Marco Rubio is seen as the "acceptable moderate" candidate for Republicans who find frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to be too extreme.
The problem with that labelling, however, is that he is neither an acceptable nor moderate candidate.
Rubio's paradoxical campaign breathes an air of idealism, on fomenting a 'New American Century,' while on the other hand is grounded in scrapping the social progress that has been made in recent times.
The establishment particularly like him because he doesn't project an overly explicit irrationality like Trump and Cruz, nor is he stricken with wooden awkwardness and a burdensome last name, like Jeb!
It's easy to appear more moderate than Trump; just speak more softly and don't base your entire campaign on negativity, through disparaging women, refugees, and the disabled. In the case of Cruz, just don't call for the abolition of the IRS.
Rubio's campaign is more positive in its tone but similarly extremist in its content.
He calls for a tax cut for the wealthy that is three times the size of George Bush's 2001 tax cuts, of which almost half of the benefit would go to the top 5 percent of earners and that would deliver on average a $1 million tax break for the richest 0.1 percent in the first year. Like every other Republican, Rubio wants a balanced budget amendment, but that desired balanced budget appears impossible when Rubio's own tax proposals would reduce federal revenue by $6.8 trillion over the next decade.
Derek Thompson in The Atlantic rightly highlights that Rubio is not the only candidate offering up similar tax breaks. There is an entire consensus of economic illiteracy amongst the Republican Party today that states that substantial tax cuts can accompany deficit reduction.
Beyond the substantial loss in revenue, there appears little justification in the extent of such tax cuts on upper-income individuals at a time when 99 percent of aggregate income between 2009-2013 went to the top 1 percent. Highlighting the unfairness in Rubio's extreme proposal, Thompson argues, 'Since government spending is disproportionately skewed towards helping the poor, sick, and old, this would mean cutting unfathomably deep into decades-long commitments to America's most vulnerable citizens.'
On an analysis of the Republican Party, one could say that Rubio is a moderate within the party, a party that has lurched further and further to the right in recent decades to the point of being unelectable.
Rubio's proposals also call for delaying cuts to Medicare and Social Security as well as substantially increasing military spending significantly. Again, all of this, while promising a balanced budget amendment. It is a plan that promises so much, but has little basis in arithmetical credibility.
Len Burman, the director of the Tax Policy Center, states, "If the numbers added up, this would be a radical and innovative tax reform that would be worth taking seriously."
Beyond fiscal policy, Rubio shares an extremism with his fellow Republican candidates and the NRA; opposing expanding common-sense background checks. Ninety percent of Americans support increased background checks, and to add insult to injury, also sides with the NRA position on permitting those on the terrorist watch list to buys guns.
Republicans have in recent days been debating whether torture, with Trump being the most outspoken supporter. The extremist Marco Rubio, on the other hand, 'categorically refused to rule out any torture techniques, for fear of helping terrorists "practice how to evade us."'
If Marco Rubio were a truly moderate candidate, he would oppose torture, and would endorse the recent sentiments of Senator John McCain: "It's been so disappointing to see some presidential candidates engaged in loose talk on the campaign trail about reviving waterboarding and other inhumane interrogation techniques. Our enemies act without conscience. We must not."
It is not moderate to have as a policy program: a number of substantial tax breaks, a massive increase in defence spending, and at the same time a balanced budget amendment. It's fiscal ineptitude and political extremism. Rubio's position on tax reform, background checks and torture, are just a small few of the many examples that highlight what sort of candidate he really is.
An extremist labelled as an "acceptable moderate."