Marco Rubio: In the House with a 'Policy Wonk'
BY: Charles Flowers
speechwrite@yahoo.com
It's not hard to find State Rep. Marco Rubio's office in West Miami. There are big green and white signs on all four corners at the intersection of SW 57th Avenue and SW 10th Street. The Miami-Dade Transit bus driver will stop right at his door. A security guard at the first floor of the bank building courteously directs visitors to the second floor office, which bears no signs except a uniformed state trooper waiting inside.
Rubio, 35, elected to a two-year term Speaker of the House by his Republican peers, wants to be found. Just as he sometimes wants to escape to a busy schedule and so retains a member of the Florida Highway Patrol, with a State of Florida cruiser gassed up and ready to roll at a moment's notice. But neither directional signs nor a dedicated trooper are getting the new House Speaker as much attention as a yet unwritten book called "100 Innovative Ideas for Florida's Future."
The brainchild of Rubio, future designated House speakers Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, and Ray Sansom, R-Panama City this collection of 100 ideas seems harmless enough on first glance. Actually, 100 of the "best" ideas will be distilled from more than 1,000 and will, Rubio asserts, "become law." The problems lie in who decides which ideas are best, who was not consulted, and, as ever with politics, who will take the credit? The minority party would like to be heard on each of these issues, especially who called the meeting. Minority Leader Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, is pretty sure it wasn't him. So he sent Rubio a half-dozen "innovative" ideas he thought the Republican braintrust should consider, and skipped the meeting.
While Rubio and Cannon termed the process bi-partisan, a more believable view was perhaps revealed by the state's leading Republican at an "idea-raising" Idea Summit in Orlando last month (Aug. 12). To a partisan, mostly Republican crowd, outgoing Gov. Jeb Bush said that while Republicans were working on a new set of ideas, Florida Democrats might have one, at best.
"Not necessarily a good one," he reportedly added, drawing laughs from the bloodthirsty crowd that included such GOP luminaries as Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. The alleged joke was also not necessarily a good one, either. Especially for the incoming speaker Rubio, whose critics believe his challenge will be to get all the mules pulling together.
"We didn't show up," said Rep. Jack Seiler, D-Pompano Beach, a six-year House veteran and a Notre Dame grad who does not shy away from many battles. "My biggest criticism of that event is that he did it though the Republican Party of Florida." Despite that offense, Seiler said Rubio is "a good guy." The two worked successfully on an eminent domain committee chaired by Rubio.
"He wasn't tied up in the procedural stuff," says Seiler. "He was right down there in how it could be implemented in Florida policy." Seiler says Rubio, like Jeb Bush is a "policy wonk."
"A lot of time in Tallahassee, you'll meet a guy who wants to talk politics, but not policy. Marco wants to talk policy. He's always trying to figure out if something will work."
Al Cardenas, Miami lawyer and high-powered Washington, D.C. lobbyist whose represents at least four countries including Panama and the Republic of Ecuador, has known Rubio professionally for ten years. In 1996, while studying for his law degree at the University of Miami, Rubio was hired as a clerk in Cardenas' law firm. Rubio also directed the unsuccessful Bob Dole presidential campaign that year, and watched from the House as Cardenas ran Bush's decisive, controversial conquest of Florida in 2000. Cardenas cites Rubio's enthusiasm and careful research as reasons for his leadership positions - first Majority Leader and now Speaker. Rubio is one of the youngest, and definitely the first Cuban-American to hold either position.
"Anyone who carries as much weight as Mario will always have his opinion heard." Cardenas said. "It may not be related to his immediate mission, but he will get his opportunities."
A fellow Cuban-American, Cardenas believes Rubio may yet be heard on Florida's "foreign policy," especially when the subject is Cuban immigration issues. Rubio, who calls himself "an heir to two generations of unfulfilled dreams," is also hopeful.
"I hope that our government will become active partners and allies of that new government in Cuba that Florida is uniquely positioned to capitalize on," Rubio said in a interview, when Fidel Castro's failing health was front page news. "Florida is positioned not just to create a strong trading partner, but strong alliances and great business opportunities…Again, not to conquer Cuba or to re-conquer or to re-establish ourselves there, but to create a link between our state and a country just 90 miles off our coast…and if this should happen to occur while I'm Speaker, what a blessing that would be."
Other, more immediate needs, also await: affordable housing, property tax and hurricane insurance relief, imposition of the smaller class size amendment passed by voters and transforming public education "so that our children can compete with their true competition which is children in China and Pakistan, not kids in Mississippi or Alabama." And possibly the biggest area that Florida has slipped against the nation - access to health care. Nearly 16 percent of Floridians have no access to primary care - a number that has more than doubled in the last decade.
"I sit in the same traffic jams," Rubio says, with the cadence of a born speaker. "I worry about the same hurricanes. I pay the same utility and property insurance rates. That's how representative democracy is supposed to work. You send people up there who live life like the people they represent."
And as for being the first Hispanic to hold the job, Rubio thinks the big deal was that it was no big deal: "I believe with all my heart that this community (Miami-Dade), as unique as it is, is a treasure for our state, has really enriched it rather than deprived of anything. It's a community fully capable of producing leadership at a statewide level and producing leaders that can be loyal and representative of their area and at the same time providing leadership to the entire state…That's why I ran for Speaker, and never felt limited by where I came from as a factor. And at the end of the day, it really wasn't."
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