He would have been the most radical nominee in GOP history.
or the past few months, the fate of the republic, or at least of the Republican Party, has seemed to hang on Marco Rubio. Even now, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that remains the desperate view of a swath of the party’s eminences grises and billionaire benefactors. They still imagine themselves, and their candidate, as the noble protagonists in a twilight struggle against the forces of proto-fascism and yokelism. Only by spending wildly and forcing the nominating process into the backrooms of a brokered convention can they save their party from a descent into unprocessed insanity.
Marco Rubio’s whole career had been building to this moment. He was long viewed as the party’s salvation — or as the cliché goes, he’s the Republican Obama. On paper, he made for a compelling messiah: demographically useful, salable to the ultras yet charismatic enough for a general, and, on top of everything else, intellectually adept. Of course, that élite faith in Rubio now seems comically misguided. He looked both puerile and ineffectual — like Little Marco, actually — in his flailing efforts to take down the bully.
Despite his sheen, there’s nothing remotely moderate about Rubio.
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the party is a pretty fair summation of the recent history of the Republicans, the volcanic explosion of all the nasty sentiments that the party nurtured over the decades. But it’s also telling that Marco Rubio came to represent the establishment’s idea of sanity. Despite his sheen, there’s nothing remotely moderate about Rubio. It would be a mistake to think of him as a denizen of the center-right. His agenda, both domestic and foreign, is at least as right wing as Ted Cruz’s program, if not more. His vision lacks much of Donald Trump’s overt cruelty, but in its own way it would terrifyingly remake American government. As the establishment mounts a final, doomed effort to prop up the Rubio campaign, it’s worth examining the object of their devotion and what he reveals about his backers. Rubio would have easily been the most radical nominee in Republican Party history. Where John McCain and Mitt Romney faked some of their severely conservative campaign forays, Marco Rubio is a true believer. He became the face of an establishment that has drifted so far to the right that it might never return.
“No one’s going to force me to stop talking about God.”
Marco Rubio felt like he had caved to the forces of political correctness. During his long tenure as speaker of the Florida House, he bit his tongue and betrayed his heart. But on his way out the door, he was determined to speak out. “It had taken me too long,” he later wrote in his memoir, An American Son. For his valedictory address in the fall of 2008, he would turn the daïs into a pulpit and deliver the sermon he regretted never preaching. “God is real,” he declared, “God is real. I don’t care what courts across this country say, I don’t care what laws we pass — God is real.”
The address culminated in a rousing peroration about the necessary presence of religion in the public sphere. “God doesn’t care about the Supreme Court of Florida,” he said. “He cares about them. But he doesn’t care about their rulings. And he doesn’t care about the Supreme Court of the United States. You can’t keep him out.”
The speech wasn’t a stray musing. Earlier that year, Rubio went to work on behalf of Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign — hardly the expedient choice for a career-minded politician from South Florida. (Jeb Bush, by contrast, had endorsed Mitt Romney.) Huckabee was an evangelical preacher who touted himself as a “Christian Leader” with a “biblical worldview.” A YouTube clip shows a boyish Rubio leading a group of placard waving volunteers on a New Hampshire street corner. “Quite frankly this has become more like a movement,” he tells the camera. Two years later, the very same home-schoolers who formed the backbone of the Huckabee campaign provided the earliest foot soldiers for Rubio’s 2010 Senate bid.
Rubio’s religious life has been unfairly tagged as evidence of his desire to please everyone. It’s true that he’s hardly charted a linear path to church. As a child in Las Vegas, he enthusiastically immersed himself in Mormonism — reading canonical texts, visiting the holy sites in neighboring Utah, and becoming a fanboy of the Osmonds. Back in Florida, he urged his family to return to Catholicism with the same conviction. “Football and religion. Those were his things,” his cousin Michelle told Rubio’s biographer, Manuel Roig-Franzia.
In recent years, he’s dialed up his devotion, while still leaving his doubters with the impression he’s hedging his bets. “I have come home to Rome,” he has said. “One of the great treasures of the Catholic faith is the ability to go to Mass everyday.” Its a ritual he has performed with that precise regularity for long stretches of his adult life. He subscribes to Magnificat, a magazine that supplies him with daily meditation. And he has boasted about his use of contraception, or lack thereof: “I can tell you that none of my children were planned.”
But while Rome is home, he’s maintained a weekend cottage in the Southern Baptist Church. On Saturdays he takes communion; on Sunday he attends Christ Fellowship, his wife Jeanette’s church of choice. The decision might be theologically tricky to justify, but Rubio explains it like this: “I don’t think you can go to church too often or spend too much time in fellowship with other Christians, whatever denomination they confess.”
In his telling, Rubio is a particularly receptive pilgrim. He seems to be always receiving messages from the Lord — they appear regularly in his self-effacing memoir. A job offer comes his way, just as he’s on his knees praying for God’s help. In the early flailing days of his Senate campaign, he discerns signs from God that urge him forward. “I felt as if God were sending me a message.” He hears that message in the singing of 3‑year-olds and sees it on a keychain he serendipitously finds on a table. It contains a laminated verse from the book of Joshua: “I’ve commanded you to be brave and strong, haven’t I? Don’t be alarmed or terrified, because the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
We’re accustomed to Republican nominees mouthing the slogans of the culture war, without fully believing them or soft-pedaling them with an eye toward the November electorate. When George W. Bush ran his evangelical friendly campaign, he told his story of spiritual conversion and spoke in the rhetoric of uplift, rather than dwell on the prospects of social apocalypse. Rubio, by contrast, is a happy culture warrior, or perhaps a glum one. “Without faith at the core of our society, you fall into an era of moral relativism,” he told the Center for Arizona Policy, a group that supports conversion therapy for gay kids. When asked about the Obergefell decision enshrining gay marriage, he told the Christian Broadcasting Network: “We are clearly called in the Bible to adhere to our civil authorities. But that conflicts with also our requirement to adhere to God’s rules. So when those two come in conflict, God’s rules always win.” Read more here :The Not-Sad Demise of Marco Rubio