Marco Rubio has what Mitt Romney needs in a vice president

The Washington Post-By Kathleen Parker/

Several names have been suggested, including Condoleezza Rice and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. Rice’s interest isn’t clear, and Portman, despite his personal qualities and swing-state bona fides, would merely add a snooze button to Romney’s campaign.

Latest to the list is the young and junior senator from Florida, Marco Rubio. His political résuméincludes: nine years as a state legislator, including two as speaker of the Florida House; enormous popularity with Tea Partyers who sent him to the U.S. Senate over Republican Gov. Charlie Crist; a Cuban heritage and, thus, his presumed appeal to Hispanic voters; he’s young at just 40 and, it never hurts, attractive.

Add to the above the fact that Florida is a crucial swing state, the population of which is 22.5 percent Hispanic.

No one is ever perfect, of course, and Rubio critics will cite his chronologically challenged rendition of his parents’ exile from Cuba. Rubio claimed that they were driven out by Fidel Castro when, in fact, they left Cuba before Castro took over the island nation. Rubio later explained that the date, though incorrect, didn’t diminish the family’s experience of exile when, upon Castro’s rise to power, they didn’t feel they could return to Cuba.

For Cubans who had to leave their homeland with empty pockets and broken hearts, their homes ravaged and their belongings confiscated by revolutionary rebels, Rubio’s exaggeration no doubt stung. But was it fatal? Not likely. It is possible to imagine that Rubio, who grew up in south Florida, where Spanish is a first language and displacement is the Cuban community’s core identity, can be understood to have embraced the larger cultural narrative as his own. As he wrote in Politico, “I am the son of exiles. I inherited two generations of unfulfilled dreams. This is a story that needs no embellishing.”

Rubio will survive the controversy.

Of perhaps greater value to Democrats is Rubio’s attractiveness to Tea Partyers. Thanks to media portraits of Tea Party members as tantrum-throwing ignoramuses with racist tendencies, the argument would be that Rubio can’t appeal to a broader spectrum of voters. This argument has some merit, but only if you haven’t heard Rubio speak or paid attention to his message. Rubio isn’t just a poster boy for the shrink-government contingent. Much like President Obama, he’s a monument to the American Dream. Like Obama, he speaks often about the privilege of being an American and of possessing a birthright that allows the son of a bartender and a maid to become a U.S. senator. Only in America.  More >>