Politics

Not Long Ago, Rubio Questioned His Readiness for Presidency

Published

10 years ago

April 24, 2015

In this April 15, 2015, file photo, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., discusses their recently released tax reform plan at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. (AP Photo/Molly Riley, File)

BRENDAN FARRINGTON, Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Marco Rubio lacks the experience to be president and Jeb Bush is a brilliant man ready for the job. So said Marco Rubio.

Thing is, that was Rubio a few years ago, a man of seeming humility who joked that the only thing he deserved to be president of was a condo association. He dismissed in colorful terms the idea that one term in the Senate could make a man ready for the White House.

“Everyone I’ve ever known that tries to use their position as a stepping stone for something else has ended up destroying themselves,” he said during a 2012 book tour.

Times — and ambition and ego — have changed.

Bush, the former governor who guided Rubio’s early political career, won Rubio’s praise as “one of the biggest, best thinkers in the Republican Party” with an “amazing” depth of knowledge on almost every issue.

Now Rubio says America doesn’t need politicians from the past.

After shooing off the roars of supporters in his 2010 Senate campaign who saw presidential mettle in him — “it’s fleeting and it’s not going to get to my head” — it’s now firmly in his head.

He’s hardly the first to be seized with the audacity of presidential hopes, even if others have taken a bit longer to get from you-must-be-kidding to yes-we-can.

Barack Obama’s star turn at the convention in 2004, the same year he was elected to the Senate from a background as a state lawmaker, made clear that the White House was in that young man’s eyes.

Few, though, have put down their own bona fides as thoroughly as Rubio did in his rough and tumble Senate campaign, when he wanted voters to know that a Senate seat was his total dream and devotion.

Then, he was stunned to be recognized at a Florida Panhandle truck stop while making a 400-mile round-trip drive so he could talk to 80 voters. The trip cost him as much as he raised in campaign contributions. Republican leaders in Tallahassee and Washington were trying to force him out of the race and have him run for attorney general so then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist could have a clean shot at the nomination.

“It was unpleasant,” Rubio said at the time, “but I’m glad it happened because it forced me to answer a very simple question to myself and that is, why are you doing this?” He decided “I’m in this because I want to do something.”

Rubio began the Senate race 31 points down in polls. Crist was raising $13 for every $1 Rubio took in. But Rubio used tea party rallies, the image of Crist embracing Obama and a well-delivered conservative message to top Crist by 20 points and drive him from the party.

Along the way, he’d poke fun at Obama’s sudden rise to power — a way of playing down suggestions that he could do the same. Like Rubio, Obama announced his presidential plans during his first Senate term.

He cracked at one Senate campaign stop that he was running because he wanted a Nobel Peace Prize, “but you’ve got to be in office two weeks to do that, so I’m going to have to wait.” Obama got the prize his first year in office, the Nobel committee citing his support for multilateral diplomacy and for a world without nuclear weapons.

The night Rubio won his seat, supporters roared when a speaker asked them if they wanted to see Rubio run for president.

The next day, Rubio pushed aside that talk.

“Politics is full of one-hit wonders,” Rubio told reporters. “The truth is, soon you will all go off and cover something else and there will be somebody else out there who’s the flavor of the month, and then I’m still going to be a U.S. senator.”

Two years later at a Panama City book signing, a man approached Rubio and said he should run for president in 2016. Rubio dismissed the idea afterward, and pointed to Bush instead.

“It’s just amazing to me the depth of knowledge that he has on virtually any issue, from foreign relations to the economy and obviously education,” he said.

Yet right after the 2012 election, Rubio was the first of the 2016 prospects to visit Iowa. His conviction that he’s ready for the presidency did not develop overnight.

Now, Rubio calls on voters to break with leaders of the last century. And his goals are much more ambitious than being a condo association president.

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Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

10 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

10 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.