Marco Rubio is set to announce a run for President on Monday.
We haven’t talked a lot about Marco recently, ever since the immigration debacle, from which he has backed away. (Like Scott Walker?) That event seemed to take him off the radar.
But why?
We remember Marco. The insurgent Tea Party candidate who defeated Charlie what’s his name, the National Republican Senatorial Committee anointed candidate. Those were heady days, all the way back in 2010, as we recalled in Give Some Credit To “Not One Red Cent”:
There are many stories to tell about this election cycle, but one group of bloggers deserves special credit.In May 2009, a group of bloggers started a blog called Not One Red Cent in reaction to the attempt by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to anoint Charlie Crist as the Republican nominee in Florida, and to deprive Marco Rubio of a fair chance to compete for the nomination….In those first few months they blogged like crazy, and they were voices in the wilderness.Over time Marco Rubio began to pick up recognition and support and went mainstream, and NORC posts dropped off as others picked up the cudgel elsewhere. The rest, as they say, is history.When that history is written, I hope people will recognize the impact a few bloggers had in the revolution of 2010.
Since those days, the liberal media, Democratic politicians and the Republican establishment sought to crush the Tea Party, with mixed results. The Tea Party changed the dialogue, the national focus, and both houses of Congress.
But some of those early Tea Party candidates changed too, and Rubio is remembered with some disappointment by his earliest backers, the bloggers who believed when no one else did.
But has he changed so much that he’s no longer a viable conservative candidate?
While not too much faith should be put in ratings, Marco does have some pretty good conservative ratings:
And like it or not, foreign policy will be a big part of the 2016 campaign, and that is his strength.
So what do you think?
Can conservatives fall in love again with Marco Rubio?
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