Voting For Rubio

I'll be voting for Marco Rubio today. I'll walk past the volunteers making last minute pitches for their guy. I'll stand in line to prove to the nice old lady at the folding table that I am who I say I am. She will smile and place a mark by my name in her book, then kindly hand me off to another nice gentlemen who will walk me to the first available booth. Then I will mark my ballot for Mr. Rubio, the young senator from Florida.

He is not my first choice. I had preferred Rand Paul, but he dropped out weeks ago. Rubio is not without his share of shortcomings. His resume is a bit thin. His aggressive foreign policy stances make me nervous. But in a field which features a brain surgeon, a bloviating bore, and a bomb-throwing back bencher, he has gotten my vote by default.

I vote for Rubio primarily because I believe him to have the best chance, albeit a rapidly vanishing one, to derail the Trump nightmare. The second factor in my decision is the issue of temperament. Ted Cruz is very smart, knows the constitution as well as anyone to come along in politics in my lifetime. But he seems to revel in the fact that his colleagues despise him, lacking the self awareness that this fact might disqualify his ability to get anything done once elected. If everyone hates you there's two ways you can respond. You can step back and ask some hard questions of yourself like, "Geez, how come everybody hates me? Maybe I should stop acting like a jerk." Or, you can double down on your asshattery by convincing yourself that they all hate you because you're smarter than them. Mr. Cruz seems to have settled on the latter. While some may view this as principled, others may judge this as a character flaw which would make his Presidency problematic , making the building of coalitions difficult if not impossible.

So, I vote for Rubio. Then I get my sticker and place it on my shirt. I will watch the returns tonight to see if voters around the country, having stared into the abyss of Donald Trump, have suddenly recoiled in horror and snapped out of it, or if Super Tuesday goes down as the day the Republican Party slipped into the oblivion of history. 

If it's Trump after tonight, the Republican Party will have chosen a man who can't even disavow David Duke, and who's most famous bit of life advice was, "You know, it doesn't really matter what the media says about you as long as you have a young, beautiful piece of ass."

Let that sink in for a minute, then go and do your civic duty.