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Open Letter to Marco Rubio: Run for President
Dear Senator Rubio:
I’m writing to ask you to run for President of the United States against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
I understand that in doing so, you would be breaking a promise you made during the campaign. But such promises are never absolute. Franklin Roosevelt ran in 1940 on a promise not to send American boys to fight in any foreign wars. He broke that promise. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he would have been betraying his oath of office not to do so.
More generally, consider a situation in which you agreed to take your family on a road trip with a friend, who you promised to let drive the car. But then you discovered that he insisted on drinking and playing chicken with oncoming traffic. Would you keep your promise to let him drive, putting your children’s lives at risk? I don’t think so, and no sane person would fault you for breaking your word to keep your family safe. Well, we now face an analogous situation, and it is the country that is at risk.
Consider the crisis we face in the present election. On the one hand, we have Hillary Clinton, a corrupt social democrat who would continue the disastrous policies of Barack Obama for another four or more years, notably including the cancerous expansion of the hyper-regulatory state that is strangling our economy and imperiling our freedom. On the other, we have Donald Trump, a vicious con artist who is engaging in xenophobic demagoguery to mobilize mob support behind an agenda of unlimited government, socialist policy, and unconstitutional one-man rule, and who moreover is committed to gutting the Western alliance and the global system of free trade, the two principal pillars supporting the security and prosperity of the civilized world since 1945. As if that were not enough, Mr. Trump also evidences clear symptoms of megalomania and mental instability, so much so that you yourself publicly stated that you would fear to have his finger on the nuclear button. Indeed, having a crazy person in charge of our nuclear arsenal would place every human being on this planet at risk, including your children and mine. So campaign promise or not, the only moral course of action for you is to try to seize the wheel.
It would be a fight against the odds, certainly, but there is a chance you could win. Here is why.
- Both Clinton and Trump are widely detested. Indeed, their principal appeal in the coming campaign would be that, in a two-person race, each is the sole alternative to the unspeakable other. Furthermore, they will both be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to amplify this situation by running torrents of powerful negative campaign ads to demonize each other. They would not start directing fire against you until after you became a clear threat, and by then it could be too late for them to stop you.
- You are no doubt aware of the large numbers of anti-Trump Republicans who would seize the opportunity to vote for you, but you should also consider the anti-Clinton Democrats who might go your way as well. Almost half the Democratic Party base is so distressed with Clinton that they are still holding out for the hopeless Bernie Sanders campaign. Many of these people desperately want someplace else to go after Hillary gets the nomination. The smell of xenophobia from the Trump campaign is likely to be so repellent to them that they couldn’t support him, regardless. But many of them might be willing to support you.
- The real Republicans want someone who will defend the Constitution and the principle of limited government. The sincere Democrats want someone who will stand for the weak against the powerful, the ordinary citizens against the privileged. Everyone wants a chance to vote for a decent person. Neither Trump nor Clinton represents any of those ideals. You represent all of them.
- It may be that you might be too late to get on the ballot in every state, but this would not be a show stopper. In the three-way race, you don’t need to contest every state, or even most of them. If you were to win even a handful of states (and I think you could do much better than that) you could stalemate the Electoral College and throw the decision into the House of Representatives, where your winning chances would be excellent.
There are those who say you should not do this, because if you were to fail, you would increase the prospects of a victory by Clinton. But this makes no sense, because while Trump might possibly nominate Supreme Court Justices less destructive than those that would be recommended by Hillary, this is very small beer compared to the catastrophic potential for global depression and large scale conflict that would be unleashed by Trump’s program of trade war and the abandonment of Western collective security. So, though the collection of camp followers and careerists now seeking sinecures in a Trump administration might find your frustration of their ambitions very upsetting, one way or another the mad Don must be put down. If not by you, then by Hillary; if it is not be by Hillary, then it will have to be done by you.
Furthermore, whether it is you or Hillary who gets to take Trump’s scalp as a trophy to the White House, by running you will greatly increase the chance that Republicans will hold onto the Senate, the House, and innumerable state and local offices that now stand to be lost as millions of Republicans choose to stay home rather than soil themselves by pulling the lever for Trump or Clinton. So there is nothing to be lost and everything to be gained by giving it a try.
So sir, I ask you to take heart, raise the flag and sound the battle cry of freedom. There are millions of us who will rally to your standard. The fate of the republic is at stake. You know it, and we know it. Don’t desert us, and we won’t desert you. Lead and we will follow. Charge and we will fight. Together, we can prevail.
Fortune favors the brave.
Published in General
Its death has been greatly exaggerated.
Political whores sucking up to the presumptive candidate. What a surprise.
Precisely. If Rubio couldn’t beat Trump in any primaries, what makes you think he could beat him in the general?
Exactly. That’s why I suggested the opposite.
Yeah this is going to work. I am about preventing Hildabeast now. Electing a conservative has come and gone.
Nope, nope, nope.
