Marco Rubio and the safety net

The Republican Party should take the Florida senator's ideas seriously

MARCO RUBIO'S shoulder is sore. The junior senator from Florida has just had a cortisone injection to ease the pain from an old football injury. Congress is not short of square-jawed jocks. Given that politics often resembles a professional sport for the over-40s, this may be no coincidence. Mr Rubio, who won a college football scholarship, is an extreme case: his autobiography contains 26 references to the Miami Dolphins. This mania for running back and forth can overshadow another, distinctly un-jock, interest of Mr Rubio's, which is in social policy.

Though Mr Rubio fitted the description of a young insurgent, his background is not that of an anti-government crusader. He first ran for public office aged 26, becoming a member of the city commission in West Miami, a town of 6,000 people. His tenure is remembered, if at all, for the introduction of a bicycle-mounted policeman. When Alberto Gutman, a state senator of distinctively Floridian heritage (he described himself as “Jewban”: ie, Jewish and Cuban) was indicted for a distinctively Floridian crime (Medicare fraud), opening up positions further down the food chain, Mr Rubio was elected to the statehouse aged just 28. His nine years there were mostly spent turning the agenda of Jeb Bush, a centrist Republican governor, into law. He also showed a wonkish streak, travelling around the state holding rather earnest-sounding “idea-raisers”: 100 proposals that emerged from them were subsequently turned into a book.

When he arrived in the Senate Mr Rubio was hailed as a future saviour of a Republican Party struggling to appeal to Hispanic voters, on the basis that his parents had left Cuba in 1956. An already difficult task was made harder when he had a fight with Univision, the biggest Spanish-language network, in 2011. It became impossible when House Republicans declined to consider an immigration reform bill that Mr Rubio, along with three other Republicans and four Democrats, had put his name to. He has since concluded that a law to address the 12m undocumented migrants in the country will be impossible until the border is secure and the criteria for deciding who gets to come change from prioritising family reunification to favouring workers.

This will not win over the voters that the GOP had hoped Mr Rubio would magically deliver: even young Cubans, who have long stood out among Latinos for their attachment to the Republican Party, have started to switch their loyalties to the Democrats. On climate change, too, Mr Rubio is hardly a breath of fresh air. Most scientists, he says, agree that man is to blame, but he sees no point in imposing heavy economic costs on Americans for uncertain benefits.

If Mr Rubio is going to rescue his party from anything it is from an overly narrow view of what government ought to do. Both Mr Rubio's parents worked at low-wage jobs—his father as a bartender, his mother at Kmart—but were able to provide a life for him and his siblings that was within touching distance of the middle class. In the years since then, he argues, a mixture of globalisation and automation have held down wages for low-skilled workers, making it harder for people without university degrees to repeat what his own parents managed to do.

Mr Rubio has various proposals for addressing this, including a federal wage subsidy to top up the incomes of the low-paid. He wants to help more students go to college, but also thinks the federal government should experiment with hiring people without degrees for white-collar work, as an example to other employers. Some of these ideas are unlikely to fly, such as a scheme to allow students to sell a share of their future income in exchange for money to fund tuition up front. But they show an urge to innovate that the GOP's Congressional wing has been missing.

Does a safety net give people courage to soar?

This is daring stuff in the context of today's Republican Party because it envisages a role for government that many conservatives would find distasteful. Where Republican orthodoxy suggests saving poor people from welfare dependency by mercifully reducing the amount of money they receive, Mr Rubio aims to cut welfare spending by reducing the demand for it, keeping funding at the same level but handing anti-poverty programmes over to the states to figure out what works. “I don't take my children to the circus very often,” he says, “but when I do I have noticed that acrobats tend to be much more daring when they have a safety net beneath them.” Such support “is essential for the success of the free enterprise system”.

It is hard to imagine some other Republicans with presidential ambitions saying anything like that. Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, often give the impression that the only thing standing between America and a restoration of the upwardly mobile society of the 1950s is a more faithful interpretation of the constitution. Mr Rubio is only 43, so he is probably not experienced enough to take on Hillary Clinton in 2016. But right now he is the most effective standard-bearer for conservatives who worry more about reducing poverty and long-term unemployment than about waging culture wars and cutting income tax. Whoever wins in November, these thoughts are worth taking seriously.