Marco Rubio Vs. Old People

Casting the 2016 election as a "generational choice," US Senator Marco Rubio formally threw his hat in the ring for the Republican presidential nomination, presenting himself as a young, forward-looking candidate with fresh ideas to fix the US economy and deal with problems of income inequality.

"The time has come for our generation to lead the way toward a new American Century," Rubio said. "This election is not just about what laws we will pass. It is a generational choice about what kind of country we will be."

Highlighting his relative youth—the Florida Senator is 43— Rubio contrasted his campaign with those of the 2016 heirs apparent—namely Jeb Bush, a fellow Floridian and Rubio's former political mentor, and Hillary Clinton—with thinly veiled references that dismissed the older candidates as 90s-era relics.

"While our people and economy are pushing the boundaries of the 21st century, too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the twentieth century," Rubio told an audience of about 1,000 supporters. "They are busy looking backward, so they do not see how jobs and prosperity today depend on our ability to compete in a global economy. So our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing, borrowing and regulating like it's 1999."

Later, he took a more direct shot at Clinton, who announced her campaign for the Democratic nomination in a video on Sunday. "Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for President by promising to take us back to yesterday," Rubio said, eliciting laughter from the crowd. "But yesterday is over, and we are never going back."

"We Americans are proud of our history, but our country has always been about the future," he continued. "Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. We can't do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past. We must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them."

Like Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz—the two other GOP candidates who have announced their campaigns—Rubio is positioning himself as a new face of the Republican Party,someone who can excite the conservative base while also overcoming the demographic challenges that have hurt the party in the past two presidential contests. Like Paul and Cruz, Rubio has similarly made efforts to reach out to youth and minority voters, primarily by namedropping Pitbull, who is apparently a personal acquaintance.

In his speech Monday, he also played up his ties to the Latino community, at one point shifting into Spanish as he quoted his father, a Cuban immigrant. The speech was staged at Miami's Freedom Tower, an Ellis Island-style location where Cubans were once processed after fleeing from the Castro regime.

Rather than couching his announcement in the paranoid, fear-mongering rhetoric favored by some of the other members of his party, Rubio's speech Monday took a markedly more optimistic tone, centered around an idea he calls the "New American Century." Unlike many of the other GOP hopefuls, Rubio's positions on issues like taxes, immigration, and foreign policy tend to fall in line with the Establishment wing of the GOP. The speech Monday was an obvious attempt to distinguish the Florida Senator as an alternative option to more moderate Republicans looking for a new face with a name other than Bush.

Predictably, Democrats were quick to attack the idea that Rubio could be some kind of "new" Republican candidate. "The truth is—as those of us in Florida know all too well—he's simply peddling the same stale, harmful wares that the rest of the Republican Party is selling," Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida congresswoman, said in a statement after Rubio's announcement. "Rubio says he's a new type of Republican, but the only things he's ever championed are the same failed policies the public has already rejected, and the only cause he's ever advanced is his own.

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