I suspect he would have been the most effective and President we could have elected BUT…
the people are in no mood for a functioning representative republic. The public is angry, misled, and incoherent. It wants circuses and doesn’t care what it takes. The factions are itchin for a resolutionless fight and they will have it. There will be blood, why comes later.
Dead, yes, insofar as it was unable to stop the rise of Mr. Trump. But what then of those of us who will refuse to vote for him? We are a minority, but a substantial one and unless Trump and his supporters can win us over he doesn’t have much of a chance in November. Releasing his list of possible SCOTUS nominees was a clever tack in the right direction but it is not nearly enough to move me off my position. You folks still have work to do.
You have a lot of faith that your numbers are that big and that you aren’t in states where it doesn’t matter.
Because the general is a far different ball game than the primaries.
Hmm, we don’t like Trump coz he’s always breaking his promises, but we’re cool when our guy breaks his promise if it’s something we like.
Yes this time Rubio’s ineffectiveness will give us Hillary. Good plan guys.
I think they’re progressing through the five steps of political grief.
Before Rubio reads this, I suggest this essay should be edited for sanity.
The overall sentence reads as though Mr. Trump has a secret grand plan of destruction, which can sound outright paranoid to the casual reader. Making these serial assertions with no evidence makes readers question the objectivity of the author. But worse, these specific projections reveal the thoughts of the darkest possible fantasist who grants superpowers to his anti-hero, or else, again, does not understand the American system of government.
It could also use other edits. Unconstitutional one man rule, is redundant unless it is meant to educate Mr. Rubio who is a lawyer and well-versed in the US constitution, in which case the Senator might take offense and/or lead him to question the authors general grasp of politics.
Franco it also points to the sheer insanity of saying Trump can’t be trusted on any policy issue but it can be taken as gospel that he is a fascist because of the positions he has taken on policies that he can’t be trusted on.
Xenophobic demagoguery? Can we have some quotes please? To the best of my knowledge he has said that illegals should go and Muslim immigration should be stopped until we figure out who is coming in. His comments about Muslim Americans he walked back–again the issues that he flips on rendering him inconsistent and untrustworthy.
I don’t know if I speak for all #NeverTrumpers, but I feel confident that I’m not alone in saying, “Knock it off. You’re embarrassing us!”
Yes. If not, then vote for Gary Johnson and William Weld.
They have no intention of winning us over. They want to keep a convenient scapegoat when the inevitable happens and their savior goes down in flames.
We need strong conservative leaders. Try an open letter to Mrs. Mitch Daniels, asking her to allow her husband to run.
Marco Rubio? He’s the old version of Ben Sasse, isn’t he?
Or is Ben Sasse the “new Marco Rubio?”
#draftBenSasse, #sendHimtoAfghanistan.
I can understand the enthusiasm for Trump.
I can’t understand the enthusiasm for Rubio.
Speaking objectively ( I’m not a US citizen, I don’t live there) he was a very mediocre candidate. Not terrible like Bush or any of the Democrats, but just weak and unconvincing. Part of the job description of an American President, remember, is to fight Islamic terrorism and stare-down Putin. It’s not a job I want to see given to someone who doesn’t sound like their balls have dropped yet.
Is this one of those Goldberg/NRO/Nevertrump plots? If so, then good grief, and you guys call the Trumpists deranged…
Other than to ensure that Hillary gets elected president, there is no reason whatsoever for Rubio, or any other Republican or third party conservative candidate, to run for president.
While I can certainly understand why reasonable person would be very nervous about a President Trump, I find it sad that otherwise reasonable people would waste their time even thinking about a third party candidate.
As Rockhound said in the movie Armageddon “It’s time to embrace the horror.”
Stop wasting your time on such things. It makes you sound desperate and more than a little hysterical. Personally, I plan to enjoy several months of Trump beating up on Hillary and when election day comes, I will decide what I will do.
I urge you all to stop deluding yourself into thinking there is any other option.
That doesn’t add up. A third candidate would get the voters that wouldn’t otherwise vote.
The Republican party has already split into two. The Trump half won. The conservative half has to figure out if it is staying to fight for party control or to start a competing party.
At this point it seems obvious that conservatives are on the fringe. We thought we had the Republican half of the country but we were wrong. We have about half of that half. If that.
The Republican party is a pretty big machine. I don’t see how we’ll ever work ourselves back into a position like we had in 2015. Perhaps the only way we can make ourselves relevant is organize our biggest political celebrities and shout from the fringe.
No no no, you’re getting it all wrong. Trump Derangement Syndrome is like Bush Derangement Syndrome, it’s what causes people to lash out and hate Trump.
Scott Adams has an interesting explanation of the phenomenon where its a expression of cognitive dissonance.
Boy, Doc Jay is smart.
Yes, he’s a contributor. You’re paying for this.
Hmm. Sounds familiar.
Yes, by all means, send the guy that got thumped in his own state.
Nobody is working to move you [plural] off your position. Enjoy insignificance.