You Will Be Hearing a Lot More About Marco Rubio

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Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

In the media you hear about Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush.

But from conservative policy wonks and Republican insiders, you hear a lot right now about Marco Rubio.

He hasn’t caught fire, not exactly and not yet. But he has very much caught the interest of serious people, who are impressed by the earnest way in which he has readied himself for a possible campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

While rivals and their aides have concentrated on publicity (and of course on fund-raising), he and his?have spent a?laudable amount of time on?policy, churning out proposals for changing the tax code, making higher education more affordable and accountable, reforming Social Security and more.

And he stands ever taller as Republican strategists and donors realize that many of the other potential presidential candidates on the party’s supposedly “deep bench” might best be left sitting there.

Those arbiters have long been concerned about Scott Walker, for reasons made clear in his cringe-inducing comparison of Islamic extremists and Wisconsin supporters of organized labor. This pony may have only one trick ? union busting ? to go with a gait that’s less than graceful.

They roll their eyes at Rand Paul, who prevailed in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll but was bizarrely bucking up the anti-vaccine crowd not so long before that. This physician has a nutty layer in his cake.

They’re befuddled by Juggernaut Jeb ? or, more accurately, by the way in which Jeb Bush’s big money, big media profile and big team of all-star advisers haven’t yet translated into big support among voters.

They’re starting to ask themselves who else they’ve got, a question also fed by their awareness that if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and they put Bush up against her, they lose several lines of attack. They can’t deride her as entitled political royalty without him being similarly disparaged. They can’t call her yesterday’s news when the tag fits him, too.

It doesn’t fit Rubio: Hispanic, the son of immigrant parents, reared in a home without great material advantages. The Republican Party has never nominated anybody like him.

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Bergdahl and Our Distance from the Battlefield

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I have a big, big problem with many of the people who so quickly judge the actions of Bowe Bergdahl, and I have a big, big problem with many of those who jump in to say how the soldiers around him should or shouldn’t feel and how our armed forces should or shouldn’t behave.

It’s this: These ready critics haven’t been in uniform. Haven’t endured the rigors, made the sacrifice, felt the fear. Haven’t run smack into the disparity between what our country means to achieve or says it’s achieving and what’s really being accomplished. Haven’t walked through the shards of their own shattered illusions.

This has been an emotional, messy and confusing week, which ends with as many questions as answers. One of mine concerns the Obama administration: Is there anyone there doing serious messaging strategy? Anyone stepping back to consider how a story like this one is likely to unfold and how the administration may get tripped up in it?

When Susan Rice (rightly or wrongly) carries around that Benghazi baggage, how do you send her of all emissaries onto TV to talk up the “honor and distinction” of Bergdahl’s military service? This characterization was sure to be disputed; there was countervailing evidence in circulation even as she spoke. How do you fail to realize that this is going to come back to bite you? Incredible.

But beyond the administration, in the halls of Congress and the public square, there’s something else that strikes and stops me, and it’s what strikes and stops me whenever we’re engaged in a loud conversation about military action and the military. Most of the people doing the talking are very, very far removed from the people doing the fighting?and sometimes the dying. And it gives them insufficient pause.

Back in September, at a different crossroads, the Pew Research Center noted that only “ about a fifth of the members of Congress who are debating whether or not to authorize U.S. military action in Syria have any military experience themselves. ”

That Pew report went on to observe: “Not all that long ago, military service was practically a requirement for serving in Congress. The high point in recent decades was the 95th Congress (1977-78) when, following an influx of Vietnam-era veterans, a combined 77 percent of the House and Senate had served in the armed forces.”

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Hillary Speaks! But Oh So Carefully.

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And now we enter the Period of Parsing. What you are about to behold will make all prior textual analyses — of scripture, of scrolls — look like halfhearted child’s play.

Hillary is speaking. And oh how the world will be scrutinizing those words.

