The Gathering Danger of Marco (Polo!) Rubio

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Last updated on February 19th, 2013 at 09:52 am

Please allow me a quick, personal point of privilege. I’d like to give a quick shout out to PoliticusUSA and all its writers. I’ve been following you guys for some time now and I am honored to be joining your ranks.

Readers, welcome to my debut column. I’d like to thank Mr. Jason Easley for kindly affording me this opportunity and this great platform, to percolate my thoughts, share my concerns about the state of our union. And speaking of the state of our union, we had a SOTU address delivered on Tuesday night. Likely, you all watched the SOTU and have seen pundits from both sides dissect it again and again by now. So I won’t be redundant and go through the actual address again.

Instead, let me focus on the bleak and tempest future I saw before us in the Democratic Party. No, for reals, y’all. Let me issue a cautionary note to my progressive friends whose hearts may still be giddy with and inebriated by, the president’s speech.

Fellow Democrats, I am drowning in fear. Here is the stream of thought that has been coursing through the estuary of my mind: Senator Marco Rubio did a bang-bang-up job in his response Tuesday night. The way he performed, he could be Jesus walking on water, or Moses parting the Red Sea.

Anyway, I get the sense that God has already anointed Rubio the savior of the Republican Party, leader of a new right-wing tidal wave. Rubio floated in to fill the overflowing boat shoes left by the indomitable Mitt Romney, “Mr. Land O’ Lakes” himself…and I am deeply concerned that Rubio, with his brimming pool of charisma, will lead the GOP out of the desert.

He is clearly picking up the mantle of the “NEW” Republican’t Party by putting a new, watery-smooth face on their same dehydrated ideas. He unleashed a deluge of rebuttals that absolutely muted the waterfall of “Fair Deal” ideas spigoted by the president. Rubio, drenched in confidence, easily ebbed and flowed around the president’s dry and mouthy offerings. Rubio made much of it feel like dribbles from an amphibian tongue.

And worst of all, Rubio did it in thunderstorm fashion…fast, smooth, striking, just a torrent aching to surge.

I am sweating the prospect of Rubio 2016. No, seriously, I am literally wiping sweat from my face.

As a life-long liberal, I am afraid that we will not be able to field a candidate that can match the Niagara fluidity of Rubio’s mind. I fear we will end up pushing the same soggy ideas, and either remain submerged in the American conscience, or be swiftly mopped up by the fountain of youth that is Marco (Polo!) Rubio.