Marco Rubio announced his presidential campaign on Monday evening in Miami, in a speech that was supposed to be all about the future, about the 21st century, about the triumph of young energy over old ideas.
In other words, as they said back in 1992, Bill Clinton's day: Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Don't stop – it'll soon be here!
Yes, it will. But will it be better than before? Mr. Rubio insisted that it would, with a disdainful remark about his elder rival Hillary Clinton: "Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday. But yesterday is over, and we are never going back."
While he was saying that I was looking over Mr. Rubio's shoulder, at his campaign logo. "Marco Rubio: A New American Century" has a 48-state map of the United States dotting the "i" in "Rubio." It's too bad for Alaska and Hawaii, but that's the map you have to use if you're going to turn the country into a graphic element.
It's the map from 1958, which, on reflection, seems to be pretty close to the era on which Mr. Rubio, for all his talk about looking forward, was trying to pin the country's hopes and dreams.
His speech was mostly an anthology of Republican applause lines – pro-God and liberty, anti-tax and anti-Obama — grafted onto a gauzy recollection of his family's story and his humble roots as the son of a bartender and maid. When he talked about a country that "no longer graduates students with mountains of debt and degrees that do not lead to jobs, and that graduates more students from high school ready to work" – that was definitely the late '50s he was summoning. It was the time when women's reproductive rights were not protected, when universal health care was a liberal fantasy, and when nobody, but nobody, thought of "being passive in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression."
There was more in that vein, but, to be fair, it was just one speech with an unfortunately faulty theme. (Not as flawed as Senator Ted Cruz's campaign announcement, where he oddly and endlessly channeled John Lennon.) Mr. Rubio looked young and nervous, as if he were running for high school class president, and seemed utterly relieved to get to the end, when he could do the (very, very dated) political ritual of the song-plus-the-wife-and-kids-waving-at the-crowd, with everything but the balloons.
Mr. Rubio gave a canned speech, trying, with the canny desperation of an ad campaign from the "Mad Men" era, to inject some freshness into a tired, wrinkly G.O.P. brand. For that he deserves some credit, at least. He does not seem driven by an unseen madness, as many in his party are. And he has been courageous before, when he helped to draft a sensible immigration law that enraged his party's nativists. Mr. Rubio has spent years trying to live that down, to deny that he was once smart, thoughtful and sensible on immigration. In the months to come, on that issue and so many others, Mr. Rubio may be scrambling to find a message that sells and an identity that fits in a party that has lost its mind. Here's hoping that when his head finally stops spinning, it's facing forward again.
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