Sen. Marco Rubio (R-David Brooks Still Likes Him) would just like you liberal activists to know he is on to your liberal activism, and is not interested in playing along with either your activism or your liberalism, golly darn it. Darned if he’s going to subject himself to the undignified spectacle of showing up at a town hall just to hear from “constituents” who he doesn’t even really represent, because they didn’t vote for him. Rubio has no interest in going before an auditorium of people who’ll only “heckle and scream at me in front of cameras.” No thank you. Marco knows better.
“They are not town halls anymore,” the Florida Republican told CBS4-Miami’s Jim DeFede on Sunday. “What these groups really want is for me to schedule a public forum, they then organize three, four, five, six hundred liberal activists in the two counties or wherever I am in the state.”
Oh dear. He’s on to them — Rubio’s pretty sure there’s some kind of politics going on here! He knows all about that Indivisible Guide, and he’s not about to put himself in front of a crowd of boorish booing boors and boo-ers. He explained activists have all this stuff figured out, and they actually plan to arrive at town halls early and then
take up all the front seats. They spread themselves out. They ask questions. They all cheer when the questions are asked. They are instructed to boo no matter what answer I give. They are instructed to interrupt me if I go too long and start chanting things. Then, at the end, they are also told not to give up their microphone when they ask questions. It’s all in writing in this Indivisible document.
Why, that’s not a real exchange of ideas at all! That’s a media event! And Marco Rubio has no interest in hearing from constituents if they’re media-savvy. That’s not what democracy is about, for heaven’s sake. Last week, he took a very principled stand and said he was going away to Europe to find some facts or something. But instead, Rubio actually stayed in Miami and planned to attend a private, no-press event at a hospital, which he instead skipped after being spotted by a union activist. Rather than face the heckling and the screaming and the biting and the hurting, Marco bravely ran away:
So, no, Marco Rubio has no interest in hearing from “constituents,” because they aren’t really there for a Socratic dialogue at all. Not that he thinks they’re paid protesters or anything, just that they’re trying to get publicity for their views, which apparently makes them still real people, but not as real as the real real people who showed up for tea party protests in 2009:
Asked whether he thinks today’s town hall crowds do not consist of “real people,” Rubio was quick to dispel the notion.
“These are real people. They are real liberal activists, and I respect their right to do it. But it is not a productive exercise,” Rubio replied in the interview. “It’s all designed to have news coverage at night — look at all these angry people screaming at your senator.”
Politico notes that when Rubio was campaigning against Charlie Crist during the Tea Party Summer of 2009, he complained his opponent didn’t recognize the seriousness of the regular people who wanted to come and yell at Crist so they could get on the evening news:
“They don’t think that these are real people,” Rubio said of Crist in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper in 2009. “They’re so insulated. Never has our political class been more insulated from the real lives of real people.”
But now, by golly, Marco Rubio knows better than to listen to a bunch of people who didn’t even vote for him and all their screamy whining about “losing their insurance,” because the people who voted for him want those liberals to lose their insurance:
“It would be unfair to the people that voted for me, many of whom voted for me because of my opposition to Obamacare, to now suddenly vote like the person I beat,” he told CBS4-Miami. “And so that’s what I intend to do, and in six years if people don’t agree with that and I run for reelection, they can vote against me.”
But he’s too smart to be a prop in some activists’ political demonstration, no way!
Rubio said he believes that “80 to 90 percent” of the people at the town halls were organized by activists.
“I have no problem justifying my views on these issues. The problem is they are not designed to have a productive engagement,” Rubio told the station. “They are designed to heckle and scream at me in front of cameras so that Channel 4 and other networks and other stations at night will report.”
Never mind that the people who actually come to the town halls are going to be talking about how losing the ACA will actually affect them, in their real lives. If they show up because they planned to show up with other liberals, then really, what’s the point of Marco Rubio subjecting himself to a bunch of people telling him publicity-grabbing stories about how they and their dumb families will be hurt by losing insurance? He’s not playing your game, you liberal activists.
You know who else are real people, but also kind of activisty? Yr Wonkette! We are ad-free, and depend on generous contributions from readers like you to help us keep making fun of Marco Rubio. What a weiner.
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