How unsurprising that Sen. Marco Rubio made this week’s presidential-candidacy speech at Miami’s Freedom Tower. The 90-year-old landmark had once been used as a processing center for Cuban refugees fleeing the Castro revolution. We know how that emotional optic played–even if Rubio’s own parents were not, as we came to know, political refugees.
However, Monday’s event–at 6:03 p.m. to accommodate live Fox News coverage–was also a reminder of how Rubio hasn’t always been the consummate, small-government fiscal conservative that dazzled Tea Partiers several years back. When he was the Florida House majority leader, he pushed hard for the state to allocate $7 million to Miami Dade Community College to buy the Freedom Tower property.
Ironically, it never happened with taxpayer dollars primarily because then-Gov. Jeb Bush, once Rubio’s mentor and now Florida’s “moderate,” establishment-GOP presidential hopeful, had labeled it a “turkey.”