Rubio and the National-Security Republicans By Dorothy Rabinowitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/rubio-and-the-national-security-republicans-1434669705
“I’ll fight back,” she declared, “against Republican efforts to disempower and disenfranchise young people, poor people, people with disabilities and people of color.” There was more of the kind about the oppression of women and gay people who love each other, and transgender people and their families—her encyclopedia of the victimized is long—and dark references to “CEOs and hedge-fund managers” and “billionaires and corporations.”
It is worth noting that in this sweeping account of the great issues that would concern her as president, the former secretary of state expended scarcely two minutes on foreign affairs and national security. Though what those minutes told us was, in their way, memorable.
“There are a lot of trouble spots in the world, but there’s a lot of good news out there too,” she informed Americans. Those waiting for further enlightenment on this interesting claim did so in vain. Mrs. Clinton announced that she would keep America safe.
“I was in the situation room on the day we got bin Laden,” she explained, before returning to the themes of inequality, discrimination and the oppression of the poor and helpless that are clearly destined to be the overriding focus of the Clinton campaign, to the near-exclusion of all others.
The wonder is that in this the difference between Mrs. Clinton and virtually any serious contender from the other party—a category from which we can exempt Rand Paul—couldn’t be more stark. Only a few years ago, national security had so slender a place in the preoccupations of Republicans vying for the nomination that the occasional mention in their speeches had the impact of big news, a touch of something new and exotic.
The world has changed and so has the character of the Republican contenders. National security and U.S. foreign policy are for most front-and-center concerns and there’s no mistaking the emphasis.
Not for nothing did Jeb Bush speed to Europe to burnish his credentials on foreign affairs, just as Gov. Chris Christie has been attending monthly instruction sessions with Henry Kissinger. And not for nothing has Marco Rubio, whose grasp of foreign affairs is both conspicuous and deep, emerged as a contender to be reckoned with. Not only does he address these issues with a comprehensiveness unequaled by any other candidate except Lindsey Graham—as Sen. Graham might say “that goes for you too, Hillary”—Sen. Rubio does so with unfailing eloquence.
It is unlikely that any journalist will be moved to report that a thrill runs up his leg when he listens to Marco Rubio. The senator’s public addresses have nothing of the soaring oratory Barack Obama delivered to the electorate and a swooning press. He speaks with a steady, unselfconscious authority, which is quite enough. Mr. Rubio is notably lacking in the kind of uneasy tentativeness that has characterized Jeb Bush’s public performances, though this may disappear—it was little in evidence in Mr. Bush’s campaign-opening speech Monday.
Candidate Rubio has, and it is no small advantage, a gift for language found frequently in people who have been voracious readers from childhood on. Like many children with his history, he also imbibed the sense of American exceptionalism at an early age and it has not gone away nor is it likely to do so.
There is no love of country quite as deep or conscious as that of the first-generation American. Mr. Rubio is the child of immigrants, Cubans in this case, who tutored him, as other immigrant parents have done with their children, in the unparalleled blessings of America. “You only have to have parents, family who come from other places, to know what we have here, this civilization without equal in history,” he says. All his life he has viewed the fortune that caused him to be born here—an American—as a gift without price, and it shows. He is one of the few politicians who can refer to the American dream, that exhausted rhetorical crutch, without inducing cringes.
In the course of his campaign rollout two months earlier than Mrs. Clinton’s, Mr. Rubio too addressed the dangers of leadership and ideas based on the values of yesterday. Only in his view those dangers were the obstruction of economic progress, the stifling of America’s ability to compete—and not least the failure to remember the importance of U.S. leadership in the world.
“And so they appease our enemies, they betray our allies, they weaken our military,” he says of the current administration. A dramatically different set of charges against yesterday’s thinking—and one with which virtually all Republican candidates would agree—than the compendium of victims suffering under the heels of Republicans and millionaires and billionaires that Mrs. Clinton cited on Roosevelt Island.
More than once, Mrs. Clinton paid tribute to the 32nd president, whose courage and vision had made him the inspiration of so many presidents who came after.
Still, it’s no small irony how little the Democrats of today—especially those on the left now aligned with the isolationists of the libertarian right—reflect the values Franklin Roosevelt upheld, and fought for so unyieldingly. Remarkable too, how much more FDR’s vision resembles that of today’s Republicans, who know the increasing danger of the threat posed by our enemies and are unwilling to pretend otherwise by turning away. No one loathed isolationists as much as Roosevelt did; no one decimated their arguments to greater effect. In December 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor—but when Britain and France were already at war and the Axis powers were at their most menacing—FDR delivered the famous fireside chat declaring that America must become “the arsenal of democracy.”
Further, Roosevelt warned, “Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our gates.”
They are words whose resonance today is inescapable.
Mr. Rubio and his fellow Republicans understand this. Whether Mrs. Clinton is willing to take notice of such concerns in a busy life on the campaign trail—most of it likely to be devoted, it would seem, to the iniquities visited on the universe of the oppressed—is very much a question.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal editorial board.
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