Cliff Smith is thrilled by the idea of a Rubio presidential bid:

Yet Rubio remains what he always has been: a top-tier candidate with a few vulnerabilities but numerous strengths [bold mine-DL] that could make him the best candidate in 2016.

I’ve already guessed that Rubio will decide not to run for president this time, but it’s worth reviewing why Rubio wouldn’t be an appealing candidate in the event that he did. The funny thing is that many of the strengths that Smith identifies could just as easily be seen as reasons why he would not be a strong candidate. Smith touts Rubio’s youth, which could just as easily be reframed as inexperience on the national level. Rubio is from Florida, but most Floridians don’t want him to run for president, and it’s not obvious that he will be able to win re-election to the Senate there, much less carry the state in a presidential election. One of the common claims about Rubio is that he will be able to appeal to Hispanic voters on account of his own background, but there has never been any reason to believe that most Hispanics outside Florida would respond favorably to what Rubio is offering them. He has so far escaped close scrutiny and has enjoyed mostly positive coverage over the last four years, but that would change with a presidential campaign.

Contra Smith, Rubio hasn’t charted his own course “away from both the most hawkish and most dovish wings of his own party,” but has been reliably on the side of the most hawkish members of his party on virtually every major issue of the last five years. He has boasted of wanting to keep a permanent U.S. troop presence in the Near East. He has disingenuously tried to distance himself from the label of hawk while continuing to support hawkish positions across the board. Like his failed balancing act on immigration, Rubio would like to have things both ways on foreign policy. He has sought to court the support of the hard-liners in his party while hoping not to alarm everyone else, but the ruse is so transparent that almost no one has been fooled by it. Finally, because most of his foreign policy views are virtually indistinguishable from Clinton’s, Rubio would be one of the least qualified Republicans to attack her record. I expect that Rubio will defer to Bush and choose not to run, but even if Bush weren’t in the picture there are several good reasons reasons why Rubio shouldn’t run for president.