Marco Rubio by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0.

While a boy’s face on a man’s body may be the romantic ideal for some, it serves only to reinforce Republican primary voters’ skepticism about Sen. Marco Rubio’s lack of skepticism about government interventionism. The Florida senator’s political instincts have led him to believe, among other things, that the US immigration crisis can only be addressed through comprehensive reform, a mutually-exclusive term favored by pundits, progressives, and “soft values” Republicans like Rubio.

When the senator from Florida invokes “context” in attempting to explain away his since-disavowed support for amnesty, one is reminded of a petulant child attempting to rationalize wrongdoing rather than a respectable grownup who straightforwardly asks for forgiveness and moves on.

Rubio, it seems, possesses a Peter Pan complex in reverse: a political boy who desperately wishes to be a political man. One gets the impression of an eager-beaver naif easily seduced by big, juicy ideas advanced by big, juicy government.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the man who cited US security in supporting the invasion of Libya should do the same when defending his risible, regrettable belief that — absent government handouts to Florida sugar growers — the America is at risk of “losing the capacity to produce our own food, at which point we’re at the mercy of a foreign country for food security”. (Other than pundits refraining from affixing “-gate” to every political scandal, my political dream is an end to invoking “security” when discussing energy issues and, now, in the case of Rubio, sugar. Sugar).

That Sen. Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses while issuing full-throated opposition to ethanol subsidies further suggests that Rubio is the Bobby Darin of contemporary American politics: a relatively young man whose moment has already passed while trying desperately to appeal to an audience that has discovered rock’n’roll and in no mood for a new cover of “Beyond The Sea.”

Rubio fluently speaks the language of limited government while giving the impression that he’d be much more at home speaking Rockefeller Republicanism. His boyish desire to please does not befit a man seeking to be a conservative president in the mold of Coolidge or Reagan.

Conservatives rightly fear that Rubio is, in the words of Peter Robinson, a little soft. For example, while comfortable enough deflecting blame onto Obama and the Democrats for government shutdowns, it doesn’t even seem to occur to Rubio to do what the moment seemed to demand: namely, taking credit for them.

Seemingly far more confident in the American experiment, the equally young Cruz stands in direct contrast to Rubio in his frumpiness and breath-of-fresh-air arrogance. Cruz, unlike every other candidate in the field, offers the tantalizing possibility of a return to self-government, where Hillary Clinton promises more of the same and Rubio the weak beer of less of the same.