"I'm a air quotes presidential candidate."
A couple of weeks ago, I made what now appears to be a very
sound prediction:
Yet, here we have Marco Rubio out running around staking out a position on immigration nearly identical to the ideas President Obama has been running on for years. Marco Rubio seriously believes that the path to the nomination runs through success on President Obama's immigration bill?
I'm not buying it.
If Rubio is going to be a contender for the GOP nomination, he's going to have to abandon his own bill. I am predicting he will do so, beating a full on retreat as opposition from the right continues to mount. He will blame President Obama for his retreat, accusing the President of 'amnesty' while running away from his own bill.
Now that USA Today has
reported the outlines of President Obama's immigration reform bill, Senator Rubio has done exactly
as predicted:
“If actually proposed, the President’s bill would be dead on arrival in Congress, leaving us with unsecured borders and a broken legal immigration system for years to come.”
What are the differences between the two proposals? More analysis is coming, but from a quick review of the White House bill and the Rubio bill, the differences are minor. The vast majority of the bills are nearly identical as both are based on the Kennedy-McCain proposal of 2007. As
kos pointed it, Rubio's proposal was
surprisingly good.
So the key next move here is to point out how similar the White House proposal is to the bipartisan Senate bill, "Rubio's bill" to extract costs from him for his retreat.
Once again, I still say Rubio just doesn't know what he's doing in his run for president. This would be the last thing he wants to distinguish himself on, but he's allowed the GOP establishment to use his ethnicity for their own purposes. That made it clear to me, more than anything else, that the establishment doesn't really take him seriously.