Rubio Avoids Some Tea Party Tactics In Florida Race

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/us/po ... f=politics

Florida Candidate Veers From Tea Party’s Script
Steve Johnson for The New York Times

Marco Rubio addressed supporters at the opening of his campaign headquarters in Melbourne, Fla., on Thursday.
By JEFF ZELENY
Published: August 22, 2010

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PENSACOLA, Fla. — When the year began, the stars could not have shone brighter for Marco Rubio, the fresh voice of newly invigorated conservatives who embodied the change that frustrated grass-roots Republicans demanded from inside their own party.
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This week, facing a more complicated path than he had anticipated in his race for a United States Senate seat, he is hoping to begin a second act.

The Florida primary on Tuesday was once going to be Mr. Rubio’s chance to dispatch his main Republican opponent, Gov. Charlie Crist. But Mr. Crist bolted the party four months ago rather than face Mr. Rubio in the primary and is running as an independent in a three-way race.

Now, facing intense competition for the moderate Republicans and independents who could be the keys to victory in one of the nation’s most evenly divided states, Mr. Rubio is trying to show that he is more than just an insurgent protest candidate — and he is breaking with some Tea Party orthodoxy in the process.

Mr. Rubio spends less and less time trying to tap into the discontent that has been at the forefront of the midterm elections. A wiser course for Republicans, he said, is offering an alternative, not simply being the angry opposition.

“The solution isn’t just to paralyze government,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview as he traveled the state last week from here in the Panhandle to Miami. “Vote for us because you couldn’t possibly vote for them? That’s not enough. It may win some seats, but it won’t take you where you want to be.”

His course bears little resemblance to those of other insurgent candidates, many of whom hope to ride a combative streak — and little else — to Washington. Mr. Rubio is increasingly trying to turn his candidacy into one built more on ideas than outrage, which is why he delivered three detailed speeches in the past week alone on education, veterans’ affairs and retiree issues.

The strategy is partly born out of necessity for a wonky candidate trying to compete for attention in what has become a preprimary spectacle in Florida, where Mike Tyson was the best man in the wedding of Jeff Greene, a billionaire developer seeking to become the Democratic Senate nominee, and a multimillionaire, Rick Scott, is running for governor as a Republican.

Mr. Rubio, 39, a former speaker of the Florida House, won an ideological victory of sorts in pushing Mr. Crist from the Republican Party, but in electoral terms, Mr. Rubio has struggled to overtake the governor in the Senate race. The outcome of the Democratic primary between Representative Kendrick B. Meek and Mr. Greene will define the three-way fall campaign and give voters choices across the political spectrum.

“I always knew that I’d have to run against two people who support the Barack Obama agenda,” Mr. Rubio said. “I just didn’t know I’d have to run against them at the same time.”

Mr. Crist has been running hard to sew up moderate voters from both parties, testing the idea that voters are as fed up with Republicans as they are with Democrats.

“The independent agenda is the people’s agenda,” Mr. Crist said the other day as he dropped by a retirement complex populated nearly entirely by Democrats.

Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor and a close adviser to Mr. Rubio, said the race had been consumed by multiple distractions beyond Mr. Rubio’s control. But he said the message of an optimistic conservative, which he believes national Republican leaders are not offering, would set Mr. Rubio apart.

“The fact is that Marco has three months to be better known, and he will be,” Mr. Bush said in an interview. “He hasn’t peaked. Things change now in warp speed.”

But Mr. Rubio was asked last week in the Panhandle if he had peaked too soon, and his perpetual smile fell.

“People say that, but I don’t know what that means,” Mr. Rubio said. “Our election is in November. There’s an ebb and flow to politics. There are other races that people want to pay attention to.”

Yet in the four months since the Senate race was upended, Mr. Rubio has defied the Democratic-driven caricature of a Tea Party phenomenon.

Many voters he came across on his tour were mad, but there was no anger, shouting or hint of irritation from Mr. Rubio as he fielded questions in Pensacola about how he would stop what one woman described as a radical Democratic agenda overtaking America.

“This is our country!” the woman declared from her seat at McGuire’s Irish Pub, looking to Mr. Rubio for affirmation. He nodded and paused a moment.

“I am not running for the United States Senate because I want to be the opposition to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid,” he replied in a measured tone. “I’m running for Senate because I want to create an alternative.”

At each stop, Mr. Rubio speaks of the urgency to restore “American exceptionalism,” which he says is slipping away under Democratic control. He said that the private sector had been stymied by uncertainty under the Obama administration and that the health care law should be repealed.

Yet in an expansive interview, as he rode in a white minivan from Pensacola to Fort Walton Beach, Mr. Rubio did not agree with flashpoints Republican candidates elsewhere have seized on.

Does he support changing the 14th Amendment, as some Republicans have suggested, which grants the right to citizenship to anyone born in the United States?

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“You’re taking energy and focus away from that fundamental debate and spending time on something that quite frankly is not the highest and best use of our political attention,” Mr. Rubio said. “I don’t think that’s where the problem is.”
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Is the Arizona immigration law a good idea, where the police would be required to check the immigration status of anyone stopped or detained whom they suspected of being in the country illegally?

“I don’t want Arizona to serve as a model for other states,” said Mr. Rubio, a first-generation American whose parents fled Cuba in 1959. “I want Arizona’s law to serve as a wake-up call to the federal government to finally do its jobs with regard to illegal immigration.”

Does anything impress him about President Obama?

“Yeah, there’s a lot,” Mr. Rubio said. “Obviously his personal story of someone who didn’t come from wealth is a testament not just to his tenacity, but to America. I just strongly disagree with him on public policy.”

When Mr. Rubio arrived for the opening of the Okaloosa County Republican headquarters, cameras immediately began flashing. But the commotion cooled when someone asked a question about immigration.

“It doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker,” Mr. Rubio said, “so bear with me.”

For eight minutes, he explained how he believes the United States must make a serious effort to secure its borders. He said that amnesty would not work and that Republicans needed to take the lead, saying “We are not the anti-illegal-immigration party, we are the pro-legal-immigration party.”

But PolitiFact Florida, a project run by The St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald that tracks what it believes are flip-flops by candidates, gave Mr. Rubio a “half flip” for his position on the Arizona law. When the law was passed, Mr. Rubio said it could create a “police state.” Now, he speaks about it in far less draconian terms.

Joseph Pascarella, an organizer of the Niceville-Valparaiso Tea Party group, said that his and other Tea Party organizations in Florida had championed Mr. Rubio’s candidacy and still believed he would make the best senator. But Mr. Pascarella added that he would be watching to see whether Mr. Rubio modulated his views as the election season crept along.

“He’s the best candidate around, Mr. Pascarella said. “What are the other choices? Crist, who’s just out for himself?”

“But,” he added, “just because we support someone doesn’t mean we are going away.”