You can always tell when a political party has fallen into a near panic during a presidential election campaign. It hauls out whatever charge it can find to discredit its most dangerous opponent – however outlandish and hypocritical.
The recent charge against Marco Rubio – that he’s been derelict in his duty as a U.S. senator because he’s voted less often since he began running for the White House – is a case in point. No one should be surprised that Senate minority leader Harry Reid would attempt to use this issue against the junior senator from Florida. Publicly Democrats spend considerable time bashing Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, but privately, they consider Rubio their biggest threat. He has a compelling back story as the son of poor Cuban immigrants and he’s running a generational campaign, much like John F. Kennedy did in 1960. And he’s telegenic and articulate, with serious foreign policy chops and a command of important issues like immigration and a family tax plan that could well draw support from working-class Democrats.
Amazingly, Bush, of all people, recently joined forces with Reid in pressing Rubio on his supposed “absenteeism,” even echoing Reid’s call for Rubio to resign. It’s a classic red herring, of course. U.S. senators that compete for high office must spend days and weeks away from the nations’ capital in key battleground states shaking hands with voters and articulating their policy positions and defending their record. That record, of course, includes crafting and voting on important Senate legislation. But the rigors of campaigning do not always allow for a rapid return to Washington to vote on any one pending bill. Often senators get less than a day’s notice that a vote has been called; it’s simply not feasible to return. Moreover, if the vote is not going to be close, one senator’s vote simply may not be that critical to the final outcome.
Consider what happened in 2007 when the Democrats had at least five different U.S. senators running for the party’s nomination – Barack Obama (D-IL), Joe Biden (D-DE), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), John Edwards (D-NC), and Christopher Dodd (D-CT). Naturally, the very same issue came up. And within hours, the five candidates began pointing the finger at each other’s record of non-voting, desperately trying to gain a margin of advantage. Barack Obama was criticized for having missed what some considered an important vote declaring Iran’s revolutionary guard a terrorist organization – especially since he had criticized Clinton on the campaign trail for having voted for the legislation, even suggesting that passage would give then-President George W. Bush a “blank check” to invade Iran.
An entire news cycle was devoted to whether Obama had sufficient time to return from an important campaign swing in New Hampshire – a state he would eventually lose – to vote on the pending legislation.
Eventually, the voting record for each candidate was scrutinized – and the numbers were shocking: Obama, it turned out, had missed a whopping 80 percent of his Senate voting opportunities in the two months prior to the Iran vote, more than any other candidate. But the records of the others over the same period were scarcely better: Biden had missed 68 percent of the votes during the same period, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut 65 percent and Clinton of New York 63 percent. In fact, when the entire calendar year was considered, it turned out that Biden and Dodd had the worst records – not Obama. It didn’t take long for the five candidates to stop throwing stones; they were living in the same glass house.
Naturally, governors like Bush don’t have to face this same conflict in their time commitments. In fact, they may be no more diligent in attending to their duties of office than a sitting senator campaigning for office. When they postpone consideration of an important issue, no one probably notices, except political insiders. But when a senator isn’t part of the official roll-call, it’s a matter of the public record, which can makes for easy scrutiny – and facile “gotcha” criticism.
Will Rubio pay a political price for doing what every campaigning U.S. senator has done to launch his or her presidential campaign? Rubio’s fellow senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) do seem to be making more votes than Rubio, but they aren’t surging in the polls, or campaigning quite so hard. Even so, watching Rubio turn the issue to his full advantage during the debate, all but bashing Bush for taking such a cheap shot at a fellow Republican and making his one-time mentor look like a callow and desperate rival will surely give both men pause.
Still, the more recent attacks on Rubio’s personal finances and credit problems are suggestive of the growing stakes involved. Democrats clearly don’t want to see a fresh-faced and charismatic conservative Hispanic become president. That’s understandable. But with Bush and even Donald Trump starting to pile on, you have to wonder why Republicans are so intent on devouring their own – and damaging one of their brightest stars. Who but the Democrats really benefit in the end?