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UPDATE II: The "G.O.P. reply [to the SOTU speech], delivered by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, was both interesting and revelatory. And I mean that in the worst way. For Mr. Rubio is a rising star, to such an extent that Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him 'The Republican Savior.' What we learned Tuesday, however, was that zombie economic ideas have eaten his brain."
Read The New York Times, Rubio and the Zombies.
UPDATE: "The media consensus seems to be that Marco Rubio’s Big Gulp distracted from the message of his rebuttal, a circumstance that’s being broadly portrayed as a negative turn of events for him. But Brian Beutler speculates that perhaps this was a better outcome for the Florida Senator, because it distracted the public from the vacuousness [editorial note: means "lack of ideas or intelligence : stupid, inane"] of his message.
Beutler runs through the speech’s substance, such as it was. There was a wink at climate change denial; a fusillade of the same old anti-government bromindes; a nod towards the Fannie and Freddie theory of the financial crisis; and a rehash of the idea that lowering the top marginal tax rate will uncork a rush of growth. He concludes the public would have seen through the ruse if not for the Big Gulp . . .
[T]his seems like a truly epic gamble when you think about it. After all, the priorities laid out in both the Inaugural Address and in yesterday’s SOTU speech are very explicitly about intensifying the bond between the core constituencies that reelected Obama — minorities; young voters; college educated whites, especially women; and to some degree non-college white women — and the Democratic Party. The second term agenda Obama laid out in both those speeches is also explicitly designed to deepen GOP estrangement from these constituencies — which also happen to be growing as a share of the national vote. Is the GOP response to this really to do … nothing? . .
[But Republicans are betting that Obama's policies will fail and "current demographic trends won’t be quite as bad for them as they look now," that is angery old white guys are the future.]
In this context, the decision to change nothing suddenly makes sense. If these policies are bound to fail, simply continuing to argue against them, as Republicans are now doing, could conceivably be enough. Republicans would later be able to say: We told you so. We told you Obama’s Big Government policies would fail. Time to try the limited government approach we’ve been arguing for all along. Buying in to Obama’s policies by compromising would muddy these waters."
Read the Washington Post, The GOP’s epic gamble.
Marco 'I've Got a Drinking Problem' Rubio's Republi-con response to the SOTU speech was nothing but "[t]he same old rhetorical tricks and tropes . . . paired with the same old policies. Despite being the frontman for the GOP on immigration reform, he barely mentioned the issue, and when he did, he emphasized border security. He called for more energy exploration on federal lands and tax reform. He wants less debt and less spending, but the only actual spending cuts he mentioned were the sequester’s cuts to defense — and he opposed those. . .
He’s trying to position himself as the future of the Republican Party. But his big speech evoked nothing but the past."
Read the Washington Post, Where were Marco Rubio’s new ideas?
But Marco 'I've Got a Drinking Problem' Rubio did try to reprise an old but popular Republi-con myth by blaming the housing crisis on “reckless government policies.”
“[T]his argument is very popular on the right, but there’s precious little to back it up. . .
1. Private markets, rather than the GSEs, created the subprime mortgage boom. . .
2. The Community Reinvestment Act and the GSE’s affordability mission didn’t cause the crisis. . .
3. There’s a lot of research to back this up and little against it. . .
4. Conservatives arguments tend to blur the definition of subprime. . .
5. The government policy that likely made an impact were deregulatory actions. . . “
Read the Washington Post, No, Marco Rubio, government did not cause the housing crisis.
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