With a book to promote, the former secretary of state and the future presidential candidate (maybe, probably) is shelving her profound distaste for the news media and sitting down for interviews that will be as inventively interpreted on our end as they are meticulously constructed on hers. Diane Sawyer’s coming up. CNN is coming up. Fox News is coming up.

From journalists, there will be mentions of Monica, questions about Benghazi and an attempt to put her on the defensive and extract something other than anodyne sound bites. From Hillary, there will be talk of yoga and an imminent grandchild, at least if one of the first interviews, in People magazine, is any indication.

The People interview was released today, the latest step in a sequenced rollout of her book, “Hard Choices,” that already included an article in “Vogue” about her relationship with her mother and a preview in Politico of the book’s passage on Benghazi. Baryshnikov never saw choreography this painstaking.

From the People interview, one comment of hers in particular struck me, as I myself pivoted into parsing mode. Asked about Monica Lewinsky’s recent essay in Vanity Fair, she said that she hadn’t read it. “I think everybody needs to look to the future,” she said.

It’ll be interesting to see how many references to “the future” she makes over these coming weeks, because one of the central liabilities of her presidential campaign, should there be one, is that it might seem to many Americans like a glance backward, into the past. How does she tout the Clinton administration while presenting herself as a candidate of tomorrow, not a holdover from yesterday? How does someone so exhaustively well known come across as fresh and brimming with new ideas?

How does she claim the future? Perhaps, for starters, by invoking it.

Obama’s Magic Three

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Hands down, the passage of the State of the Union that brought the broadest smile to my lips and even had my heart doing a little jig was the oratorical triptych near the top. You know the one I’m talking about.

First President Obama recognized Mary Barra, who was in the audience, noting that her childhood wasn’t a gilded one?she wasn’t born into corporate royalty. No, she got there by dint of toil and talent, a factory worker’s daughter rising to become the first female chief executive officer of General Motors. She’s the American dream personified.

Then Obama recognized John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, as “the son of a barkeep.” He, too, landed far from where he began. He, too, took the kind of journey that we like to believe is uniquely possible in this country, the fabled land of opportunity. Read more…

Fashion, Fairness and the Olympics

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Model Anna Ewers wearing the P6 beanie designed by Alexander Wang. Hugh Lippe/Vogue ? Conde Nast; Styled by Jorden Bickham

The February issue of Vogue, which will begin to show up on newsstands this week, includes details and a photo of something new from the celebrated fashion designer Alexander Wang, but it’s not quite like anything he’s done before, and it’s more than a piece of apparel. It’s a statement of solidarity, a cry of protest and a sign of just how many people from just how many walks of life are determined not to let the Olympics come and go without shining a light on Russia’s discrimination against, and persecution of, L.G.B.T. people.

It’s a winter hat, to be exact. A beanie, he calls it. Black. Warm. But the most important detail is this: It spells out P6, a shorthand for Principle 6 of the Olympic charter, and it speaks to a strategy by gay rights advocates?specifically, by the groups Athlete Ally and All Out ?to get spectators and athletes in Sochi to register their opposition to outrageously repressive, regressive anti-gay laws in Russia without running afoul of one of them, which bans what it vaguely calls gay “propaganda,” or of the International Olympic Committee’s own restrictions against political statements.

The Principle 6 campaign involves the visual promotion of the phrase Principle 6, the number 6 and the logo P6?on clothing, for example?as a way of flagging support for gay rights. It has caught fire since I last wrote about it on this blog, which was the first place to report on it as an alternative to some of the other ideas that advocates had floated, such as having athletes wear rainbow-flag pins or having athletes of the same gender hold hands during the opening ceremonies.
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The Obamacare Rollout’s Toll

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As the promoters of a sweeping education referendum in Colorado look to Election Day next Tuesday, they worry about many factors, including what kind of voter turnout they can expect in an off year and whether Americans in an anti-tax era will choose to pay more, as the referendum calls on them to do, even if the money is guaranteed for kids and schools.

