Values Voter Summit Update: Rubio's Family Leave Plan and Cruz's Horror Show Stand Up Comedy
PoliticsWhen I was walking around the different booths and spying on people who had friends yesterday, the whole Values Voter platform felt very niche. I was able to have a nice time joking around with vendors and making one friend because it was obvious that we were all individual people with different backgrounds and nobody really had the power to impose one’s views onto the other. Today, the first real day of the conference, feels very different. This is does not feel niche anymore. It feels significant.
I’ve been in the Regency Ballroom in the basement of this hotel for just over four hours, and it feels like this is the world now. I have forgotten what it feels like to laugh or chew solid food or say words out loud. I have drunk six cups of water and peed three times.
In the first plenary session of the 2015 Values Voters Summit, I saw a number of Republican presidential hopefuls preaching to a choir of the converted where the assignment wasn’t to present the best, most innovative plan to transform America— rather, it was to present a predetermined roster of ideas with the most pizzazz.
The morning began with a rendition of the National Anthem (which an enthusiastic reporter behind me sang with a strong vibrato), an invocation (which obviously invoked Ronald Reagan), and some rousing racism from MC Gil Mertz who remarked about the visit from Chinese President Xi Jiping (he is apparently staying in a hotel across the street) with the joke, “The only Chinese I know is on a menu.” He also made the first of a number of Hillary Clinton email jokes. They were all boring and they were all the same.
The first candidate to speak was Sen. Marco Rubio (introduced rather humbly by Sen. John McCain). Rubio, I’ve always felt, has been the most electable of the Republican candidates— he is seemingly the least crazy of the options and manages to present the Christian pro-family platform in a way that doesn’t make me physically ill. He even announced a new policy which would give a limited 25 percent tax credit to any business that offered between four and 12 weeks of paid family leave, which is a great improvement on our current paid family leave policy (there isn’t one), and a position that has really only been championed thus far by Democrats.
“This won’t solve every scheduling conflict between work and family life. No policy can,” Rubio said in his announcement. “But it will help ensure that our people don’t have to sit behind a desk while the most profound moments of their lives pass them by. And it will help our businesses expand and create new jobs by allowing them to keep more of their money rather than send it to Washington.”
But then he had to break my heart and remind the crowd he was that kind of Christian, growling his support for what would become the three most important causes of the day: the right to religious liberty, the right to bear arms, and the right to life.
It was then that my attention rapidly waned.
The winner of the morning was undoubtedly, horrifyingly Ted Cruz. In the two GOP debates, Cruz has played the part of the unnervingly sincere creepy uncle—his eyebrows and subdued tone make him impossible to trust. But for this crowd, he is a fucking rockstar. Cruz’s very fiber is made up of values voters — these are the people that taught him that he is Special. This is where he makes sense.