Site by Evan from Texas, launched Dec. 7, 2010.
About this site
As a Republican, I think it’s crucial for the health of our nation that
we beat Barack Obama. When I look at the candidates out there who are
thinking of running for president, I don’t see politicians who can
inspire Americans in the way necessary to beat an incumbent president.
Marco Rubio can rally this nation to be great. So the goal of this site is to get Republicans to watch Rubio in action (what I call “The Draft Marco Rubio Challenge“) and then ask themselves “Is there any other prospective candidate that I think would make a better leader for the USA than Marco Rubio?” After careful thought, my answer is no. I hope yours will be too.
While I have kept the site fairly simple to start, I’ll try to flesh out why Rubio is the best candidate to beat Obama.
About Me
I’m a late 20something Texan. I also write the Rick Perry vs World blog on
Texas Politics.
Evan from Texas set out the case
for Marco Rubio in more detail in a Dec. 8, 2010 posting on his "Rick
Perry vs. The World" blog:
Basically, the more I looked at the Republicans who were running, the more I thought that none of them looked like a winner. Lots of them would have trouble consolidating the Republican base (Huckabee, Romney, etc) or simply have too much baggage to be electable (Gingrich, Palin, etc). Some of them wouldn't be good presidents and some just don't strike anyone as a POTUS.
Marco Rubio has none of those problems. Not only is he likely to be able to raise the money for a run, but he's spent the last two years running against Obama. He doesn't need to search for a message or run a poll. He already has it because he's lived it.
The idea of Marco Rubio running for president seems to initially strike many people as a bit early..."but he was just elected to the Senate!" I had the same reaction when Matt Lewis suggested this last April that Rubio run for president in 2012.
The obvious counter-argument is that he's too inexperienced, and that running this soon might look overly ambitious. For this reason, Rubio's team wants nothing to do with this meme, but the experience factor has been utterly altered by the very man I'd like to see Rubio challenge in less than three years. Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton and John McCain after serving only a few years in the U.S. Senate -- most of which was spent running for president.
Barack Obama's performance as president has underwhelmed the
expectations of pretty much the entire political spectrum. But it has
nothing to do with age or years in elected office. It has to do with
wisdom, competence, and ideology. That's where Obama fails, and where
Rubio excels. And arguably Rubio's pre-presidential electoral
experience exceeds Obama's anyway.
And, a Jan. 19, 2011 posting on Draft MarcoRubio discusses strategy:
Our strategy for DraftMarcoRubio is pretty simple. We don’t think any current Republican running or likely to run for president is going to catch fire in the next 6 months or so. If someone is running in July or so who looks like they can beat Obama and be an excellent president, then we won’t need to draft Senator Rubio.
This is why we want to build infrastructure as it becomes
appropriate.
We haven’t filed to create an independent campaign expenditure
committee because we don’t see any point in buying advertising or
spending money right now. As Chet Arthur mentioned yesterday,
we
don’t actually think that Marco Rubio should be visiting Iowa at the
moment, so we’re not yet trying to specifically identify supporters
from the big 4 primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and
Nevada. We certainly might in the future, but for now we are simply
issuing a clarion call for Republicans alarmed at the weakness of the
current field who think Senator Rubio has the clarity of vision
necessary to be the next President of the United States of America.
That’s why we want as many people as possible to take the Draft Marco Rubio Challenge. If you don’t research Senator Rubio and if you don’t hear him speak, then you won’t know why he should be the next president.
If you take the challenge, then the Take Action page lists several steps of increasing commitment.
First, send out a tweet to your followers on twitter. Second, click the like button on the side of the page.
Then, when you really want to send a message to Senator Rubio that you think he should run for president, donate $20.12 to his campaign account.
You can also start your own blog, write a post for publication here on why you support drafting Senator Rubio, or email us to see if one of the projects on our list (we have more than a few!) matches your interest.
Ed. Notes
>As of April 20, 2011 the most recent posting was on March 30
reporting on the 5000th follower. At that point Draft Marco Rubio
Twitter shows 615 Tweets, 5,037 Following, 6,107 Followers.
>Evan's other site, the "Rick Perry vs. The World" blog, shows its first posting on Dec. 2004. Evan notes that he graduated from Rice and wrote his senior thesis on "the Deep South gubernatorial campaigns of the 90s."