They worry about something else, too.

Obamacare.

It’s their unlucky timing that they’re asking Coloradans to give the government an extra $950 million a year at a moment when the botched Obamacare rollout is in the news and being easily?and inevitably?cast as an example of government incompetence.

I wrote about the referendum, on what’s called Amendment 66, in my Tuesday column , which provides details on the tax increase and the shrewd grab bag of education reforms it would buy. I absolutely think they’re worth the price.

And I quoted the savvy chief architect of the education overhaul, Mike Johnston, a young Democratic state senator who has become a deeply admired figure among education reformers nationwide.

In one of our telephone conversations, Johnston noted that he makes four or five speeches to voters about Amendment 66 every day, and that over the last week, people in his audiences have begun, with some frequency, to bring up the Obamacare rollout.
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A Clever Solution to an Olympic Problem

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For athletes and others going to the Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, it’s a much-discussed riddle: how to take a stand against the host country’s reprehensible anti-gay laws , which have rightly caused international outrage, without running afoul of them or of the International Olympic Committee’s prohibition against political statements and protests.

One of the logos under consideration for the Principle 6 campaign.

Many suggestions have been floated. Some people, including me, have theorized that if enough athletes wore or carried rainbow flags or icons of a discreet size, officials would be hard pressed to punish them, because ejecting them from the games or meting out some lesser penalty would only heighten the disruption and draw more attention to the gesture. But that’s a theory, not an assurance.

In private meetings, some LGBT rights advocates have envisioned the following: during the parade of athletes at the opening ceremonies, pairs of two men and two women would hold hands, sending a message of solidarity with LGBT people without saying or brandishing anything overtly political. But would enough athletes feel comfortable doing this?


Now the LGBT rights organizations Athlete Ally and All Out are promoting an alternative that may well steer clear of the flaws and dangers of other ideas. It involves appropriating the I.O.C.’s own words and stated values and turning them into a coded affirmation of LGBT equality, an epigrammatic protest of Russia’s laws that doesn’t include the word “gay” or any of the conventional symbols of the gay rights movement. Russians wouldn’t easily be able to classify it as so-called gay propaganda, which the country deems illegal. And I.O.C. officials could hardly take offense and muster any opposition.
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Gay and Fearful

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If you’ve been out of the closet for decades and you live in a state that has marriage equality and, better yet, your city and neighborhood reflect the diversity that’s a hallmark of urban life at its most rewarding, it is easy, most of the time, to feel as respected and at ease in society as any straight person does.

Then your partner slips his hand in yours as you walk down the street and your stomach clenches just a bit. Your heart rate goes up a nervous notch or two. It’s not shame that does this. It’s not embarrassment. It’s the awareness that even in Manhattan and even in 2013, you might easily encounter someone who will cast a disgusted look your way. Or say something nasty. Or, worse, throw a punch.

According to news reports , holding hands was what got Peter Notman and Michael Felenchak attacked around midnight Tuesday night. They’d just seen a movie. They were in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood known for its gay-friendliness. And they were set upon by six young men who shouted anti-gay slurs at them.
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An Olympic Legend on Boycotts and Bigotry

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American Olympic diver Greg Louganis Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Last week, as Russia’s cruel and repressive laws regarding gays and lesbians drew rapidly intensifying concern, gay bars throughout the United States pulled Russian vodka from their shelves. LGBT Americans and their supporters seemed to agree: a message had to be sent to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, and a boycott of Stolichnaya was one way to do it.

But there’s considerable difference of opinion about what would be a much bigger, more consequential boycott: of the coming winter Olympics.

They’re to be held in the Russian city of Sochi early next year, and in a recent Op-Ed in The Times, the celebrated playwright Harvey Fierstein wrote that “American and world leaders must speak out against Mr. Putin’s attacks and the violence they foster.”

“The Olympic Committee must demand retraction of these laws under threat of boycott,” Fierstein continued.
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