U.S. Senator and former Tea Party darling Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has come out swinging against an almost $9 million TV advertising campaign targeted in Florida, Tennessee and Texas and intended to promote the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
In a September 3, 2013 letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Senator Rubio calls the advertising buy a ?…blatant misuse of federal dollars to promote a fundamentally flawed law…?. In the PR he continues:
While the Administration should be abandoning this disastrous law, instead it is imprudently and blindly promoting poor policies that will harm Americans and American businesses, and misappropriating public funds in an effort to sell bad ideas to good people.
The Obama administration has been aggressively working to get information out to the public and encourage signups into the program, including enlisting Super Bowl champs Baltimore Ravens and offering strategies to promote fact sheets in schools.
The moral indignation found in the letter might do little to change the Administration’s actions, but it appears Senator Rubio’s real intention is to work to regain favor with the Tea Party voters.
The fast-rising political star won his State Senate seat in a special election in 2000, and retained it until 2009 when he made the choice to run against the then Florida Governor Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate. Rubio won the primary and ultimately the election, riding the wave of Tea Party activism in that election to 49% of the vote versus Crists’s 30% and Democrat Kendrick Meek’s 20%.
Almost immediately Rubio started being mentioned as a potential Republican candidate for president, his meteoric rise culminating in his being vetted by the Romney campaign as a potential Vice-Presidential candidate.
However, his star has fallen since then as he has joined the Gang of Eight working for immigration reform and said the GOP must embrace a path to citizenship for immigrants. His vote for the bill has been roundly criticized for the alleged pork-laden final version which includes: $1.5 billion for youth jobs, allowing seafood processors in Alaska to hire young foreign workers, and revisions to rules for J-1 visa holders.
The pork-laden bill, combined with accusations that it doesn’t go far enough to secure the borders against future illegal immigration, has caused a falling out with Tea Party Republicans. Ken Crow, an Iowa activist who formed TeaPartyCommunity.com?says
The thing that is most baffling for me is that this man is willing to lose millions upon millions of votes he could have had from tea partyers for illegal votes that he will not get because he is not a Democrat
It is blatantly hypocritical to ?attack a $9 million ad campaign when he’s voting for billions in ‘pork’ and obviously doing so to regain favor with the Teapublicians. Perhaps Senator Rubio has determined the best way to deflect attention from his perceived missteps in supporting immigration reform is to pander to the Tea Party base by attacking the Administration’s right to notify the public of the coming health care changes.
edited by Kyla B
