No one will claim that I am a fan of Marco Rubio. His CPAC speech was awful, and it was all the more awful because it is the sort of low quality speech that activists at CPAC seem to crave. That this was the speech that seems to have cemented his place as a modern conservative folk hero only makes things worse. It will come as no surprise that I regard any speculation about a Rubio presidential bid in the next two or even six years as frivolous and absurd. However, much like baseless Petraeus speculation, the equally baseless Rubio speculation is useful for what it tells us about the movement conservatives and Republican activists who engage in it. Matt Lewis writes (via Antle):

I know that at first blush, this sounds quixotic. But in my mind there is a better rationale for Rubio running for president than there is for almost any other candidate on the Republican side.

That is quite a remarkable admission. Surveying the field of possible Republican presidential candidates, Lewis cannot find one candidate more suited to being a presidential candidate than Rubio? Whether or not this makes any sense, it is telling that Lewis thinks it does. As weak as the Republican field really is, is it so weak that it makes more sense for Rubio to jump in than any of the others?

Some observers, including both liberals and conservatives, have sometimes referred to Rubio as the “Republican Obama,” but Lewis goes beyond this and essentially argues that Rubio should run for President fresh off of a Senate election victory he has not yet won because this is what Obama did after he was elected to the Senate. By promoting Rubio as a desirable presidential candidate this early, Lewis would evidently like to see an even less experienced state legislator seek his party’s presidential nomination. Obama causes a very strange reaction in Republicans. On the one hand, they want to regard him as a joke and an incompetent, but they also desperately want to find someone who can imitate his appeal and success, and so it is almost as if they go out of their way to anoint whatever young politician they come across as their new hero and then disregard all of the person’s liabilities by saying, “Well, he’s no more inexperienced than Obama was” or “She’s still better than Obama!” It is an odd mix of contempt for Obama mixed with admiration for Obama’s success and an even stranger need to outdo him in the categories that originally caused them to view Obama so poorly. So Rubio is touted because he is even more inexperienced, Palin is held up because she knows even less about policy, and so on.

What Lewis does not take into account are the key reasons why Obama’s relative inexperience was not much of a disadvantage and why the fresh face/blank slate appeal worked so well. First, the sitting administration was staffed by some of the most experienced Washington hands and was widely and correctly viewed as extremely incompetent. On the most important issue of the day, the war in Iraq, most of the experienced politicians (and all of Obama’s main rivals for the nomination) backed the invasion, while Obama had initially opposed it. Of course, Obama was never quite the foreign policy novice that his opponents wanted to make him out to be, but his better judgment regarding Iraq showed how little long years of experience in government counted when it came to making good decisions. In Rubio’s case, there is no obvious way that he turns the experience argument around on those who would use it against him.

Rubio’s signature issue is his opposition to the stimulus bill of last year, and it is on account of this that he has now taken a large lead over Crist, but this would not distinguish him from other potential Republican candidates and as an issue it is not nearly as significant. Even granting that the stimulus was poorly conceived and designed, supporting it was not the kind of mistake that is going to cause a massive electoral backlash from the general electorate. Meanwhile, opposing it and making that opposition the centerpiece of one’s candidacy are not going to guarantee electoral success in the fall. Perhaps Rubio’s biggest problem is that he simply does not interest or excite many people outside his own party. Right now he is tapping into the discontent of the Republican rank-and-file in a primary, and he is having great success so far because of this, but the things that excite and motivate the partisan rank-and-file tend not to excite and motivate people outside the party. Meanwhile, all of the other potential presidential candidates are tapping into the same discontent. The reason for Rubio’s success makes him virtually indistinguishable from almost every other national Republican figure.

Whatever else one wants to say about Obama since his inauguration, during the campaign he did present himself as a post-partisan pragmatist. Rubio seems to want to have nothing to do with such a label, and indeed the rationale for his primary candidacy is that he is both strongly partisan and ideological. Rubio has succeeded so far because he has cast himself as the true-believing ideologue and strong partisan, but it remains to be seen if that translates into victory in a presidential swing state.