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Beware the “Great Whisperer”!

Marc Thiessen is concerned that someone is out to get Marco Rubio: Still, Team Rubio is taking the whispering campaign seriously. After getting caught by surprise about his parent’s arrival date, Rubio wisely hired an opposition research firm to make sure there is nothing else about his past he does not know [bold mine-DL]. The […]

Marc Thiessen is concerned that someone is out to get Marco Rubio:

Still, Team Rubio is taking the whispering campaign seriously. After getting caught by surprise about his parent’s arrival date, Rubio wisely hired an opposition research firm to make sure there is nothing else about his past he does not know [bold mine-DL]. The Florida senator has also moved up the publication date of his autobiography, “An American Son,” so that it arrives in bookstores ahead of a biography by Roig-Franzia (“The Rise of Marco Rubio”). This is potentially a high-risk move. While it allows Rubio to get the first word, if Roig-Franzia’s book contains revelations Rubio did not include it could create more fodder for the Great Whisperer.

What could there be in Rubio’s past that would be both something a) politically embarrassing and b) unknown to Rubio? How could there be things about Rubio‘s past that he doesn’t know? That he needs to hire a research firm to find this out is probably more troubling than anything in Rubio’s past.

Frankly, the so-called “Great Whisperer” is doing a lousy job so far. Rubio apparently didn’t know the whole story of how and when his parents came to the U.S., but it’s possible to explain that away in terms of family mythology that shaped how Rubio understood his family’s past. The story about his parents wasn’t very important to begin with, and now it is completely irrelevant. The ethics complaint against Rubio could be more politically damaging, but there doesn’t seem to be very much to it. The report about his brief time as an LDS convert is even more irrelevant: he followed his parents when they joined, and then left to return to his ancestral church a little later. When a whispering campaign against someone elicits huge shrugs and does nothing to discourage his enthusiasts, it is not an effective whispering campaign.

The argument against putting Rubio on the presidential ticket isn’t that he hasn’t been sufficiently vetted. He has arguably already been more thoroughly vetted than the last two Republican VP nominees, and so far no one has found anything particularly scandalous in his past. The real scandal is that a unqualified junior Senator is being promoted for the position of Vice President on the basis of little more than an election-year pandering strategy of dubious merit.

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