Rubio Tuesday

The new issue of the Weekly Standard puts Marco Rubio on the cover and features Andrew Ferguson on Rubio’s election night speech as well as Stephen Hayes on Rubio’s campaign.
By contrast with President Obama, Rubio has made a theme of American exceptionalism. Both Ferguson and Hayes quote Rubio on this topic. Today he touches on the theme at the outset of the weekly Republican address:

America is the single greatest nation on earth, a place without equal in the history of all mankind. A place built on free enterprise, where the employee can become the employer. Where small businesses are started every day in a spare bedroom and where someone like me, the son of a bartender and a maid, can become a United States Senator.
I know about the unique exceptionalism of our country. Not because I read about it in a book, I’ve seen it through my own eyes. You see, I was raised in a community of exiles, by people who lost their country, people who once had dreams like we do today, but had to come to a foreign shore to find them.
For some their dreams were answered here in America, but many others found a new dream. To leave their children with the kinds of opportunities they themselves never had. And that is what we must do as a nation. To fulfill our sacred obligation to leave the next generation of Americans a better America than the one we inherited. And that is what this election was about.

This doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter. America is exceptional because it is the only country in history founded on a proposition. America is founded on the assertion of the self-evident truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This can’t be said often enough; everything important flows from it. Here is the video of Rubio’s talk today.

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