
The speech also had a whiny, defensive tone ("I don't … want
to protect the rich!") and took a shot at the legitimacy of climate
change ("Our government can't control the weather"). These were stands
that would appeal only to his party's own base, which probably wasn't
even watching. It says all you need to know that no less an expert on
State of the Union responses than Bobby Jindal declared afterwards that
Rubio had done "a wonderful job."
And how do you think the speech set Rubio up for 2016? Care to comment on "water-gate"?
Look, it could have been worse. Rubio could have reached for a bottle
of Evian instead of Poland Spring. Then again, it also could have been
better: If he had grabbed a bottle of beer, he might have made a dent in
erasing the fun-free teetotaling Republican image left by the Romney
campaign.
Whatever, the moment was a bit of pure farce that sent a
simple message: Amateur Night. As comedy, it may even have surpassed
Michele Bachmann's looking-at-the-wrong-camera television address.
But let's not get carried away. Rubio's clowning, sadly, didn't
remotely rank with Albert Brooks's sweaty on-camera meltdown in
Broadcast News or Ralph Kramden's hapless television appearance in the classic "Chef of the Future" episode
of The Honeymooners.
As for the ultimate political fallout, who knows?
It's not as if the GOP is well stocked with plausible alternatives to
take on Clinton or Biden in 2016. My favorite analysis of this question appeared in Politico,
where a "general consensus" of Republican operatives declared that the
incident would have "no little lingering impact" on Rubio's 2016
prospects.
Not quite sure what that language means, but maybe it doesn't
matter since many of these same operatives foresaw a Romney rout on our
last Election Day.
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