Marco Rubio to Florida seniors: I’ll strengthen the military

“GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio has proposed a new tax credit to encourage businesses to provide their workers with paid leave”. Perhaps the only pattern to have emerged from this prediction-defying campaign is that the trickle-down coverage from engaging Trump is a candidate’s best hope of getting covered.

Donald Trump earned a round of boos when he attacked fellow Republican candidate Marco Rubio – calling him a “clown” – at an event Friday for conservative, faith-based voters. “Number one, I am not sitting in the United States Senate“.

That brought a cascade of boos from the audience. Romney’s 47 percent theory was bad, but not explicitly about black voters, though certainly that code was embedded in his theorizing about the 47 percent of people who would vote for Obama no matter what and are dependent on the government.

But it won’t be an easy or quick win for Rubio.

Rubio also called the billionaire businessman “touchy and insecure”, joining the chorus of Trump critics who have intensified pressure on the GOP front-runner in recent weeks. “It was awful. And then he went down in the polls”.

His backers believe he can overcome such obstacles with a campaign structure created to let his natural political skills show through and shut out just about everything else. “He is a very sensitive person”.

They took (relatively) mild barbs at each other during last week’s presidential debate in California. “Carly Fiorina really embarrassed him“. The back-and-forth was the latest signal of Rubio’s growing prominence in the Republican race.

Trump also criticized Rubio for having missed the most votes of any lawmaker in the Senate.

Senator Rubio relished in the role of campaigning in his home state. As Trump would say, why waste time with losers? That criticism prompted a wave of insults from Trump, who appears to have either exhausted of mocking Bush or determined that he no longer poses him the greatest threat among the primary contenders.

“They never even tried [to make their case]”, Rubio said.

“First of all, he takes shots at everybody that gets anywhere close to him, in terms of a poll, or anytime he hits a rough spot that’s what he does”, the Florida senator said of Trump on Kentucky Sports Radio.

“He had a really bad debate performance last week”, he said of Trump. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who chased headlines and veered clumsily from one issue to the next, is out along with former Texas governor Rick Perry.

I don’t have much skull left in the spot where I’ve been scratching my head because, as a conservative, I fail to see how Trump is anything but a flaming liberal compared to Bush, Rubio and every other Republican candidate. Trump proceeded with his usual blend of free-associative patriotism, blending in some talk of religion and jibes at retiring House Speaker John Boehner.