Tag Archives: Marco Rubio

In Defense of Marco Rubio

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally printed in The Hill

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is trying to save the conservative movement from itself. The question today is: Will it let itself be saved?

As an upstart outsider, Rubio ran against the Washington establishment and the conventional wisdom to take on a seemingly invincible Florida governor in a heated race for an open Senate seat.

But it turned out that Charlie Crist was a paper tiger, and his campaign collapsed in the heat of the Florida summer, leaving Rubio as the conquering Tea Party hero.

Almost immediately, the new Florida senator and Republican star hinted that he wasn’t entirely comfortable merely being a product of the Tea Party. He wasn’t an isolationist, and he believed in a muscled American foreign policy, a departure from the newly dominant Ron Paul wing of the Tea Party. As a former Speaker of the Florida House of Continue reading →

Regular Order on Immigration

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The goal for John Boehner and pro-immigration reform House Republicans should be to get a vehicle to conference.

It is not to pass the perfect bill. It is not to pass the Senate bill.

The Senate frequently likes to forget about the House. Those pesky House members, who have to face reelection every two years in districts that are mostly packed with partisans, annoy the Upper Chamber to no end. Continue reading →

Molly’s First State of the Union

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

It was Molly’s first State of the Union Address (she is four months old) and whatever the President said clearly didn’t agree with her. To say she was fussy would be an understatement. She moaned. She complained. She cried. And then she burped.

Okay, well maybe she had a bad case of gas. But after the listening to the President spend some more of her money, I wouldn’t blame her if she were more than a bit upset. Continue reading →

Media Missed Mark on Campaign Coverage

By Michael S. Johnson

Delta Airlines’ Sky Magazine had a 26-page spread last month on the Midwest’s new tourist hotspot, North Dakota . It featured Governor– and now U.S. Senator-elect– John Hoeven, who gets much of the credit for making North Dakota one of the most prosperous states in the country.

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The Politics of Purification Not New

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

Reprinted from Atlantic.com

The purification process — hard-core and uncompromising partisans driving heretics from their ranks — has been going on for a long time.

The recent Republican convention in Utah, the one in which conservative Senator Robert Bennett was defeated for being not conservative enough (despite an 84 percent approval rating from the American Conservative Union), is just one more step in a decades-long effort to drive independent thought from the political decision making process.

This year, of course, attention has been focused primarily on Marco Rubio’s success in driving Florida Governor Charlie Crist out of the Republican Party (he’s now running for the Senate as an Independent) and former Congressman Pat Toomey’s success in converting Republican Senator Arlen Specter into a Democrat. But in both of those cases one can argue that the targeted incumbent was simply too far out of step with his own party.

The same ACU ratings index on which Bennett scored an 84 gave Specter a 40. The ratings only measure members of Congress but Crist had more than once angered party members with his support of initiatives that were fiercely opposed by most Republicans. But given Bennett’s long embrace of conservative positions, with relatively few departures from the party-line script over a period of nearly two decades, what happened in Utah was something of a very different and disturbing nature. It was checklist politics, a demand for suspension of judgment and lockstep adherence to an ideological instruction manual that would brook no deviation.
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