When Rand Paul announced his presidential candidacy last week, I broke down the speech here so that our readers could get a sense of his actual policy goals. As I noted at the time, Senator Paul’s remarks deviated somewhat from the norm in their specificity (for a good discussion of some of his policy proposals, check out Reihan Salam and Patrick Brennan in the inaugural episode of the Wonky Town podcast). That fact was only underscored by Marco Rubio’s announcement yesterday, in which he hewed much closer to the traditional model of going easy on policy details.

Now, Rubio’s no slouch when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governing. Indeed, he’s enthusiastically embraced a lot of the ideas coming out of the “reformicon” camp and it’s hard to argue with his record of policy entrepreneurship in Florida. That said, he’s also a much more talented speaker than Paul (and, for my money, anybody else who is, or may end up in, the GOP field), so he presumably knows that an announcement speech is not the time to do an on-stage scoring of your budget plan. I expect we’ll see a lot more details in the future.

Rubio’s Miami announcement speech was, for the most part, a rhetorical exercise (and a pretty fine one at that), but there was one section in the middle of the speech that gave some sense of his policy agenda. Granted, it’s a laundry list, but, as part of my effort to keep you in the loop about our candidates’ actual agendas, here’s the text: